OT: Is any hard disk brand better/worse than the others?

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Mon, Dec 01, 2008 at 09:59:50AM -0500, Evan Leibovitch wrote:
> I haven't been in the hardware market for a while so I'm wondering if
> there are any real winners or losers amongst hard drive makers.
> 
> It's amazing how terrabyte drives are now reasonably priced. Right now
> the ones that seem to be aggressively priced are the Seagate
> Barracuda, Western Digital Caviar Black, and Samsung Spinright. Also
> on the market are entries by Maxtor and Hitachi.
> 
> Is there a real preference out there? Does any brand really stand out?
> Do any really fall behind? Reliability, of course, is at least as much
> a factor as performance, and noise also matters.
> 
> Any suggestions are welcome.

Well current and past issues on forums for certain seagate drives have
certainly made me avoid them.  They seem to manage to misunderstand the
SATA standard a bit too often.  Their current issue with write caching
and drives essentially stopping for 30s on cache flush commands is not
looking good and their handling of the issue is looking downright awful
so far.

I liked quantum drives, while some maxtor drives were very unreliable in
the past.  Now they are one company and I have no idea what they are
like now.

I have been buying western digital drives myself for a number of years
now, and haven't had that many problems.  Only a single model seems to
have been problematic and was discontinued long ago (the WD1200JS).  I
have had a few of those fail and have taken the remaining couple out of
use for that reason.  The other models just work.  They are also nice
and quiet.

I have never used a hitachi drive that I know of.  Maybe in a laptop.
Not sure.

No idea about samsung.  Based on experience with samsung monitors and
samsung cell phones, I consider samsung a producer of junk.  Might not
be fair, but that's how I see it.  So I don't even consider their
harddisks at all.

-- 
Len Sorensen
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