Best harddrive brand to buy?

[dlh75]

Hello need to buy a new harddrive soon. Was wondering who makes better quality HD's. I have a WD that is crapping out on me ( less than 4 years old, Common? ) and wanted to get a different brand. I have heard Maxtor is better. How long do they usually last under normal conditions? Would investing in a HD cooler fan be a good investment or a waste of $ ?
Any thoughts would be helpful.
DLH

[yorky]

hi there
I think WD is one of the best brands though I haven't tested it (i know because my friends say so and other people do)
I myself have an 80Gb Seagate! It is rather good. I would say BEST... but this brand has one disadvantage - the dive is too hot!
In summer I've got 50C... Maybe HD cooler fan could help!...
As for Maxtor, in Ukraine where I am from (near Russia :-), it is the cheapest hdd. Make conclusions yourself...

[[Neo770]]

IMO there all good. Everyone will have problems with some brand. Just get whatever drive has the features you want for the price you like.

[Optimus Prime]

I use maxtor, because it is cheap, much like AMD, but it does not run hot, only warm.

[Jeordiewhite]

One advantage I like about maxtor is that they actually changed over to the Fluid Bearing Design from the spindle drive motors with the ball bearing mechanism now to "liquid bearings". It is surely a promising feature to look foreword to in the future. Many faults in a hard drive usually has something to do with ball bearings; problems such as the bearings not being perfectly round, or eventually wearing out over time. However all drives will wear out as they have moving parts, however these will have a longer life span, which will certainly be good for full time servers and etc.

With the FBD, you should see in the future, faster drives as 7200 rpm is peaked with the ball bearing design. Like the new 10,000 rpm drives, however they are still needing quite a bit of developement since they only are available at 36.7GB because of design issues.

While this may not be as important for most home users who run their HDD's occaisonally, but it's still something to look for when purchasing a new HDD. However taking this into consideration, the drive may become obsolete before it wears out. Like how quickly hard drive space is really growing, but maybe considering a Serial ata HDD maybe a good idea as soon Parallel ATA will soon be phased out.

I've always noticed WD drives here being cheaper and maxtor's being the costly drive.

Hard drive coolers are a good idea, not always needed, but I have two case fans placed in the front of my computer, they work wonders for cooling. Hard drive coolers do tend to take a lot of space and seem like a good idea for a SCSI system, however if you are unable to fit any case fans blowing onto the HDD's directly, then do consider an HDD fan if you have the room for it.

[Droppyale]

Maxtor vote here.....

[Martoch]

Whatever you do, say NO to IBM!


Maxtor, WD, Seagate...they're all good brands.

[Jeordiewhite]

I agree with you there completely, IBM is the worst, I've got too many drives from them, two crashed recently

Maxtor, WD, Seagate are generally all very good.

Has anyone heard from seagate if they are using FBD drives? I can't find any info at their site about it and I know WD hasn't either.

[sfw1960]

Maxtor had the highest RMA rate of all the drives I've owned -- I have probably sent in excess of 12 drives back in the past 5-6 years.

WD .
SFW

[Jeordiewhite]

IBM wasn't any better, they undergone a class action suit against them for two bad models.
However one thing about the IBM's is that all models will eventually have data corruption on the drive making it seem like the drive died and will cause it to become erradic and even show strange ACSII characters in the post.
To fix this you must wipe your drive with a low level format using IBM's DFT thus wiping out any data retrieval
I'm slowly switching from IBM tho.

I'm still quite curious if seagate uses FBD now because i'll be considering new drives soon.