What Is The New HDD of Choice Nowadays?

[Kubie]

My Maxtor 80gig SATA drive that I've had for I believe four years is now starting to get a little noisier when accessing, reading, and writing. I almost hate to do a AVG scan or when diskkeeper starts up it gets rather noisy. Sometimes there is individual clunk sounds.
I'm looking into a Seagate or WD from Newegg. Of course it will be a SATA drive and I don't need a lot of space. 120gig at the most for me.

Your thoughts? I want to get one before something major happens. I want to be able to copy my complete old drive to the new one.

TIA

Kubie

[TwoRails]

Hey Kubie! Long time no see! :) -- Seagate has my vote. Not knocking WD, but the have never been my drive of choice. Seagates are fast, reliable, and have a good customer service in the rare time of need.

[Kubie]

Hey Two Rails!
It has been a long time! I just put a refurbished 40gig Seagate in my laptop and really like it. It seems that after the IBM Deathstars, the HDD makers were swapping quality for awhile. Looks like its getting down to two now.

Kubie

[Cricket]

Hey Kubie! Where you been hiding? Good to see a post from you again.

My hard drive of choice nowadays is Seagate too...been using them exclusively since about 2002 or 2003 without one failure.

Don't be a stranger.

:) Cricket

[XenaWP]

The sweet spot for $ per GB seems to be about 320 GB. 500 GBs are priced well too, but the 32 MB cache version adds a little premium on price. If the cache doesn't matter, the 500 MB Seagate with 16 MB cache is a killer deal.

[glc]

250gb, 60 bucks, marked down, free shipping:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148262

[Alexjfinch]

I swap and change with reports I hear and experience. I stopped using Maxtor awhile back due to failures and swapped to WD. Now recently I've had a few of these fail on me along with their Mybook 1TB external drive.

I'm looking to use another manufacturer on my next repair or if I upgrade the HD in my laptop.

[Kubie]

250gb, 60 bucks, marked down, free shipping:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148262

That is a great deal! I ordered it a minute ago and with sales tax, it was only $64.34

Well, my wifey has a 250gig HDD in her Dell for email. There is no reason I can't have 250gig to cruise the internet.:D:D:D


Thanks for all of the replies.
Cricket, I'll probably be hanging around more often. A person just can't beat this quality tech site with all of it's quality members.

Kubie

[glc]

Alex, here are my thoughts on hard drives, based on over 10 years of experience.

There are only 4 manufacturers of note left in the desktop IDE/SATA world. Seagate, WD, Hitachi, and Samsung. In the notebook world you can add Fujitsu and Toshiba to that list.

My first choice in both applications is Seagate. They were the leader in offering a 5 year warranty on all drives. With a few minor exceptions, they have been consistently reliable in the past few years. Their diagnostic and setup software is excellent. Customer service is only "just okay". Finding Seagate notebook drives can be difficult though.

My second choice for desktops is WD. Their warranty (3 years) is shorter than Seagate (except for Raptors and enterprise drives, those are 5) and they have had notable problems with certain models for a long time. Their software is also excellent and they have the best customer service in the business - the only manufacturer that offers a no-hassle advance replacement. I do not trust their notebook drives, have heard of too many problems.

Hitachi - average warranty (3 years), lousy customer service, excellent diagnostic software, NO setup software. I will never completely trust them due to the "Deathstar" from several years back. However, they are my second choice for notebook drives by default.

Samsung - supposedly they have gotten their act together (and have gone to a 5 year warranty), but I won't trust those either. Their drives from years past were just awful across the board. Lousy diagnostic software, no setup software, almost no customer service.

I can't even take Fujitsu and Toshiba notebook drives seriously. They are just bad. Toshiba doesn't even have diagnostic software. The only Fujitsu drive I'll buy is SCSI.

[Alexjfinch]

I had a deathstar in the past, worked well for all of a year and I gave up.

Sat next to me is a Maxtor, which is grinding soo badly that the table vibrates its sat on (I've just been transferring files to my laptop) and a WD which clicks badly when first spun up but works effortlessly from then on.

I have never had any experience with Seagate, although I've never heard a bad word about them.

[gods_son_is_me]

Seagate is definately the best. I've never even had to use a warrenty. Have a 250 Gb one and a 80 GB that was 5 years old and still works with no problem. I also have 4 80gb Seagates becasue my job has a discount with them. I must add that they are decent. No problems yet with them. I think I just get good stuff.

[Dave21]

Either WD or Seagate is reliable.

However, seagate is in the lead with regard to performance because of their 32 mb cache. I don't know why WD hasn't come up with an answer to that...

[gods_son_is_me]

Yeah,the 32Mb cashe actually has a noticable difference in preformance.

[Cricket]

However, seagate is in the lead with regard to performance because of their 32 mb cache. I don't know why WD hasn't come up with an answer to that...Probably because they have the 10,000 RPM Raptors.

:) Cricket

[glc]

Instead of large cache drives, WD is doing the "green" variable speed drives. Samsung and Hitachi have 32mb cache drives now.

[Alexjfinch]

I've been thinking of upgrading the drive in my Laptop, on your recommendations I'm going to be seriously looking into a Seagate, they do one in the UK 160Gb for £50. Which is a great price, and by the looks of things its full of technology for damage limitation when being moved :)

[Freakitchen]

I had a quick look on ebuyer.com, Alex, the 160GB Seagate is available for just over £40 if you need the IDE version...

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/108779

The SATA version is a few quid more:

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/136276

[Alexjfinch]

I need the SATA version, It isn't much different to the price I found on dabs.

[glc]

I put one of the original Seagate Momentus drives in my old Thinkpad - 20gb, 5400, 2mb - it's fast, extremely quiet, and runs quite cool.

[Alexjfinch]

I was reading about the seagate for the laptop, something about having a buffer of solid state memory that predicts what programs your going to load and preloads it into this solid state memory in order to load things quicker and it can stop the disk running to reduce damage on mobility.

[cuzzzzzz]

Seagate... never had a problem with them. Have with WDs.

[Force Flow]

I quite agree with everything glc has said earlier.

I was a WD-only tech for a number of years. I've since switched over to Seagate in the last two years or so.

I've gotten too many bad WD drives as of late, plus Seagate does have the longer 5-year warranty. Seagate's quality *today* seems to be in the lead, and I've been satisifed with them, and the people I've reccommended them to have been satisfied.


Just as an interesting note...within the last few months, I've decommissioned half a dozen servers at one worksite that had old "deathstar" drives (that were 7 years old, and presumably running pretty much 24/7 since that time), as well as a few quantum fireballs. Surprisingly, all these drives execpt one were up and running at about the time I decommissioned the servers. The one that failed was a deathstar in a mirrored array (the second drive was fine).

I am quite surprised at how lucky these folks were.