Hard Drive Brands

I need a couple of 320/500 GB SATA drives to add to an existing RAID controller. It currently has SAS drives (mirrored) in two of the four locations and I need some additional storage.

Which brand and model is recommended?

Samsung are quite sturdy and the F3 drives are fast,

Same for WD but personally Seagate/Maxtor have gone down hill. I have a 500gb Laptop drive that died for no reason after only a few weeks of use

wouldn't touch Samsung with a bargepole, in the last year 3 HDD's went all in the last year all Samsung all in the first year,

first one was a 500Gig one which had a repecement sent after 8 weeks, 2nd one was a 750gig, 10 weeks to replace and then the replacement for the 500gig went and had to get that replaced.

They may be the cheaoest of the big brands but they certainly seem to be falkey.

Ditched the lot of them and gone back to Hitachi which are very good drives.

Is speed a priority? If so, these are not bad. A bit pricey though.

Range of velociraptors:

http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=20

The way it is going there will be little choice anyway, Seagate buying up Samsung drives and Weston digital grabbing hold of Hitachi.

Need to get another Hitachi drive before Weston digital muck them up.

Basically its pot luck which you will have the best experience with, as you can see some will say samsung, others western digital, etc.

Personally I wouldnt touch seagate/maxtor, too much bad stuff has gone on with their drives and theyre generally lacking in performance, look at samsung or WD cav blacks/blues, never green, same with samsung, never eco's. Not unless you want a harddrive you will barely use at all and just want an archive drive.

Stuff like hitachi - LOL, theres a reason why their "deskstar" series went by the nickname of "deathstar".

I've had good experience with Samsung F3 or F4 and the latest Seagate Barracuda.

In preference I would probably go for the latest Barracuda series than the Samsung as the samsungs can get noisy. The performance is pretty much the same, and reliability also very much the same (now).

Reliability never seems to be great for any consumer level hard disks anymore, such as buggy firmware resulting in complete data loss and all sorts, which is why I pay a little less attention to reliability statistics now because I make sure there is a tried and tested backup solution implemented!

i.e., my train of thought goes that I'd rather get 2 disks with moderate reliability and have them mirrored (not necessarily in the RAID sense) rather than 1 disk with a claimed better reliability.

Edited by Pipexer (Sat 18-Feb-12 22:36:51)

In reply to a post by Pipexer:

my train of thought goes that I'd rather get 2 disks with moderate reliability and have them mirrored (not necessarily in the RAID sense) rather than 1 disk with a claimed better reliability.

I agree 100%

I lost a boatload of F1 spinpoints in under a year, now using WD quite happily.

Will probably go for a couple of 500GB WD Caviar Blues.

I presume that a current SATA drive (SATA 600?) will be fine on a 4 year old SATA supporting RAID controller.