Best hard drives

[drdata]

What is a good quality hard drive for store videos. Since btv is basically recording 24 hours a day I would think the hard drive would take a pounding. Over the years on a desktop computer i have not had much luck with WD or seagate. I use to have good luck with Maxtor until Seagate took over. Any opinions?

[Jakesty]

Within each family there are models to choose from that are geared to the desktop, enterprise, and video markets. If you notice the pricing for example on 1tb drives for Western Digital, there will be some in the $100 range and others that are 50% more. They have some of these extra features to consider...often the quality could be better, quieter, longer warranties of maybe 5 years instead of 3, larger cache, lower wattage/more efficient and faster access times.
If you want to consider a different manufacturer, surprisingly Samsung has the Spinpoint drives which at 7200 rpms equal throughput that rivals the very fast Raptor series drives, but at a lower price and larger capacity.
TomsHardware.com has charts that compare the different hard drives.

My personal experience has usually been pretty good. Better in the last 3 years than ever in the previous 15. I use standard desktop drives, and my newest being the Seagate 1.5TB drives. They run HOT, but they're also very fast. Look at the current months issue of MaximumPC on this drive.
I read that Western is coming out with a 2tb drive very soon. If this is something for you to consider.

[LionRed]

My view...stay away from Seagate 1 TB drives....if you value your data and time. The Seagate 4x320GB and 4x500GB's I have had no problems.
Of the 5x1TB Seagate drives I have...1 died in 21 days and another is making a clicking noise (every 5-15 min).

Google ST31000340AS problems/dying.
Read http://techreport.com/discussions.x/16232 and http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/...200-11-failing

I hate to use theinquirer...but I think they are onto something...this time.

Also Seagate...only offers 3yr warranty now. I can honestly say...I will be buying only Western Digital WD1001FALS Caviar Black 1TB (5yr warranty) from now on. They cost a little more...but with that much data...it is worth it.
I have been a longtime Seagate user...but they seem to be having issues since the 1TB.

[ZetaVu]

Well, I had used WD and switched to Seagate because of their reliability (4 issue in 12 WD drives, no issues in 6 Seagates, I know, not enough for proper comparison) and the longer retail warranty. If they drop their warranty to 3 years they've pretty much lost competitive advantage over WD. WD replaced my one bad drive that was still in warranty (and even then I'm not sure if it was the drive's fault or my mobo at the time). The other 3 failures happened to 5 year old plus drives, and typically caused by moving old drives around. I try to keep all my active drives 5 years or younger, and have never gotten a premium. I also keep reduntant data on other drives, so if one fails I can pull it back up quickly.

Also, Seagate still has the 5 year warranty on retail kits, which sometimes sell at the same price as OEM.

[LionRed]

http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/sup...rranty_matrix/

Heh I love how giving customers less is better -

Q. Isn’t this a step backward in terms of demonstrating your confidence in the quality of your products?

A. Absolutely not. Our product quality remains excellent, and, as the worldwide leader in drive storage, Seagate is committed to providing our customers with the most reliable storage solutions available anywhere. Based on our data, we know that 95% of all returns take place during the first three years, so by going to a 3-year warranty period (which is more in line with the rest of the industry and the needs of our partners and customers) we can make other aspects of our customer and warranty support programs more attractive, with negligible impact on customer product return needs.

[ZetaVu]

Originally Posted by LionRed

Q. Isn’t this a step backward in terms of demonstrating your confidence in the quality of your products?

A. Absolutely not.

Sounds like it was written by one of Bush's press secretaries. (yeah, interrupt my shows!)

[Zogg]

Hmm, I keep seeing people in love with WD drives, but the one drive I've had fail in recent history (VERY recently) is a WD 500GB. You look it up and it says it has a 5 year warranty, but when I put in my s/n it says it's out of warranty. I've only had it for about 1.5 years. I need to call them to see WTH their problem is with the warranty.

And a couple of years ago I bought a Samsung 500GB drive that works well, EXCEPT as the primary recording drive. When it's the primary it just hiccups and goes into PIO mode, but if I copy recordings to it and just playback from it then the POS works fine.

So, I guess I'm down to Seagate or Hitachi.

