Most reliable hard drives?

**meatwad** · January 13th, 2003, 10:53 AM

IBM had a rash of 30GB drives that were constantly failing. They bot a pretty bad reputation after that, but some of their bigger stuff seems OK. Maxtor bought out Quantum, so just about any Maxtor you find at Best Buy or Circuit City is just a fireball with a new label on it. Try to stick to DiamondMax drives if you go Maxtor.

Personally doing fine with the new 80GB SE WD drives.

**Darkstar** · January 13th, 2003, 11:29 AM

I have a bunch of older drives at home. In my experience, if a drive lasts more than a few months when brand new, it will last for several years. Just my experience, though.

Had lotsa bad Western Digital drives at work. I don't like them. Somtimes if you drop them from about 3'' above a table they will start working.

I agree with meatwad on Maxtors. Quantums aren't as reliable as the DiamondMax. Love my DiamondMax.

**Carlitos_Way** · January 13th, 2003, 12:07 PM

All I've ever used in my PCs have WD...I've never had a problem with them...maybe I'm just lucky.

**xt477** · January 13th, 2003, 02:58 PM

didnt see this mentioned but I found IBM to have as much as a month turn around time whereas maxtor and WD returned within a week.

drives are going to fail what sells me is how the manufacturer handles the replacment.

***DonJ*** · January 13th, 2003, 05:09 PM

HP regularly uses Seagate drives. And I'm not just talking about their PCs...they also use them on all of their big main frames, servers, RAIDs, etc. Whenever I replace a HD, I try to go with Seagates. As stated above, all drives will fail at some point for some crazy reason...some just do it more than others.

Go here to check out Seagate's datasheets. The .pdf's are rather large and can take a while to download if you're on a dialup like I am...sigh...

Anyway, click on Select a Disk Drive in the left hand column...you can find lots of info, including warranty info, with a little bit of time and effort.

Good Luck in your quest for the perfect HD!

**Hippie_Tech** · January 13th, 2003, 11:02 PM

The thing I didn't like about Seagate and their warranty replacement was the replacement only had a 90-day warranty regardless of when I bought the drive. They might have changed that policy, but when I found out that my 3-month old Seagate drive that came with a 3-year warranty was going to be out of warranty in 6 months from purchase, I was a little peeved. This was several years ago and I haven't bought a Seagate since even though the drive they replaced under warranty lasted till I upgraded.

On a side note, if you didn't know by now, it is no longer IBM hard drives. Hitachi bought IBM's hard drive business. With the class-action law suit and subsequent bad publicity for high failure rates on the 75GXP line (I've seen my share), IBM thought it best to get out of the hard drive biz. Any failures on existing IBM drives will likewise be handled by Hitachi and its warranty department. Good luck getting your RMAs.

**Thor Caron** · January 15th, 2003, 05:25 PM

I have used a few different types (seagate) (Maxtor) and they lasted about 1 to 1 1/2 years then boom they went dead I have had 4 different (WD) and they are all still working I use WD in all sys that I build but I also get the 8 meg buffer one those still carry the 3year warrenty the other ones are down to one year now. But as you can see it is to each person preference. But I have had good luck with the companys return policy and reliability.

**techs** · January 15th, 2003, 05:37 PM

Originally posted by ilovetheusers
The SE drives are Western Digital. Yes it is an 8mb cache and I did not hear/read anything about an 3 year warranty. As a side note I have noticed no real gain in speed from mine.

I'm surprised by that. I used a seagate 60gb and an ibm 120 gb both with the regular 2mb cache and 7200rmp ata100 and my new WD with the 8mb is definitely faster, esp. when doing large file transfers (which surprised me cause I thought the extra cache would not help in this area)

**scutterboy** · January 16th, 2003, 09:44 AM

Originally posted by ilovetheusers
The SE drives are Western Digital. Yes it is an 8mb cache and I did not hear/read anything about an 3 year warranty. As a side note I have noticed no real gain in speed from mine.

WD are my personal fave. So long as the mobo can run them at full whack they're usually mint.

One thing... I would check that the drive is actually a JB and not an EB. Two months ago I ordered 8 drives from a big supplier, the packaging was correct so I signed it in to stock. When I went to fit one a few days later I found the drives in the boxes were not what they should have been. -- I'd already done a big install on one of the drives. I wasn't a happy teddy. The EB is a 5400rpm 2MB cache version.

There are two versions of the SE. The BB and the JB. They are both SE 8MB cache 7200RPM.

The JB is the latest version of the "Special Edition".

Model numbers would be WD400JB for a 40 Gig drive and WD800JB for 80 Gig and so on.

**TuanSupreme18** · January 16th, 2003, 03:59 PM

My HP Pavilion 8660c have been using Quantum hard drive for 3 years without failing. It's still working great. But it's not quite as much.

I heard Seagate makes good and quiet hard drives, so does WD.

**Hippie_Tech** · January 16th, 2003, 07:24 PM

Check your info again, scutterboy. The SE drives (Special Edition) are only the JB part numbers. They start at the 80GB and go up from there. The BB drives have been around for a while and started around the 15GB range several years ago. They are 7200RPM with 2MB buffers. The JB drives are the only Western Digital drives that have 8MB cache.

**Garfeild_Cat** · January 16th, 2003, 08:18 PM

One other consideration...

WD will do a "rapid" replacement w/o a returning the drive first. They do require an OEM account or a CC# for "collatoral"

(Overnite shipping not included)

(smile)

Garf.

**Ruslan** · January 16th, 2003, 08:38 PM

Doing my job as RMA tech for big computer company, I can say what most of bad drives I have to replace last times were WDs, but... they were not true WD's models, they were actually IBM models and look like IBMs... yes, made by WD, but designed by IBM... actual WDs models are reliable enough...