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hitachi, seagate, or wd hd for reliability

plunar

plunar

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Sep 7, 2003
334
0
i've had two apple notebook drives fail me waaaaaay ahead of mtbf ratings. a 17" fujitsu drive from a g4 not even a year old, and a 12" g4 hitachi almost 3 years old.

i need something that WILL NOT FAIL. this is freaking ridiculous. the product descriptions on newegg for 5400 80gb drives are pretty ambigous; all seem to claim "highest shock tolerance" blah blah.

which is it?
 
I like WD and Seagate... my Seagate died on me in a few months but they generally are good drives. My WD has been perfect for 4 years.
 
::shrug::

i tend to trust seagate and hitachi. i've never had any problems with WD drives myself, but i've heard plenty of stories, so that makes me wary.

i just bought a new drive for my MB that should be here in a couple of days (along with 2GB of RAM.. :D) and i went with the hitachi over seagate because it was cheaper. hopefully that 15 bucks saved doesn't cost me more hassle in the end...
 
I favor the Seagate Momentus line...they're solid drives and the 5-year warranty is definitely a big plus.
 
Seagate has been my favourite. Hitachi took over IBM's line because it was having quality and reliability problems. I had a bad time with my DeskStar but some models are much more reliable than others. Western Digital used to be the bottom of the barrel for drives, but with S-ATA, they've apparently improved a lot but I wouldn't buy one, even on a dare.

Why not Toshiba? They make reliable 2.5 inch drives.
 
These larger Hard Drives remind me of those 120 minute cassettes that use to jam up in your cassette deck.

The 60's and even the 90's were O.K., but the 120's just had too much slack
so they messed up.

I keep this in mind when I decide how much information I want to have at risk on any one hard drive.

The finest warranty on the planet doesn't mean diddly squat if your vital data
is stuck on a drive and you can't retrieve it.

This is one reason I really like the new MacBooks.

You can easily configure a drop in, back up, replacement drive ready to roll
if you lose the one in your machine.

An 80 GB drive is more than enough storage for most people's portable needs.

If you have that much more data, you need a fast external F/W drive.

AND a ready to go drop in drive.

If I lose my primary drive today, I can boot from my restoration drive in minutes.

I keep back-ups of everything important there and on CD.
I also have Data Rescue II and DiskWarrior pre-loaded, just in case.

I prefer Seagate Barracuda's but respect Western Digital Caviar and the Raptors.
I'm not sure how Seagate's acquisition of Maxtor will affect quality.
I've had the worst luck with Maxtor Drives.
 
Seagate will have the edge for me. Their current 7200 RPM drives are built as server drives meaning they are meant to run for long periods without fail and they are superbly quiet.
 
No, no, no!

You NEED a WD! :)

SATA2 16MB Cache 7200RPM and 250GB+ for £50

The new ones are very quiet (quieter than the seagates) BUT can get a bit warmer. Never had one die. But my IBM/Hitatchi died last week :-( 3yrs young!


Dan :)


Also, get the "RAID edition" as they last longer, i.e. higher MTBF etc. server drives, and they are the same price!
 
My experiences:

Seagate - no problems at all. The extra drives I stick in my Mac Pro will be Seagates.
Western Digital - never owned one (to my knowledge).
Hitachi/IBM (as was) - my Deathstars are working fine to this day.
Maxtor - two failures in two months convinced me never to buy Maxtor again.
 
You would have to see the storagereview.com reliability raitings. But there's not much data for notebook drives.

Everybody should fill this up!
 
I'm currently running 4x250GB Western Digital (2 SATA, 2 IDE) and they're goin string. I've had personal experience of about 10 other Western Digital drives goin back the last 4-5 years. They've all working fine or have been replaced with larger drives. I've never had a Western Digital drive fail yet, nor have my friends who use them.
 
well i ordered a 5400 80gb seagate off newegg. couldn't really justify the extra cash for a 7200, seeing as this is an old 1ghz g4 i'm planning on selling off as soon as soon as adobe gets it's act together on intel.

wonder if there's any market for dead drives???
 
miles01110 said:
Only 80 GB? Hmm....the general consensus is that anything under ~150-160 is not cost effective. Oh well! Not to rain on your parade or anything though....I'm sure you'll be happy with it.
Click to expand...

this is for a laptop drive...
 
I've never had a disk drive failure in the last 5 years. My last drive that went bad was a Connor 40MB hard drive.

Seagate - Own 2 x 120GB ATAs, 1 x 120GB ATA Laptop, 1 x 120GB SATA Laptop.
My preferred brand. 5-year warranty, runs very quiet. Have never had a failure.

Western Digital - Own 1 x 60GB ATA, 1 x 27GB ATA, 1 x 20GB ATA Laptop.
Great brand. I've always gotten the Special Editions with 8MB Cache, when that was popular. Have never had a failure.

Hitachi - 1 x 60GB ATA Laptop. Came with Thinkpad T40, used 3 years before replacing. No problems.

Toshiba - 1 x 60GB ATA Laptop. Came out of Macbook, used 3 months. Keeping around in case I need to send machine into AppleCare. No problems.
 
I've been doing drive intensive work for years and have learnt that Seagate are the best. Second to that WD, and have never used the others becuase drives are to important to get cheap ones.
 
After the stock (60gb 4200rpm Toshiba) HD died after 18 months in my powerbook, I went with an 80gb 5400rpm Western Digital. I love it. It is very quiet and more importantly very power effiecient.

A year later and it is still going strong. Haven't tried Seagate's 2.5" hard drives, but I definitely trust them as well.
 
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