Which is The Most Reliable Hard Drive Brand?

[Blacky]

I would like to hear your experience between brands

[Speederlander]

Personal - Western Digital
Enterprise - Hitachi SAS

[Blacky]

From my experience WD hands down, I had bad luck with Seagates and don't get me started on Maxtors...haven't tested samsung either Hitachi, I've been hearing good things about Samsung Spinpoint's though...

[RAW-Raptor22]

Maxtor before Seagate bought them...

I actually have three still in my system, a 200GB and two 120GBs...

[Oats]

I have a couple 6 year old Hitatchi's that have been running almost 24/7 since I got them. I have had several Seagate 7200.10 and .11 without any issues, including 3 of the 1.5TB drives. I have had a couple WDs and Maxtors (before and after Seagate bought them). Come to think of it I have never had a drive go bad on me, I guess I am lucky.

However, I don't trust my important data to be in one place and do automated daily and weekly backups as well as an off site monthly backup.

[gatecrasherlok]

Western Digital all the way. Had nothing go wrong with them at all. I have 2 maxtors from previous rigs as externals now which are still going strong. I dont think Maxtors are as bad as people make them out to be really.

[zanzabar]

Western Digital all the way. Had nothing go wrong with them at all. I have 2 maxtors from previous rigs as externals now which are still going strong. I dont think Maxtors are as bad as people make them out to be really.

i think that maxtor depended on when and what u bought, after seagate bought them the quality on the maxtor line went way down, they also had a bunch of problems with udma4, i have a maxtor120GB drive from 02 or 03 i think that was in my computer until 05 then was is still in my ps2 and running strong. but the 1st time i had a maxtor was a 12GB in 97 and it died so axis (the company who made the computer i used to have, now they are part of dell ) sent a new one then that one died and they sent a new one and a psu and a new MB then that died and so on until i had i think it was 8 drives over a year and ended up with a 20GB drive from maxtor that worked

seagate i have had nothing but problems with. i have en external free agent 400GB and it came assembled wrong and they wouldent take it back at best buy (it was a christmas present) and then seagate wouldent rma it, and the other about seagate was my maxtor 120GB sata had died and it had a 3 year warranty and it was almost 3 years ( a week off) so i call and they said that they would send me the rma number in my email and such then a week latter affter not getting and calling a couple times they said that they had no info on it in the system so it wasnt going to get an rma. then i asked about my other drive that it was raided with that was purchesed a month affter the other one and they said that it was a desktop drive so raid voided the warranty.

i use the samsungs now, ive had 6 drivers personally and built computers and used about 30 of them and recommended hundreds and have heard nothing bad about them unless they came DOA and most of those they needed a bios update or they were physicaly damaged and dented during shipping (i hope)

WD is my next pick but they are slower and cost more while being noisier and hotter than the samsungs, so aslong as samsung works i dont think that i would go WD

[Blacky]

I'm always been WD they haven't failed me so far and either the builds I have done...though I think i'm going to start testing samsung for future builds to see how they go! nice feedback guys

[Blacky]

Looks like WD is the clear winner

[Razmatazz]

Or...Seagate is the clear loser. I've had plenty of problems with Seagate and am not planning on purchasing any additional drives from them.

[Jowy Atreides]

Why all the WD love?
Maybe they used to be good back in the day but modern WD drives are completely no go.


Not a single spinpoint F1 has failed me

[tiro_uspsss]

never had a seagate fail.. had numerous WDs that i've had to RMA.. personally I will only touch WD & Seagate

[pjkenned]

This is like debating religion.

Fact of the matter is that if you go solely by the number of reviews you see online, Seagate will lose. Why? They are, by far, the biggest hard drive maker by volume, thanks to the Maxtor acquisition.

If you see 5 people flaming Seagate failures for ever one Samsung failure, that's more likely to be a shipping volume driven delta.

I run about two dozen Seagates, a dozen WD's, and about a dozen Hitachi's. All drives fail, and if any manufacturer had significantly higher failure rates, they would go out of business fairly quickly. OEM's drive volume, and have contractual failure rate quotas with penalties to pay for the OEM's effort in supporting the drives post system sale.

And for the record, as a percentage of drives failing, even though I own 15 or so 7200.11's, my WD failure rates have been higher than Seagate, by double. Sample size is so small that I put no stock into it (just ordered 8x WD 1.5TB drives). Frankly, anyone that runs <100 drives from a given manufacturer, including myself, has too small of a sample to comment on this topic. Then again, there are plenty of people running raid 0 or single drives that would rather flame a drive failure than ensure appropriate redundancy.

[lowfat]

This is like debating religion.

Exactly. I buy whatever is cheapest at the time. All manufacturers have failures.

[wuzy]

Exactly. I buy whatever is cheapest at the time. All manufacturers have failures.

QFT. The only way you're going to get reliability is RAID redundancy (excl. host-based RAID5) plus backup.

If one averaged all products from every HDD manufacturer, the failure rate will be around the same.

[tiro_uspsss]

This is like debating religion.

