What hard drives do you use?

[Kirk Hamster]

Glad to see I'm not the only one using this little gem of a program! I always used it for decoding FLACs to WAV before burning to audio CD's before. Then I had a rash of bad harddisks fails and then I quickly learned to appreciate it's checksumming capabilities.

On a side note:
Is it just me or is Maxtor one of the worlds worst harddisk manufacturers? Can't be accidental that I have a stack of like 10 dead/unstable Maxtor drives here, and pretty much nothing else. I have a 4 year old failed Samsung 160GB disk here, but that was a system/data disk and had a lot of thrashing going on it. It's sister drive that I got at the same time still works fine as storage. All the Maxtors were basically storage drives with no real activity going on and still they just die or become unstable.

Seems to me Western Digital is pretty good and then maybe Samsung, if I am to judge by the pile of dead drives I have in the closet here...

Man I still have a WD 120MB (thats Megabytes, not Gigabytes!) disk I had in my Amiga here, and it works just fine!

What brands do other people swear by ?

[pimpachu2001]

What brands do other people swear by ?

I have a Hitachi Simpledrive and a Seagate External drive. The Hitachi has been going strong for 3 years now, and the Seagate is about a year old.

Of course, I only plug these in when I absolutely must (to put shows on, or pull them off), and only keep them running for the least possible amount of time.

In fact, I need to begin looking into backing these guys up, too, pretty soon! Rule of thumb: anything valuable should be backed up TWICE. At the very least.

[benharri]

Glad to see I'm not the only one using this little gem of a program! I always used it for decoding FLACs to WAV before burning to audio CD's before. Then I had a rash of bad harddisks fails and then I quickly learned to appreciate it's checksumming capabilities.

On a side note:
Is it just me or is Maxtor one of the worlds worst harddisk manufacturers? Can't be accidental that I have a stack of like 10 dead/unstable Maxtor drives here, and pretty much nothing else. I have a 4 year old failed Samsung 160GB disk here, but that was a system/data disk and had a lot of thrashing going on it. It's sister drive that I got at the same time still works fine as storage. All the Maxtors were basically storage drives with no real activity going on and still they just die or become unstable.

Seems to me Western Digital is pretty good and then maybe Samsung, if I am to judge by the pile of dead drives I have in the closet here...

Man I still have a WD 120MB (thats Megabytes, not Gigabytes!) disk I had in my Amiga here, and it works just fine!

What brands do other people swear by ?

Western digital for me. I have three, 2 of which are 3 year old and I've had no problems at all in that time with them

[Kirk Hamster]

I have a Hitachi Simpledrive and a Seagate External drive. The Hitachi has been going strong for 3 years now, and the Seagate is about a year old.

Forgot about Seagate, they seem alright too.
I think my next project is to find out where the brands make their drives (which factory etc..)

According to this, Seems like Seagate bought both Samsung's and Maxtor's HDD business.
I wonder if the factories are combined or if Seagate now has three independent factories. (wich will then produce 3 very different drives, quality-wise.)

Western Digital also bought Hitachi, which could be a good sign if both of them was pretty good to begin with.

I will dig further into this and see if i can't come up with a list of brands/batches of manufacturing that are likely to be decent.

[Kirk Hamster]

So I did some digging, and here's some interesting results:

I could only find 2004 numbers, but here we go:
* The HDD motor company "Nidec" produces 70% of all HDD motors, regardless of brand. (Also for WD, which sells 60% of the worlds HDs)
* Maxtor was NOT in that 70%, and buys from a company called "Minebea"

Then read this article on ZDNet!
Holy harddisk Batman, I think I was in the right when it comes to Maxtor. (wich, as well as Samsung, is now owned by Seagate,)

It would seem that if this company 'Minebea' still makes motors for Seagate(Maxtor,Samsung), I would avoid everything they make.

But it was hard to find recent data. I may be wrong.

Post number 100, I can't be wrong !

edit; typos

[deadone]

i only use buffalo external drives of which i have 4. had no isses with any of them.

models i have are
Buffalo’s DriveStation 1tb x2
Buffalo’s DriveStation 2tb x1
Buffalo’s DriveStation 3tb x1

all with ECO Manager
Which Allows you to regulate the power usage of the hard drive by cutting power to the drive during extended periods of inactivity, which in turn conserves energy and reduces battery consumption and saves the life of the drive.

Mick

[sjmike]

I have these hard drives in my system currently. I swear by Seagate and Samsung. I used to always have problems with Western Digital drives, but their quality has improved.

1 x Seagate 74 GB (OS drive)
2 x Samsung F4 2TB
1 x Seagate 750 GB
2 x Seagate 1 TB

I will be eventually replacing the Seagate 74 GB with an Intel 120 GB SSD and replacing the Seagate 750 GB with another Samsung F4 2TB drive. I just need to find the motivation to do so.

[uoho]

I only use WD external hard disks and I've had no problems at all in that time with them

The models that I have are:

6x WD ELEMENTS Desktop 2TB
2x WD Desktop 1TB

and in the next days I will buy my 7th WD ELEMENTS Desktop 2TB.

[Bluefalcon]

I only use WD external hard disks and I've had no problems at all in that time with them

The models that I have are:

6x WD ELEMENTS Desktop 2TB
2x WD Desktop 1TB

and in the next days I will buy my 7th WD ELEMENTS Desktop 2TB.

Same. I've never had any issues with WD drives (internal & external).

I currently have:
2x WD Caviar Blue 500GB
3x WD Elements 3TB

[shownomarcy]

I have a Samsung 2 TB, it works ok, though it isnt old yet.
I also use it when I copy there the master files of new bootlegs.

I wonder if its normal that external hdd stops after some time no using?
It saves power, but it isnt bad to stop and start again?