Z

[LionRed]

Just 10 minutes ago...I had a new ST3320613AS 320GB died (less then a month old), fails to be detected in bios. I ordered it to replace a older 320GB (2006'ish) that died on me (which the RMA for should arrive this coming monday). The older one...I am not upset it died....it was old ...lol.

Go ahead buy a Seagate...I dare ya...I double dare ya!

[vidiot1985]

You'll easily find people who love and hate every hard drive manufacturer and maybe even every model line within a manufacturer.

In my personal and professional life, I've had problems with drives from every brand, except Samsung (probably only because I've never used one :-).

The brands with the largest "market share" in my house are (descending order):

Seagate
Maxtor
Western Digital
Quantum
IBM (pre-Hitachi)

One Quantum was a little flaky, they all got too noisy.

The Maxtors are fine, but got WAY too noisy.

The IBM was fine, but got WAY too noisy.

The Western Digitals are fine, but started out slightly noisy, but haven't gotten worse.

The Seagates are fine, started out quiet and remain so, but they run hotter and one recently started giving me write errors, but that was likely due to a bad SATA channel on the motherboard since swapping to another one fixed it.

[Grasshopper]

Originally Posted by Jakesty

Within each family there are models to choose from that are geared to the desktop, enterprise, and video markets. If you notice the pricing for example on 1tb drives for Western Digital, there will be some in the $100 range and others that are 50% more. They have some of these extra features to consider...often the quality could be better, quieter, longer warranties of maybe 5 years instead of 3, larger cache, lower wattage/more efficient and faster access times.

One of my first jobs was for a disk drive company that will go unnamed. Back then 150MB was the biggest drive available. They also sold a 40MB drive. For a while the only difference between the two was the micro-code on the drive. I know because I wrote Unix drivers for it.

The marketing guys were the ones who dreamed up that deal. They wanted a drive with a seek time of less than 10ms. We gave it to them by changing the micro-code to only use a few tracks on the platters so the heads did not have as far the seek. They charged a big premium for the 40MB drive since it was "faster then any other drive on the market."

Beware of marketing hype.

[Nick Burns]

Originally Posted by vidiot1985

You'll easily find people who love and hate every hard drive manufacturer and maybe even every model line within a manufacturer.

Precisely. One must remember the mantra: All hardware sucks, all software sucks.

[Mistergq]

I think the one key to having hard drives survive is a cool case. My case has a fan that blows air right on the hard drive, as well as exhaust fans in the back.

btw: I had too many WD fail (probably computer cases fault). Since then switched to Seagate and at this point won't be going back.

[redlion4]

Just over 1.2TB worth of Seagate storage in our HTPC (across 4 individual drives - details in sig). Total count for all PCs in the house is about 2.5TB across 10 Seagate drives - 9 internals + 1 external. Largest single drive at this point is a 500GB (2 internal and 1 external), with no reason yet to upgrade. Have yet to have one fail, and hoping that writing this does not jinx the success. I agree that case cooling plays a role.

[ZetaVu]

I threw in a cooling fan in front of my hard drives, uses a temperature sensor to control fan speed, I mounted that on my hotted drive (750gb Seagate). Adds some noise but also some comfort of mind. Since my system is in a cabinet I keep the side panel cracked open which is worth about 5C in cpu temp.

[TomXP411]

I used to sell computers for a living (I managed a computer shop), so I have some experience with this.

Out of the few thousand drives we sold, Seagate, Maxtor, and WD have all had failure rates approaching 10% at times. I sold a lot of Samsungs, and I never saw a single one go bad.

What's interesting is that out of the computers we fixed, we had to replace a LOT of Maxtors and quite a few WD's, but we only had 2 dead Samsungs come through. One was OLD (we're talking a 400MB drive in the day of 120GB drives), and one was in a removable tray with no ventilation - it was so hot that it just cooked itself.

For my money, I prefer Samsung for reliability. If that's not available, then Seagate, WD, and Maxtor tend to be about equal... I've had 3 major drive failures over the years in my own machines: one was a Seagate, one was a WD, and one was a Maxtor.

On the bright side: drive quality seems to be improving overall. The kind of tolerances that allow manufacturers to pack terabytes on to the same platters that only held megabytes 10 years ago has forced some major improvements in quality assurance.

So don't sweat the brand; just make sure the drive is adequately cooled, and odds are you'll be just fine - no matter which brand you pick. (Just make sure you always have a backup for anything critical.)