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.

Sata is meant to be fully backwards compatible so it shouldn't be a problem. One funny thing to note the first and only harddrive failure i have ever had occurred last year and it was a 500gb WD caviar blue. Altho i do have 2 more of them that are still working perfectly happily. And the drive was kind enough to keep giving me smart warnings for over 2 months before it died completely so i was able to save all the data from it.

barracuda 7200.12/11 or samsung f3 m8

stay away from hitachi deathstars and WD blue

WD black are pretty good though

I would go with a 500GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.

I've had a WD Caviar Blue and it was a horrible experience compared to this Seagate. Everytime I carried out a task such as unzipping a large file, I wouldn't be able to anything else on the Western Digital Drive.

I've also found the Seagate to be quite a bit faster at data throughput.

cheap slow drives imo

i got st7200.11 sata 3 in raid zero and it pumps out over 275 mb/s on raid 10r

ideal movie unrar and encoding

In reply to a post by Stanman_24:

barracuda 7200.12/11 or samsung f3 m8

stay away from hitachi deathstars and WD blue

WD black are pretty good though

hitachi drives have improved a lot, got a 250Gb on in my computer as a data drive now and it is fine. Worried about what WD will do with them now.

I also got myself a second hand 2.5 640Gb drive for my PS3 yesterday which is also Hitachi, cheaper than buying new and comes with a 12 month warranty

just sent my 1tb back yesterday

smart data showed up pending sector counts

My personal opinion would be Western digital, Hitachi (if you don't mind lots of noise) or Samsung (just got one recently for and older laptop and it is VERY quiet and fast for an older IDE type).

Seagate drives seem to have gone downhill these days and Maxtor are owned by Seagate so...

But that is just my opinion based upon past experiences, with hard drives its mostly just pot luck. But I do believe Seagate have gotten worse though.

Edited by deleted (Tue 13-Mar-12 14:36:45)

In reply to a post by Stanman_24:

just sent my 1tb back yesterday

smart data showed up pending sector counts

Oh dear, not good. but then most of us no doubt got stories of different makes of hard drives and problems with them.

For me it is seagates, always have problems with seagates, which is why I went for a Hitachi, thinking they could not be worse than Seagate and the drive have lasted and is still working, but only as a data drive.

In reply to a post by Alex1M6:

My personal opinion would be Western digital, Hitachi (if you don't mind lots of noise) or Samsung (just got one recently for and older laptop and it is VERY quiet and fast for an older IDE type).

Seagate drives seem to have gone downhill these days and Maxtor are owned by Seagate so...

But that is just my opinion based upon past experiences, with hard drives its mostly just pot luck. But I do believe Seagate have gotten worse though.

My hitachi is quiet, much quieter than the seagate/maxtor drive I have got.

My idea at some point is to take all the drives out of my computer apart from the SSD and 500GB one , add a 1TB and then put the drives i removed into external units.

it is pot luck and how you look after em imo

performance is a different story

i got st7200.12 500gb running raid 0 and get 270mb/s read / write

thats pretty impressive imo

In reply to a post by Stanman_24:

stay away from hitachi deathstars

This was a long time ago and I think only one series of drives. I have used Many Hitachi drives in data packs at work for our data recorders. The packs are shipped to the US, Germany and the Netherlands and despite this failures are rare.

Personally I have found Maxtor drives to be the most prone to failure, I have several dead ones of those. I would use either Hitachi, Seagate or Samsung (in no particular order).

I uploaded a video of my noisy Hitachi for you to see just how loud it is That is one loud hard drive!

My new Samsung drive on the other hand makes almost no noise!

I do wish people would stop going on about the 'Hitachi Deathstar' when it was over 10 years ago now and that was when the company was IBM's hard drive division and before they were bought by Hitachi

In reply to a post by Stanman_24:

it is pot luck and how you look after em imo

How you look after them? You stick them in a computer and use them. Ok a external one can be bumped i suppose and laptop ones.

performance is a different story

i got st7200.12 500gb running raid 0 and get 270mb/s read / write

thats pretty impressive imo

I got a 120GB corsair SSD unit which does for the Os and software and for my second data drive that I use to store video clips on I have a 500Gb Seagate momentus XT hybrid drive. The 250GB hitachi drive is just for downloads and documents. I also got a 160Gb Maxtor/seagate drive as well, just in case i need some more space. Now you can see why I need a larger drive to get rid of most of these drives apart from the SSD and 500Gb drive.

