Hard Drive Brands

[Blackhawk]

Well my laptop hard drive seems to have pretty much died on me. It's got several bad sectors, which some of those sectors are were the Window's files are located so I can't get it to start up anymore. So I've had to spend all day getting a Knoppix (A live-cd version of Linux) working so I could attempt to copy the remaining good files from the hard drive to an external hard drive, and hopefully not lose all the time and effort I put into on my next map.

Anyway, I figured I'd post and see if anyone had any brand preferences for hard drives? Currently I'm looking at getting a Western Digital Scorpio Blue 500 gb drive. The drive that failed was a Seagate ST91608220AS hybrid drive with 256mb of flash memory on it. Being a newer technology at the time maybe that could be one reason the drive failed on me. Or maybe it was that Seagate bought out Maxtor and I've read that many people said Seagate's quality declined after that merger/acquisition.

[Hawk]

For what ever it's worth, I've always used Western Digital and I've never had any hard drive problems with them.
I'm still using a couple in external cases that are several years old.

[Knave]

I have used a few different brands over the years. Even had a couple of Seagate's before I knew of the Seagate /Maxtor merger. As they all gave out I have replaced them with Western Digital. I normally try to get as much cache as I can. That seems to add a lot of speed to a system.

[WPandP]

I'll back up Hawk's play. I've never had any drive other than a Western Digital in my home computer, going back to when I first bought my PC in 1995. I can't say I've never had a failure, as I have an 80-Gb IDE drive that no longer works, but it didn't exactly fail while in service. I didn't have to replace it when I did, I just chose to upgrade, and I kept it in place as a secondary drive for a while, until it finally went kaput. This was my standard practice all along - add the new bigger drive as primary and keep the old one as secondary - each time I've upgraded through the years, and all my other WD drives kept on chugging as secondary discs for long after their primary service life. I started with a 750 mb drive, added a 2 Gb to that, then added a 13 Gb (and retired the 750), then the 80 Gb just mentioned (retiring the 2 Gb), and finally I'm at my current 3-drive RAID 5 array built on WD 250 Gb drives (retired the 13 Gb initially, lost the 80 Gb later). With a 500 Gb WD external drive for backup.

My car is getting kinda old now, over 100,000 miles. If only Western Digital made cars...

[Wolverine@MSU]

I have had mostly Western Digital and have been very pleased with their reliability.

[thegrindre]

Gonna have to agree with everybody else here. A WD would be your best bet. A bit more expensive but well worth it in the long run. They seem to last longer. I guess they just make them better then all the others.

[Braindead6]

I guess I'm going to be a fly in the ointment. My son's computer had a 350Gb WD hard drive and it failed. I mean it gave no warning, just wouldn't work. I replaced it with another WD hard drive and all is well.
I guess I'm the exception to the rule.

Jim

[Hawk]

Even WD can't make all their drives perfect.

[Gwizz]

Talk about a fly in the ointment. I just bought a Seagate external 250 GB drive at Fries. (made in China) They were selling so fast, I stopped thinking about it, and just bought the next, to the last one, on the shelf. I guess they call that acting with mob mentality.

I bought the Seagate drive and a external DVD RW recorder/player, (made in Korea), both cost $39 each. I had two reasons for buying: the price and that they are both very small for travel, to back up a laptop for the wife. Now we need to find a laptop. She can't makeup her mind.

The last 3 HDs I bought were WD drives.
I've never had a drive fail. Not even a Seagate drive. I've
owned or been in charge of about 155 computers before I retired. I just replaced early.
My only problem, I had a WD drive that was noisy; So I bought an external USB, Firewire, box for a WD drive that I had. I think the drive is about 700 GBs. I also down loaded a free program from the Kim Konando site that states that it is programable and automatically backs up the Computer to an USB external backup drive. I have yet to install it.

I have been manually backing up both Desktop computers to it about once each week although the Onboard drive is running quiet now after I blew out 3 years of dust.

The computer seems a bit slower now. I think some of that dust was magntized and was being used to expand memory

[Blackhawk]

In the past I've had a drive in an old Packard Bell's hard drive die (I can't remember the brand as it was many years ago back in the days of a 486 and the computer chain Elek-Tek being around), a Hitachi Deskstar (a.k.a. A deathstar), and now a seagate fail on me. Guess the moral of the story is to back everything up, or just don't have any important files. Although I thought PC experts used to say for the best computer performance reformate once a year. hmm I'll probably just return back to my old habbits of only backing up highly important things if that, and just attempt to see what I can salvage in the end after another future drive failure, not smart, but it's the most convenient


Anyway I went with a Western Digital, and should be receiving it relatively soon. The highest rated options from newegg.com were all western digital so it was just a matter of deciding how many gigs and what rpm speed I wanted. I thought about going with a 7200 rpm, but I read a decent number reviews that said they vibrated a lot, and in my small/thin sony vaio any vibrations would probably be pretty noticeable so I decided not to risk it and just went with another 5400rpm drive.

The real question now is whether to install vista (which the laptop came with) or xp on it when it arrives, or possibly go with a dual boot.

[thegrindre]

Vista!!! Man, unless you have any of the newest most modern software that needs it, I wouldn't install it. XP would be the best bet.

[Blackhawk]

Well it came installed with vista and said some of the things that came with the computer might not work correctly with XP, so I made the mistake of going with vista. The installation process took awhile, then the sony installation process took over and install all it's bloatware and crap. (The best was during the installation where I can't access anything, I get a few error messages saying "This program may not have installed correctly" Continue or Reinstall ? How am I supposed to know if it was installed correctly or not when I can't even access it. Now I'm back into attempting to get RT3 working on vista.

After immediately being reminded of how bad and slow vista is, I'm definitely considering attempting a dual or multi-boot system. The slowness and frustration of Vista just isn't worth the flashy looks.