[POLL] Hard Drive Brand of Choice

[hernandito]

Please post your successes or horror stories.

[BRiT]

HGST 7200rpm for spinner have been working great.

[Squid]

If anyone ever offered me a WD drive for free, I would promptly throw them in the garbage.  No real experience with HGST or Samsung, but my Seagates have always been completely trouble free.

 

But then again, I may be an oddball around here, because it seems like most people expect a hard drive to last forever and never die, which is just unrealistic for any mechanical device.  I fully expect to lose a drive once per year after they are out of warranty (out of my pool of 24 drives), and any drive that lasts me beyond 6 years is just icing on the cake.  My 1tb Seagates that are still in service (the others have been retired without a failure) are now pushing 10 years old, have never had a failure on any of the 3tb Seagates.

 

The 2tb WD greens and 3tb WD greens that I still have operational have all been RMA'd at least once.

[hernandito]

Funny... every drive that has failed on me has been a Seagate... would not buy them.

[John_M]

I predicted the order of the top three before I voted, so I gave my vote to Toshiba for the MD04ACA500 and MD04ACA600 because they are great drives. They are fast, cool and great value for money. Despite this they are often overlooked.

 

If we're talking anecdotes, my first hard drive failure was a WD 540 MB (yes, megabytes!) back in the early '90s and my most recent was a Hitachi 500 GB laptop drive.

 

If money were really no object I'd like a Quantum Fireball brought up to date, please. Back in the day they were my favourites. The worst brand I ever used was Conner and, probably, the worst brand I never used was Kalok - they were just nasty. Kalok used stepper motor actuators when every other manufacturer had moved to voice coils and they were believed to use fewer component parts than were strictly necessary!

 

If we're talking relics, I still have a mint condition Seagate ST4096 in its original packaging and a working Rodime RO3055.

 

[TUMS]

Money no object, either wd or hgst enterprise drives.  But i'm not rich enough to own any.... If i'm going to wish I might as well wish for a pallet of them.

[HellDiverUK]

WD pretty much every time up until recently.  Now I have a few of the 8TB Seagate Archives and a pair of 4TB Seagate NAS.  They work fine, no issues with them so far.

 

I really can't remember the last time I had a drive fail, perhaps the last one was a 2TB Barracuda LP (the green drive that came out before green drives were a thing).

 

Oh, well I just had two 5TB Reds die, but that's because they fell out of a case on to a concrete floor from 4 foot.  Whirr, crunch, crunch, wheeze. 

[HellDiverUK]

Samsung is a funny option - they were bought out by Seagate several years ago, biggest Samsung drive I've seen is 2TB. 

 

Yes, they were good drives in their day, but apart from a few rebadged Seagate 2.5" drives, Samsung doesn't do HDDs any more.

[gtroyp]

I have used Seagates, WD Greens and Reds, and a HGST (first of many).

 

I have had Seagates, WD Greens and Reds all die—and the WD's long before they should.

 

The data from Backblaze led me to HGST-Hitachi, that and the fact that the original drive in my first MacBookPro was a Hitachi, and it STILL lives in an external drive, going on nearly 10 years later.

 

From all of this I have learned the following: anyone who thinks that any of the manufacturers is better than another is due for a rude awakening at some point; all drives fail; backups are not just for baseball; and hot spares are not a luxury, they are a necessity.

 

[korith]

 

I probably have a few of each brand. I do like hgst, hitachi, and toshiba though. I expect most drives to fail, it's just a question of when. I'm usually the one ranting and preaching about backups to people. I look at the warranty periods each company gives on the drive, the way I look at it, the shorter the warranty period the less confidence they (the company) have in their product. If its only a few bucks more I'll get the drive with the longer warranty period usually. Also some credit cards, will add on an additional year onto the warranty period.

 

Think my first drive failure was a 40MB western digital, thankfully they had a 3 year warranty back then. Drive cost about $300ish I think back then.

 

Also have an old 10MB and 20MB mfm drive that still works, sounds like a jet plane taking off. Haven't gotten rid of it yet, one of these days have to get an old xt or 286 perhaps, that the mfm controller card will plug into, and see what is on the drive.

[KB36]

I have a little bit of everything.

 

4 x TOSHIBA DT01ACA300 (production date sep-nov 2015)

Just added, tend to get hotter than the other drives

 

2 x SEAGATE ST2000DM001 (production date Mar 2013)

Have a somewhat bad rep. But they haven't given me any trouble. (Knock on wood)

 

1 x WD RED WD30EFRX (production date apr 2013)

My parity drive

 

1 x WD CAVIAR GREEN WD20EACS (production date Jan 2011)

2 x WD CAVIAR GREEN WD20EARX (production date Jul 2011 & May 2012)

1 x WD CAVIAR GREEN WD20EARS (production date Feb 2011)

 

Only 1 drive has been taken from the system

 

1 x WD CAVIAR GREEN WD20EARS (production date Jan 2011)

Started having some read errors. Can't be precleared.

 

 

 

 

 

[Unqualified Spectator]

I've had bad luck generally with Seagate. Anything Seagate. I tried a Toshiba X300 5TB drive but it couldn't pass it's own extended SMART test - it was returned. I have recently had a WD Green 2TB drive that went south after 16,000 short service hours. I have 2 WD 6TB Reds - but they are infants - 3 months on one and <1 day on the other. My current data drives have about 18,000 hours on them and I am migrating their data to the new WD Red after it finishes 3 rounds of preclear. I plan to reformat the Greens to XFS and continue using them.

 

I'm with gtroyp - any drive can and will fail. I've had mostly good results with WD, so I tend to use them - they aren't sacred...but I've used Greens, Reds, Blacks and the 640Gb Scorpio in various situations and I've replaced very few drives after the WD was installed.  I have replaced lots of Seagates but that might not be a fair statement - I buy used equipment and maybe they put questionable drives in them or dropped them - I couldn't know.

 

Haven't tried the HGSTs - heard good things about them, but they are 7200 RPM I think, and I avoid high RPM drives.