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.