Hard Drive Woes

[YotaFun]

I don't get it, I just can't seem to get my luck right with hard drives.
All I know is Wester Digital GreenPower hard drives are complete poop and the minute I get everything I need off of it, that one and another failed one I have are going in a fire!

I need to know what everyone here recommends when it comes to a hard drive.
I have had 2 western digital's and a few maxtor's fail on me.

What does everyone recommend?
I am in a quick turn around for this.
I am getting what I can off the hard drive to the main drive, but thats not a lot since the main drive is small, but I need something at least 1TB, thinking external through USB.

Any suggestions?

[Seanz0rz]

seagate, the ones with the 5 year warranties, have always given me very good performance. a bit more than their 3 year warranty OEM counterparts, but worth it for the extra 2 years.

[YotaFun]

Thanks for the tip Sean.

I am on Newegg looking at some hard drives now.

[DHC6twinotter]

The HD went out on my last computer, and I replaced it with a Seagate. It lasted until I replaced the entire computer a few years later. I'm sure it still works too. I have no complaints with my Seagate.

If I build my next PC, I want to do a solid state drive for the OS and a hard disk drive for everything else. :D

[CJM]

Seagate and maxtor are the same thing, both are owned by one or the other I forget.

I have had every brand of drive fail on me Avy, doesnt matter which one you pick as they all have equally crappy usage lives. For the heck of it tho I prefer maxtor, seems they take longer to crap out on me.

[2ndGen]

none of the 10k rpm HDD's would last long. stick with 7200rpm.

Hitachi is the worst, they are the IBM glass drives, never been good.

Seagate bought Maxtor years back, it was better before that.

I have good lucks with WD.

[Seanz0rz]

i had a seagate notebook harddrive in my car pc for nearly 4 years. it saw a tremendous amount of abuse. after i dismantled my carpc, i stuck it in an old laptop as a replacement. its still chugging along, playing videos on a tv. its probably 6 or 7 years old at this point.

i have had all brands fail on me, IBM, Hitachi, WD, Maxtor, Seagate, Samsung, and one other im forgetting... Fujitsu maybe? either way, they all have a set MTBF, and that mean time is exactly that, an average. some will last for 10 years, others 10 months. i suggest seagate because they have been the more reliable for me, as well as packing a decent warranty on most of their products.

[04 Rocko Taco]

Just to toss my 2 cents into the pot here Avy, I have always preferred WD. I've had good use out of them, and never had one fail on me that I didn't think had lived a satisfactory lifespan.

[Lee]

yeah i'm surprised to see you've had a bad run with WD...

I use WD and Seagate exclusively... We bought 8 WD caviar black drives for our raid backup here at work with good results so far...

I use 2 seagate drives for my backup at home too, no problems in over 6 years for one, 2 years for the other.

[YotaFun]

Thanks for the input Gentleman,
Still slowly working everything over, got all my pictures, now to get my off-road video's and I should be good.

I did some research on the GreenPower version of the WD hard drives.
It seems I am not the only one to experience the issues.
Apparently I read somewhere that the Read/Write heads are run on energy saving mode if there hasn't been an activity for about eight seconds.

So with this being a secondary hard drive that doesn't get accessed much but you would think that would work, but I guess if certain programs like iTunes accesses that drive for my music only when it needs to, it might be sleeping and waking way to much for it to handle?

[YotaFun]

Whats everyone's opinion on this?
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148579

[Crinale]

im gonna agree with pretty much everything said here.. i have had every major brand fail.. but harddrives are a good example of what u pay is what u get.. buy a more expensive hard drive and they tend to last better.. my 2 favorite brands are Seagate and WD, but thats just cuz those are what i have had, and Seagate is (at least a chapter of it) a local to me company

[YotaFun]

So I am bringing this thread alive and a few others.
I have come to the conclusion any moving parts hard drive is inevitably going to come to a failure point.
It has moving parts like most anything with moving parts a failure is bound to happen.

SO I am thinking of going with a solid state harddrive in my next pc, my back up will still be a standard hard drive but I figured I will have a few back ups lying around till the price of the bigger Solid States gets lower and the technology more concrete (hearing that there have been firmware issues with the solid state drives)

[Seanz0rz]

solid state will fail as well. the studies they have done so far show reliability is about the same from ssd to hdd

last month i lost my hdd to the clicks of death. i lost EVERYTHING ive collected from the last 5 or more years. no backup. whoops.

now i have a backup...

[Crinale]

SSD only gains you more speed (which is a huge amount actually), not more reliability at this point. Basically a SSD uses similar technology to memory, and memory is one of the most common pieces of a computer to fail. Basically just always keep a backup, because any hard drive can fail

[mastacox]

For what its worth I've had good louck with Samsung hard drives, and they are well rated on Newegg. Tjey have good warranties and "server class" models if you're so inclined. If you're worried about losing data (I am too), set up a RAID array, either do RAID 1 (mirrored) at a bare minimum, or RAID 5 if you're feeling feisty. That way even if you lose a drive, your data is GTG.

FWIW, many NAS boxes support Raid too. A USB hard drive you linked is USB 2.0, so it will be slow. You want either USB 3.0 or SATA.