[boead]

Just over a year ago, I purchased several Maxtor DiamondMAX 11 drives (SATA 3.0Gb/sec) hard drives in the 400GB range. I bought 2 for home, 4 for my office and a friend bought 2 as well for his home.

Just over a year later, I had 4 fail and my buddy had 1 fail and the replacement (his died just under a year) lasted only a couple of months before it failed (it was refurbished).

5 out of 8 failed in about a year. They were all properly cooled.

I replaced mine at home with Western Digital drives that are much faster and a lot quieter. Note that Seagate owns Maxtor and I have bought Seagate drives in the past for my office and found that they generally only last 3 years. I just recently replaced two in a server that were made in 2005.

I took notice that the oldest drives throughout my office are Western Digitals, noticing that a number of them are well over 5 years.

Maxtor’s customer service was horrible, it took multiple phone calls and emails to attempt to get an RMA and after I was told that they were in warranty and was issued an RMA number (finally), it was rejected afterwards because in fact they weren’t in warranty anymore. I don’t’; understand why they couldn’t get their own facts straight but the entire ordeal was comical.

I won’t be buying Seagate or Maxtor products again. I’d beware if you have. Remember to backup and secure your data (music) and don’t trust these brand drives.

[bassboy]

Personal experience - I have a seagate (120 gig) and it's great - quiet and reliable - has been on full time and never complained once.  My newest hd is a western digital usb hd - I have no brand loyalty.

My uncle bought a computer with western digital at about the same time I bought the seagate and his failed within 2 months.  The western digital restoration program got it back into working order but all data was lost.  It still works to this day, but that computer has been nothing but trouble.

From older computer pulls (stuff headed for the dump - early 90`s junk) by far the most common working hd model is western digital.  There`s a couple of other names but I have more old WD than all other brands combined. 

I have no experience with the models boead mentions.

[KS]

Anyone have experience with Steve Gibson's SpinRite "recovery, repair, and maintenance" utility program?

I use it, have no problems with my drives, but don't know if the drives would be trouble free anyway.  And, of course, everything is subject to failure and all mechanical parts wear out.

[jqp]

Most brands have had problems with certain models at one time or another. A particular drive manufacturer may be completely different company than they were 10 or even 5 years ago. Consulting websites such as Storagereview can help, also read the customer reviews of websites selling drives. All brands seem to have some DOA drives, which probably accounts for a disproportionately large percent of the postings so you have to look at the big picture. I have been lucky, only had a couple of drives go bad across 5 or 6 brands over 10-15 years.

[satfrat]

Seagate is 1 of the most reliable hard drives out there, check the stats. That said, nothing is forever and hard drives will eventually fail. That's why backup hard drives are so important. I use nothing but Seagate in my system, 4 hard drives with the oldest around 4 years old now with 0 issues (knock on wood).

Cheers,
Robin

[richidoo]

Seagate Barracuda is most reliable drive available.

[andrewbee]

Firstly,  all manufacturers have drive failures, it has nothing to do with the manufacturer per se but rather  they simply screw up a particular model e.g  some part does not meet spec and fails over a short time period.
When buying sata drives, buy the server class types. Yes they cost more, yes they are much more reliable. Manufacturers sell drives in "tiers", as in how many percent of errors present, all drives have errors, the ones with the least errors cost more- server class. You also get a better built drive, quality components in its manufacture and much better reliability and in particular heat tolerance.
When you buy those 1TB drives for $100.00 you are not getting a deal, you are getting the bottom tier of the drives.
If you want quality you have to pay for it.

[bpape]

Personally, after purchasing a LOT of HD's and building a lot of PC's and servers, I prefer WD HD's for the long term - unless you're going to spend BIG BUCKS on enterprise type HD's

If you want real security, you need to consider building a RAID array of some sort.  Other than that, it's purely a crap shoot.  Even if you do, an external USB backup is well worth the money.  With 1TB(!) external USB being under $250 now, why not.

Bryan

[boead]

Seagate Barracuda is most reliable drive available.

Yeah maybe so, I was referring to the Maxtor DiamondMAX 11 drives in particular, they were very popular and on the high(er)-end in performance and cost. I am personally annoyed at the CS and will choose to not give them my business or the business of the company I work for.
These new WD’s are fabulous BTW, as fast as the original SATA Raptors in large sizes, I bought (2) 750GB drives for redundant raid.  They are quieter and much faster than the DiamondMAX 11 drives that failed.

[K.C.]

For useful information about drives a good place to start is here:

http://www.storagereview.com/

[boead]

The opinions above are totally subjective and amount to little more than conjecture. Sorry if that offends anyone, but it's true.

For useful information about drives a good place to start is here:

storagereview.com/

Yes, opinions are subjective. Besides myself, I build PC’s for my office of about 50 persons. I’ve been doing this for about 15 years. I also build our servers and systems for others. I’ve bought quite a number of components over the years. The last time “I” saw this type of high fail rate was with the IBM star drives, they were sure fast and large but didn’t last much past their OEM 1-year warranty.
Anyhow, I guess I’m just encouraging people to backup and beware of HD failure. I didn’t lose anything but if I had not had redundant drives I would have!

[lonewolfny42]

This looks like a good deal on a WD 750GB external hard drive.... Link....

[JohnR]

FWIW, I just bought a Western Digital "Studio II" 1TB drive, as I just ran out of room on my other drive. These have two 500GB drives that can be configured as RAID 1, which is what I have set it to. Currently copying all my photo files over using the FireWire connection to my Mac Mini. It has no fan, so is obviously very quiet - looking forward to that actually, soon as I get all my files over onto it and can turn off the other drive!

I ummed and ahed for quite a while on which RAID NAS to get and in the end found this WD model and decided that this is the simple solution. The WD drive will also be backed up to a cheap Maxtor NAS using rsync and shell scripts. I don't plan to actually test the RAID 1 capability by removing and rebuilding a drive but people say it works fine... If my machine had Gigabit Ethernet on it I might have gone a different route.

[boead]

Wouldn't you know it. Last week I lost 'another' Maxtor drive in my office. It was made in late 2006. 1 year OEM warrentee. It was a 300GB drive in another RAID-1 array. F'in amazing how these drives are dropping dead.
Unfortunately I bought allot of these drives when they were popular because they were large and fast and again they were not cheap.

[BobM]

I've been investigating external hard drives so I can pick one op this Christmas. You're right - all of them fail or have other problems. There's no perfect answer.

Older WD's seem very reliable, but the new stock is not the same. Seagate's have a lot of good reviews, but there are bad experiences out there also. There's a lot of recommendations on the boards and in the mag's for lesser known brands as well.

You'se pays your money and you'se takes your chances, as Yogi used to say (I think).

If you're worried, buy 2 from different brands and double up on your backups. They certainly are cheap enough these days.

Enjoy,
Bob