Fact of the matter is that if you go solely by the number of reviews you see online, Seagate will lose. Why? They are, by far, the biggest hard drive maker by volume, thanks to the Maxtor acquisition.

If you see 5 people flaming Seagate failures for ever one Samsung failure, that's more likely to be a shipping volume driven delta.

I run about two dozen Seagates, a dozen WD's, and about a dozen Hitachi's. All drives fail, and if any manufacturer had significantly higher failure rates, they would go out of business fairly quickly. OEM's drive volume, and have contractual failure rate quotas with penalties to pay for the OEM's effort in supporting the drives post system sale.

And for the record, as a percentage of drives failing, even though I own 15 or so 7200.11's, my WD failure rates have been higher than Seagate, by double. Sample size is so small that I put no stock into it (just ordered 8x WD 1.5TB drives). Frankly, anyone that runs <100 drives from a given manufacturer, including myself, has too small of a sample to comment on this topic. Then again, there are plenty of people running raid 0 or single drives that would rather flame a drive failure than ensure appropriate redundancy.

couldnt agree more
the only reason I stick to WD & Seagate is cause their 5yr warranty range is easy to get hold of

[Chosen.]

All hard drives have a failure percentage, so I would not trust my data on any brand; I would trust it on multiple locations including some optical media and only store on a hard drive for quick access.

Asking individuals who might have owned 1-10 hard drives across an 8-year span will not give you substantial data for your search for the most reliable brand.
However, working on a major OEM computer manufacturer, I have seen RMA numbers on a region-wide scale (Europe, Middle East & Africa) and I can safely say that I will not be buying a Maxtor hard drive, ever.
While all the other manufacturers have a similarly low failure of about 4-5%, Maxtor is on the double digits (~16%). These metrics are based on several 100,000's of hard drives sold and not on the "I have a 123Gb Seagate drive since 2003 and it's still working" personal experience.

What I don't know is if the fact that Seagate started having more frequent firmware issues (especially when they resemble the Maxtor Calypso drives fiasco) has anything to do with the fact that they have absorbed a lot of Maxtor employees on several of their departments, following the acquisition.

[RPGWiZaRD]

It's funny regarding Maxtor because for me they have been the most reliable brand but I stopped caring after Seagate bought them. I have owned 7 Maxtor HDDs DiamondMax 9 1x160GB, 2x200GB and DiamondMax 10 4x300GB and none has failed on me. The 160GB is the oldest from 2002 and it's sitting in this parents comp I'm using as I type this, I don't even have any damaged sectors. There was also this period I wasn't giving some of the HDDs proper cooling so they ran at like 50C for maybe 1-2 years even and eventually I ran out of 3.5" bays (the cheap comp I bought in 2001 had only place for 2 hdds) so I ended up putting one HDD in the very bottom of the case and I only put some screws that you put between the comp case and mobo into the HDD screwholes on the bottom side so it could get some airflow going under it as well and I later on also put a HDD in the same way on top of the cd-rom drive! LOL I wouldn't do such things today but despite harrassing my Maxtors like this they still work fine and even the SMART values are very good.

Once I decided to give Seagate a try, I went for a 7200.10 320GB I discovered this. Mine were using the very loud motor and the SMART values went nuts (some jumped up and down almost all the time so just got rid of it as I can't trust such HDDs for longtime storage) and it also had some idle noise. Then I went for a WD 320GB that I used for about 7 months before I started noticing slightly more high pitched spinning noise coming from it constantly so I interpret that as worn out layers inside the hdd or something so I also got rid of that one (seems to be a typical problem for older generation WD HDDs). That was when I decided to go for yet another 300GB Maxtor and it worked perfectly and still does today in my comp in sig.

[chispy]

WD = , Seagate = , Samsung = , Hitachi = , Maxtor =

[pjkenned]

... has anything to do with the fact that they have absorbed a lot of Maxtor employees on several of their departments, following the acquisition.

It wasn't that type of acquisition, especially if you looked 18 months from the close date. Any of the few surviving Maxtor employees had to be very good or else they went with everyone else. That acquisition was all about market share and scale whilst getting rid of costs (sadly, aka Maxtor employees).

[zalbard]

WD = , Seagate = , Samsung = , Hitachi = , Maxtor =

Whoa, can't agree more!

[pjkenned]

Not to beat a dead horse, but I just had one of the eight new WD green 1.5TB drives die after about 36 hours of use. It died just after the raid 6 array finished build/ verify, and hadn't yet written any data (save adaptec metadata). Not that WD's are bad drives, but it just shows it's sample size and luck.

[HeXploiT]

WD hands down. Ten years ago it would have been seagate with WD near the bottom.

[Scubar]

Had numerous Seagates fail recently but no WD drives at all even when im using 10 of them all going strong.

[snoro]

like pjkhenned said, having just a couple of hdd in your life cant really show how reliable a hdd company is. Even with a sample of 100hdd it would be way too less.The thing we should have done is compile everyone that want to participate number of hdd failure they had and which hdd did failed. That could help us more to know which brand is the most reliable.