Thanks Bob. Just putting together my WarChest(££) for this. I'll see if there is any Samsung price differentials here in London.

Cheers

Grazie

Grazie,

I've got a bunch of Seagate drives and have been very happy with them, not a single failure and I pound the blazes out of them. A few years ago I also started buying Samsung drives and have been perfectly satisfied with them, too.

I have had too many Western Digital drives fail, so I haven't purchased any in quite a while. Don't get me started on Maxtor, in my opinion they're complete junk. They may have inproved since Seagate bought Maxtor, but I don't take chances with my data.

echo samsung / seagate (even when i had one with the bad firmware - the fix worked).

had failures with all the other brands (heck, maybe three failures in 15 years!?)

I have used Samsung discs after I had problems with Maxtor and other brands (Iomega and Packard Bell). I have never had a single problem with my Samsung discs.

Take a look at this review (here page 7 Conclusions):

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/storage/2008/12/09/samsung-spinpoint-f1-1tb/7

Jøran Toresen

Thanks for your reassurances on the Samung Guys! John thanks for pitching about Maxtor. See, I've said it again . . MAxtor Maxtor . .. just for you -lol!

Jøran I read the review. What with what John mentions, seems like a no-brainer now. . .

What a Team. "Team-V"

Grazie

Until a year ago, I used to buy mostly Seagate because of the quality.

Then they set up new manufacturing in China, and completely lost control of their QA.

Losses have been heavy since then, and I'll be avoiding them until some time has passed with good reports across the board.

WD used to be mediocre, but in the last few years they have really joined the Winner's Circle for quality and performance. I've bought a ton of their Green drives, a lot of their very fast triple-platter drives (~100 MB/sec read and write w/o a RAID), and I'm looking at their high spec Black drives for some applications.

I have also bought many Samsung SpinPoint drives over the years, with no problems for me and few problems reported by others. Nice and quiet, which is also a factor for me.

I don't recall ever buying a Maxtor drive, as their bad reputation preceded them.

Yes, Seagate bought the company, but that doesn't mean that they had even the desire to impose the former Seagate standards on them (because that costs money).

So far it has seemed to be more like when Macy's bought Robinson's; the combination is worse than the lower end Robinson's (which was OK but not at Macy's level).

I've also had mixed results with Hitachi drives, but others seem to have done mostly well with them.

Isn't it odd that we have to discuss which drives fail "less often?"

The complexity would seem to be less than that of a car, which has a vastly larger number of parts.

It's not the complexity that matters, it's the tolerance. The newer > 500GB drives pack so much data into such tiny spaces that we're now dealing with mechanisms that have to be accurate to millionths of an inch. If a car needed that sort of tolerance it wouldn't even make it off the production line. Car production generally doesn't need accuracy past a thousandth of an inch.

That means that hard drives are about 1000 times more finicky than cars. It's not surprising that they're still a bit fiddly.

Tolerance: for something to be off by 10 micron in a hard drive could mean that the part would have to be say half as thick, right?

So we have to scale everything, including the absolute tolerances.

We're not close to bumping up against quantum problems yet (although I guess there could be other issues like cosmic radiation, etc.).

No, not close to quantum issues yet. But, hard drives are still manufactured from many of the same materials as cars, built by the same human hands, and in many cases, the same tools. These materials, hands, and tools have to be used with 1000 times the delicacy. There's also the fact that cars have been around for a couple generations longer than hard drives so there's a much longer history of understanding the technical issues and working with them.

Heck, you could build a car in your back yard mostly with things already lying around the house. It might even be road-worthy. I doubt you could come up with *any* useful data storage device on your own.

My experience has been mostly along the same lines as Coursedesign. I have had several Maxtors fail and will not put them in my systems again, a couple of Seagates fail that were fairly new, but my older 300-500 GB seagates have been running for years (IDE). One thing I do that does seem to affect drive life is make sure they stay comfortable - I use the Antec Sonata cases mostly and they have a fan mount on the side of the drive cage. I put a fan there and basically keep the drives close to room temperature (with the occasional blast of canned air to get the dust, dog hair and other assorted stuff out of the fans/cooling fins on the CPU etc. Note that most of my experiences are with IDE drives - I'm not sure if the SATA drives come off a different line or just what, so that may or may not make a difference.

mikey

I have 4 WD 640gb Caviar Blacks, and 1 WD 1TB caviar blacks - all have been problem free and have 32mb cache - fast drives and very reliable - These are the only drives I would consider buying now. Also have 4 250g seagates that are much older - but they are slow by comparison to the WD - but haven't had any problems with them. All 9 of thes are still in use. The WD are very quiet and run cool.

On the other hand, I've had 3 Maxtors and they all failed in less than 2 years each.

"Losses have been heavy since then, and I'll be avoiding them until some time has passed with good reports across the board."

Same here with Seagate - the 7200.11 SATA series seemed to be the worst - nearly 100% failure rate here over 1-2 years. I've heard the same from pro Audio/Video computer builders as well.

I will ditto srode's recommendation for WD Blacks. They seem to be the preferred model now (not blue or green) here and by the builder's I've talked to. I have several of the 640Gs running fine.

Don't overlook the Hitachi drives. I am told they bought the old IBM manufacturing facility and designs and did not change much. I have had a number of 750 - 1TB drives with no failures. Also like Samsung.

I mentioned them above, and had a high failure rate before I stopped buying them. Others have done better however.

Yes, IBM sold their infamous "DeathStar" drive business to Hitachi, and Hitachi to their credit cleaned up the design and manufacturing.

The reasons behind the preference for the WD Black 640GB HDs is fairly complex, nothing to do with reliability, more to do with power consumption, access times,cache size etc. The number of platters is also relevant to their attraction.
Some of what you'll read on the web comes from people running monster home databanks. If you're running that many disks in a box and paying the power bills yourself then factors irrelevant to us become very relevant to others.

Bob.

Samsung gets my thumbs uop.

I've bought about 25 Samsungs over the past 5 years from 160GB up to 1TB. All are still working fine. Only one developed a problem with a few bad sectors (I think this was caused by being knocked whilst running). I masked off the bad sectors and the drive has been running flawlessly 24/7.

I purchased one 500GB WD drive and it failed after 6 months.

Rats, I just missed a deal on WD 640 Caviar Blacks - Newegg had them with free shipping for 49.99 - Black Friday sale. I would have upgraded from my 4 segates and had another matched set for my RAID array. They were sold out by the time I looked this afternoon. Hard to beat 4 640s with a 5 year warranty for under $200 shipped.

Well, not exactly "just missed" :-) - I saw that ad this morning fairly early and they were already sold out so they went away fairly quickly. Look at the bright side - you didn't have to stand in line for 10 hours to find out they were gone :-)

mikey