Which is best hard drive Brand?

I have 7 WD HD's and they are all fine, touch wood. I heard that Samsung are also good. Got a Seagate 7200.11 1Tb and luckily it's been fine for me, again touch wood.
 
I have been using Maxtor for about the last 10 years (5 maxtors), I changed because at the time I was told they were easy to deal with if they failed under warranty.

Never had a maxtor fail, but then only had one drive fail and that was a 20MB Seagate on a 80286 20 years ago!

The last 2 Maxtors I brought were server grade with a high MTTF.

Choosing a hard drive manufactuer is like choosing tyres for your car. One manufacture will make good/bad of everything.
 
The best brand is the best value for money brand when you come to buy.
Everyone has an opinion on this with almost no evidence to back it up ever. See it all over the internet all the time. Just buy one, don't worry about it, job done. (obviously back ups are a good idea). Any drive can fail at the end of the day.
 
jaybee said:
The best brand is the best value for money brand when you come to buy.
Everyone has an opinion on this with almost no evidence to back it up ever. See it all over the internet all the time. Just buy one, don't worry about it, job done. (obviously back ups are a good idea). Any drive can fail at the end of the day.
Click to expand...

Ah the OP didn't ask for evidence. He just wanted to know our general opinion of what's the best. If the OP had said something like "I looking for it to be quiet as well" or some other request he probably would have been better guided.
 
At work we have mainly seagates and I'm not impressed, seems to be a fairly high failure rate and this is a college with around 5000 pcs. I personally use WD and never had a failure. The few pcs we did have at work with WD drives (10gb) were rock solid and were only replaced when they became too small, still got around 30 or so in and running fine!
 
With this question you will always get mixed results, purely because there will always be flaws in manufacturing processes that will undoubtedly mean there will be bad batches. And an unhappy customer is always louder than a happy one.

Thus, there will always be horror stories from every HDD manufacturer out there.

Personally I prefer Western Digital, purely because I've had several drives from them and never had any issues. Personally I will also never touch Maxtor or Seagate - I've had 2 of each in the past 3 years and each of them have given me issues (slow transfer speeds, clicking sound of death, insanely bad spin-up times (eg, 4-5min for my external Maxtor to spring to life after puting my PC to sleep).

Though there will be someone on the other end too... someone who has had nothing but trouble with western digital, and will rave till the cows come home about how awesome Maxtor is.

Really it comes down to your own history with the brand in question.

Im a WD & Samsung guy. I will always avoid Hitachi, Seagate and Maxtor, purely because of my bad history with their drives.
 
WD is an easy choice and at the moment i'd have to say samsung aswell but the only mkae i've every had problems with really is maxtor.
 
I'd agree with the "any drive can fail" idea.

I've also never had a Western fail on me though.

2 74GB raptors (8MB cache) I bought from the MM here that turned up as bricks (I think poor packaging) were RMA'd (with a decent gap between) to WD. The first came back as a bright, new 74GB raptor with 16MB cache, the second (about 6 months later) went away and came back as a shiney 150GB raptor so you can't really fault WD on their RMA policies.

They offer an advanced RMA (they send you a drive secured with a debit/credit card they will bill if you don't return the faulty one) which is even more of a thumbs up. They don't quibble either, I had a Hitachi I tried to RMA once and despite the drive being in cover they were complaining about the code being "an RMA supply chain drive, you will need to return it to your supplier" and refused to budge from that standpoint. WD will basically take any drive from anywhere if the checker says it's in warrenty.

Of the WD's i've owned from new none have actually gone **** up on me to date (as with others i've had maxtors fail on me). About to throw 5 WD 640GB blues in a raid5 so putting my money on em (but giving myself some chance of a get-out if the worst does happen :D)
 
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I had 2 120GB Seagate drives, they lasted 3 1/2 years then both failed at the same time.

I had a samsung drive fail within a couple of months. There is no best hdd manufacturer imo
 
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