So the only two drives that got high performance is the seagate hybrid and the SSD. the others are old, will do fine as external drives.

In reply to a post by Alex1M6:

I uploaded a video of my noisy Hitachi for you to see just how loud it is That is one loud hard drive!

My new Samsung drive on the other hand makes almost no noise!

I got two Hitachi drives, the 250GB internal one and a 1TB external, the External can be a bit noisy sometimes, but it is sat on a wooden shelve, so I expect it.

In reply to a post by huwwatkins:

I do wish people would stop going on about the 'Hitachi Deathstar' when it was over 10 years ago now and that was when the company was IBM's hard drive division and before they were bought by Hitachi

Me two, saying that I am a bit worried now what Wd is going to do with them.

Just had a Seagate 7200.12 500gb develop 44 bad sectors after 2 years. Smart says drive ok. Acording to the Google Labs drive study on 100,000 drives I can expect another 8 months if I'm lucky or at least a 39% chance of it lasting that long. I've replaced with a Hitachi 7200.c 500gb see how that goes.

I have another Seagate from the same batch hope that doesn't get bad sectors. Using that as an OS drive, the failed one was a data drive and rarely used, except for paging file. Interestingly the bad sectors showed up in the partition where the paging file was.

Never had any problems with Seagate before and just found a firmware update for the two drives which it says to improve performance and reliability. Have an external WD which seems ok but rarely use it, its for backup. See how this Hitachi goes.

I'm running a Samsung Spinpoint 1TB F3. Paid £46 before the prices went through the roof. Got a 2nd hand HD as a spare b/up, 1st one didn�t work, was replaced with a 2nd one which is fine from my eBay trader. I'm holding out for the prices to fall as I want a 4bay RAID setup. Nearly all are made in Thailand, so with the floods the prices doubled, slowly coming down. BC

All drives can develop faults, but if you have constant problems with one make of drive it does put you off.

I do need a larger drive, but waiting for prices to come down, about august so I have read. the problem is not sure what I will get then as Hitachi will be moulded into Weston digital.

I was looking at the Hitachi GST site and it already says part of WD.

In reply to a post by Banger:

Just had a Seagate 7200.12 500gb develop 44 bad sectors after 2 years.

You get a 3 year warranty with these HDDs.

I've had 2 (of 12) of these HDDs replaced without quibble.

In reply to a post by Anonymous:

In reply to a post by Banger:

Just had a Seagate 7200.12 500gb develop 44 bad sectors after 2 years.

You get a 3 year warranty with these HDDs.

I've had 2 (of 12) of these HDDs replaced without quibble.

How did you manage that? I dont have a Seatools code because the drive passes smart diagnostics. Did you send back to the retailer?

got 2x ocz agility 3 in raid 0

pumps out over 1000 mb/s

i use it for gaming and occasional movie dl / unrar / encode

i backup both my os on my vertex2e and my raid 0 to an external usb using acronis true image home

have tried intel rst also on my z68 mobo but i was not that impressed with transfer rates

Well I have just been on to Seagate tech support and they said they will swap my drive for a re-certified drive. Is this a refurbished drive as I may be better off seeing how long it lasts as the warranty is til Aug 2013.

Sounds like a refurbed drive Tim which I wouldn't touch.

Personally, I find it's luck of the draw, just like with new drives. I've got 2 500Gb refurb Seagate units that are around 4.5 years old, running in a non-essential capacity and they're just fine.

Interesting. Having said that I have performed a low level format on the offending drive so probably recertified my own drive for now. Although the Google labs study on drives that have bad sectors doesn't give them much of a probability of survival beyond 60 days.

In reply to a post by Banger:

I was looking at the Hitachi GST site and it already says part of WD.

i know, sad really, oh well at least Seagate did not buy up Hitachi GST. the problem is that now we are in the same stage as graphics card and CPUs, just two manufactures.

Now using the Hitachi as a boot drive as it's faster than the seagates both burst speed and average read speed.