Most Reliable Hard Drive Brand? (1 Viewer)

[Patrick Cate]

I'm considering buying a new hard drive soon and was wondering if I could get some opinions on what the most reliable brand is. If it matters, I'm looking at getting a 80-120GB IDE 7200RPM drive which will be used to store my entire CD collection which I will be converting to MP3's, and store some ghost images from my other drives. I appreciate any help.

 

[JohanK]

I've had two older WD drives give out. I have older Maxtors and Quantums that are still going strong. In fairness, I have three older WDs which still work good also.

 

[Todd Hochard]

I've never had any hard drive fail on me, so they're all good!
I generally stick with Western Digital. Personal preference.
Todd

 

[Chris]

At our facility (I'm the director of IT) we have quite a few to track from. We have never, period never, had a Quantum fail on us. We've had 6 Maxtor, 3 IBM fail, 2 Fujitsu, and 2 WD.

Realize, though, at this point, IBM line basically manufacturers all WD drives, so they should have basically the same failure rate. q

 

[Steve K.H.]

Hmmm...
More information could assist. The new ATA 133 drives are out but if your M/B has no facility for that bus speed, it's waste of dough.
The premier drive of choice lately has been IBM. That said, the upper end builders (e.g. Voodoo Computers) point to the new Western Digitals as being solid and deserving of elite status.
What you may want to consider are the new 100 GB extended buffer drives. Remember, the slowest item on any computer these days is your hard drive. Access times on these are the best (for non SCSI drives).
Good luck!

 

[Rob Gillespie]

I don't think it's really possible to give an accurate reliability report based on manufacturer. All have gone through good and bad times. Maxtor - up until about two years ago - had a poor failure rate. IBMs 75GXP range has been plagued with problems, despite the rest of their drives being extremely reliable.

Out of the big main brands (IBM, Seagate, Western Digital, Maxtor - which incorporates Quantum) there really isn't a fat lot to choose from. I sold off all my main IBM drives last year and replaced them with Seagate's ultra-quiet Barracuda ATA/IV. I'm very happy with them.

 

[Steve K.H.]

Test
Success!

 

[DonRoeber]

I run a lot of high end unix servers and storage area networks for a living. So I use a LOT of hard disks Over the years, I've been consistently happy with Seagate's disks. Always very reliable, and we beat them pretty hard. Lately I've used their IDE disks in desktops as well, and they've also been great. But for Notebook hard drives, IBM's travelstar line is the way to go. They use fluid ball bearings to make the drives silent, which is something I desire in a notebook.

 

[DmitriP]

I've also probably replaced over 100 failed HDDs in my lifetime, and I'm a HUGE fan of Seagate. They don't break, they're ahead of everyone else, and they warranty for 3 years. If something ever goes wrong, they'll take it back no questions asked. And you're new drive comes in ASAP.

Not sure if they still do, but the one company that used to suck was Quantium. I used to work at a place that took in defective laptops, fixed and returned them. I kept stock of the HDDs used, and the box of Quantium drives was always full. None of the techs wanted to waste 20 minutes installing windows and have it crap out on them. Their DOA rate was pretty high (this was about 4 years ago, could have changed).

 

[Carlo_M]

As Rob said, all have had some problems. Nature of the game, creating thousands to millions of product with tiny, moving electrical & mechanical parts.

That said, I've been most happy with my Seagate Barracuda IV ATA100 HD. You can't hear the damn thing when it's working!

Had a dreaded IBM 75GXP which died. My Quantum is nice, but loud. My S.O.'s Maxtor is louder. Never used a WD because of their poor past, although by all accounts their new products are good.