[justenhansen]

Is there a hard drive brand that is known for lasting a lot longer than the rest? I'm willing to pay a few extra bucks for something I can feel confident with. I've had a lot of hard drive issues in the past. I'm looking for at least 1TB.

[Advertisements]

Is there a hard drive brand that is known for lasting a lot longer than the rest? I'm willing to pay a few extra bucks for something I can feel confident with. I've had a lot of hard drive issues in the past. I'm looking for at least 1TB.

There really isn't one drive that lasts longer than the rest. I have always had good luck with Western Digital and all of my drives I have bought over the years and none of them Thankfully have died on me. Its a hit or miss for some people but I have not had problems with WD at all. I have used maxtor also but stick with WD first. Some people swear by seagate also.

Remember you might get one DOA and might not, its does not mean that you can never trust that brand again.

Here is a SATA 3gb/sec drive

http://www.newegg.co...N82E16822136284


These are quite a bit more but they are built better and noone has had any problems with this model..

http://www.newegg.co...N82E16822136313

Edited by jrm20, 04 January 2009 - 12:13 PM.

[jrm20]

Is there a hard drive brand that is known for lasting a lot longer than the rest? I'm willing to pay a few extra bucks for something I can feel confident with. I've had a lot of hard drive issues in the past. I'm looking for at least 1TB.

There really isn't one drive that lasts longer than the rest. I have always had good luck with Western Digital and all of my drives I have bought over the years and none of them Thankfully have died on me. Its a hit or miss for some people but I have not had problems with WD at all. I have used maxtor also but stick with WD first. Some people swear by seagate also.

Remember you might get one DOA and might not, its does not mean that you can never trust that brand again.

Here is a SATA 3gb/sec drive

http://www.newegg.co...N82E16822136284


These are quite a bit more but they are built better and noone has had any problems with this model..

http://www.newegg.co...N82E16822136313

Edited by jrm20, 04 January 2009 - 12:13 PM.

[Neil Jones]

Drives only last as long as you look after them. Like the car, it'll last you practically forever if you look after it.
The most common symptom for a dying drive is if you drop it, hit it hard against something or apply excessive shock to the case it's in.
There's no real reliable brand, they're all as good as each other.

[justenhansen]

I usually buy Western Digital because I find good deals on them. I don't drop them or anything. They just sit in my desktop. And it seems they all go bad within a couple of years. Maybe I'm just unlucky.
I usually buy them OEM from some online discount store like Mwave. Do you think that has something to do with it?

[lurky]

I've got two Western Digital Raptors and a 1.5tb drive in mine. Aside from one of the raptors failing within a few months, they all work great. All WD products carry a 3 year warranty which is pretty great. Even if it's a pain if you end up needing to use the warranty, it's nice knowing they trust their products for that long.

Also, I know Seagate drives carry a 5year warranty and also tout a mean time of failure of over 5,000 hours of use.

The drives recommended by jrm are great products. You might look into one of those.

[geek666]

Dropping any brand of drive usually is fatal for it. One important factor in drive lifespan is spin speed. I have some 15,000 RPM SCSI drives (IBM) that would be much more reliable if they were 5400 RPM, but in general, SCSI is more reliable than "IDE" (ATA, SATA, all the same, really).

In normal use, the brands seem to be getting closer in reliability over the past ten years. Before that, Seagate seemed much more reliable than Western Digital. I base this on about 15 years experience with twenty different computers of mine and hundreds of Windows and Mac boxes that I worked on. WD used to be cheaper than Seagate, so most PC makers chose WD. That made many people familiar with the brand. In reality, it was simply the "Chevy" brand. I have 2 Quantum drives, 1 Seagate, and 1 Western Digital in this computer, all old-style Ultra ATA. The 2 Quantums served in a previous computer as "sit-ins" for my employer's drive so I could take my data with me when I moved to another city. Using OS X contributes to their reliability, since the system auto-defrags, gets no viruses, and never crashes. I have another computer with a WD SATA drive. I didn't pick the drive. It's an off the shelf Windows box and most of those are set up with WD drives. My GF attaches virus-ridden mobile drives to it often, so it is aging fast.

Quantum was one of the only brands that outsourced their manufacturing-- Matsushita made their mass-market drives for them in the last decade before selling their HDD division to Maxtor, and Seagate bought Maxtor. Technology changes so quickly, we can't judge much about what brand will be reliable with today's crop of drives. In ten years, we will see the shelves full of solid state drives and then we can all breath a sigh of relief, since they will be about ten times as reliable as these motorized monsters we can't trust now.

Edited by geek666, 06 March 2009 - 08:20 AM.