I've seen several posts lately asking about recommendations for hard drives,
and just thout I'd share my experiences with particular brands.
Western Digital - I wouldn't buy a recent WD drive with someone elses money.
I do warranty repairs on Dell computers at work ( I work in the IT dept at a
unversity branch college) and 99.9% of the drive failures I've had with them
have been WD Caviar drives. I had the same experience with WD drives when I
was doing repairs in a computer store. I'd note that I haven't seen a WD
drive in a new Dell product in the last couple of years, at least not in the
Optiplex line. All the new ones I get in, and all the replacement drives
have been Maxtors.
Quantum - Probably a moot point since they've been bought out by Maxtor, but
not much luck with their IDE drives. The Quantum Bigfoot is big old slow
junk. There's a reason theyre cheap. I had a 2 gig Quantum Scirocco drive in
my home machine several years back that didn't even last a year before it
seized and wouldn't even spin up. The Fireballs have been a little better,
but I was never impressed with their performance. Quantum SCSI drives are
another story. We've gotten good service out of them in servers at work.
Seagate - Early Seagate IDE drives were total junk, but in the last few
years they've improved. Still, they seem to have a bigger failure rate than
they should. Seagate SCSI drives are, again, another story. We have them in
a couple of servers at work, and they've been running basically 24/7 as part
of RAID arrays for over 3 years without a hitch.
IBM- Good drives (both IDE and SCSI). Tough. They also tend to be pricey. I
can't find anything else bad to say about them really. I'm sure someone
will. :)
Maxtor - Excellent IDE drives (they used to make good SCSI drives too, but I
don;t think they make them anymore). Long lasting and hard to kill. Maxtor
is Dell's drive of choice for the past several years in their Optiplex line.
I've retired machines after 4 or 5 tough years in computerlabs and then in
offices that still have their original Maxtor drives in them. Maxtors can
tend to make some noise though, especially when they get a bit older. I used
to buy only Maxtor drives for quite awhile until recently.
Fujitsu - Why Fujitsu is not a household name for hard drives is beyond me.
They are the best most long lasting hard drive I've yet to come across, and
the only brand I put in my home machine or ones I build for others anymore.
They're sometimes a bit more expensive than other brands, but worth it,
imho. Very quiet too.
Samsung - I'm not sure if Samsung is still making hard drives, but we bought
some 4 gig drives of theirs several years ago and most of them are still
kicking around. They were slow, though, so I'm not sure I'd recommend them
or not.
Hitachi - I've only seen these in laptops, and I'm less than impressed. In
fact, I just had to replace one in a pretty much brand new Dell Inspiron
8000 laptop. The replacement drive was an IBM.
Toshiba - Again I've only seen these in laptops, and they seem to be average
drives.
Anyway, those are the ones that come to mind at the moment. :) And again,
this is all been in my experience (I've been working on computers since the
days of the TRS-80 Model 1, if that means anything. :) ) and your mileage
may of course vary. I'm sure others have had the opposite experiences from
me, I just call 'em as I see 'em. :)
Glenn
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