Which is The Most Reliable Hard Drive Brand?

[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