Storage Solutions Thinking outside the Seagate/WD box

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Krow

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Hearing about HDD failures on both the Seagate and WD camps respectively, I felt that whenever I see any buying recommendation in quite a few forums, the HDD recommendation is limited to Seagate or WD.

The purpose of this thread is to find good performing hard drives other than Seagate or WD. The only two companies I know of are Samsung and Hitachi. Of course, Maxtor is owned by Seagate now.

Since I am going to need an HDD upgrade in the coming months, I figured why not have a thread for discussing alternatives. So, please post your experience with non-Seagate/WD drives, preferably 500GB or higher as it is here that the failures have been noticed most.

I have heard of Samsung Spinpoint drives and Hitachi's Deskstar series. Could someone update the price and performance of these drives? Also, any comments about after sales service?
 
I bought a Hitachi 500Gb drive a few centuries ago, when they cost the earth. Contrary to reports on the web, I did not suffer from the click of death syndrome and drive is still somewhere in my setup, functioning fine. I thought Samsung pulled out of the HDD market in India?

Between Seagate, Maxtor and WD, the incidence of failure is pretty much equal. WD has a slightly higher failure rate in my case (I have about 11 drives total, of which 8 are WD), but their RMa service is so far ahead of Seagate's that I don't really mind - I ensure I have a good backup strategy and plan, so my data is duplicated across two locations at the least, with only one of them being active at any point in time. Lost drives, but not lost data *knock on wood*.
 
My Hitachi 160GB is running for four years now. No problems at all. Seagate has bricked once, developed bad sectors twice. Lost 400GB of data thanks to Seagate.

Anyone with Samsung drives out here?
 
Almost all drives below 320gb had a better build quality, I have a couple of 11 year old 4.3gb Seagates in working condition...
 
hitachi has the only hdd which has crashed on me , wd and seagate have been great

the samsung hdd which i had never even started :|
 
Aces170 said:
Almost all drives below 320gb had a better build quality, I have a couple of 11 year old 4.3gb Seagates in working condition...

I have a working 13+ year old seagate HDD (2GB) :P In fact out of the countless Seagate HDD I bought since 1996, only one has ever gone bad. As for WD, I have 2 x 640GB AAKS, 1 x 500GB AAKS and a 1 x 1TB Black series HDD currently working flawlessly in my rig. The only other brands I have bought other than Seagate and WD are IBM, Samsung, Maxtor and Quantum.

All of them except samsung failed after about an year. Samsung failed well within an year and I could not even get it replaced. samsung has poor quality and bad service as far as HDD are concerned.
 
Hmmm... So, for now, Hitachi drives seem to be somewhat viable. If I go for an HDD in the near future, it will be either WD or Hitachi. Thanks for sharing your experiences guys. :) If anyone else has any experience, please share. :)
 
Samsung Spinpoint F3 is topping all charts among the 7200s. Based on the user reviews, the failure rate seems about as much as Western Digital or Seagate. I'd go for it if it was available in India.
 
failure rates are mostly consistent across most brands. What is NOT consistent are the volumes.

at an assumed 1% failure rate, if Seagate & WD sell 1000 while Hitachi sells 100.. it's obvious that you will get to here more about the 10 Seagates/WDs that failed.
 
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