What is the best hard drive brand?

  • Thread starter Thread starter thebigcheese
  • Start date Start date

Best hard drive brand?

  • LaCie

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • G-Tech

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • G-Drive

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • Maxtor

    Votes: 1 2.9%

  • Seagate

    Votes: 13 37.1%

  • Western Digital

    Votes: 15 42.9%

  • other

    Votes: 6 17.1%
  • Total voters
    35
thebigcheese

thebigcheese

"Hi, I'm in Delaware."
I have a Maxtor OneTouch III. I got it because it had the right chipset thingy for Pro Tools, but now I don't use Pro Tools and the hard drive is making some nasty noises when it starts spinning. I don't know if it's still under warranty, but I've only had it a little more than a year and I haven't been very pleased with it. What do you all think is the best brand for audio recording?

EDIT: Ah crap, I new I would get it wrong. Pretend that "G-Drive" actually means "Glyph."
 
i have 2 Western Digital drives and one Seagate. both brands have been great for me. pretty quiet, smooth. never encountered any probs recording 8 inputs at once to the Seagate or WD.
 
I have found Seagate to be the best for me, never had a failure and I have some very old one around the place.

Cheers

Alan.
 
I go through about 30 hard drives a year and have for at least the last 5 or so years. I personally prefer the Seagates, but western digital is certainly a close second in my mind. Of all of my drives, I have not lost a more than one or two Seagate or Western Digital drives to things that were not attributed to user error. However, I have had MANY Maxtor drives go down on me unexpectedly. I will not ever buy another Maxtor drive unless somehow they make some big changes and even then, it would probably be a year or two of great reviews before I would even consider buying one. As far as external drives go, I love my Lacie drives. They have good solid casings, lots of features, and are fairly priced. I just can't see paying quadruple for a Glyph that does not seem to offer better performance, just some cool auxilliary features.
 
Excellent post, xstatic. Green-bar points for you. Although... the numbers don't quite add up unless you have a collection of 140 Seagate or WD drives running, or for some reason, inexplicably bought 140 failing maxtor drives, :D I still agree with what you're saying, in general, although I haven't noticed Maxtor to be particularly bad, or Seagate or WD to be particularly good.

A similar perspective: I've had numerous WD, Seagates, Maxtors, Samsungs and Hitachis. The only majorly manufactured PATA or SATA hard-drive I've never owned several of is Fujitsu. ALL hard drives die eventually. It totally sucks ass if you don't have backups, there's often no warning, there's no single manufacturer who stands above the rest in defying the nature of hard drives, and the whole world has been waiting, for many years, on a major technology shift away from insanely fast-rotating, mechanical precision-critical, magnetic hard drives that fucking destroy themselves. :mad::mad::mad:

This is the livid voice of entirely too many all-nighter data-rescue/recovery expeditions speaking, if it's not obvious... The only thing you can do to prevent the suck-fest is religiously backup your data, or RAID-1 the drives with your work on them.

A few notes on external drives, which I think you are actually asking about:
- In theory, an external drive with a quality power supply and a proper cooling solution is a fantastically convenient device. In practice, I have yet to see it implemented. Despite marketing claims to the contrary, they all SUCK. I've had several external enclosures, (Adaptec, Vantec, Rosewill, Maxtor, WD, PowMax...just off the top of my head) and they have all either died, or just been completely unusable from the start. Their mortality rate has been literally about 100 times faster than if you just stuck the same drive inside the computer. This is presumably because the cheap power supply components, which are largely identical - even across different brands - that they use put even more strain on the already-fragile drive by under-powering it, and the lack of proper cooling just fries the things. I'm buying ten when somebody makes one that's not a piece of shit (pardon my language, if that offends).

On the other hand, if you hardly ever use your external drive (like just for making backups once a week or something like that), it would likely last for many, many years...regardless of the name painted on the outside of the case, unless the name is PowMax, that one was particularly nasty, in that it drew so much USB current from my laptop, even when using it's included power adapter, that my USB mouse would stop working when it was plugged in...ridiculous.

Just for the record, the longest-living drive I've ever owned that has been used extensivelyis the Hitachi in my laptop, which is coming up on it's 5th birthday. I fully expect it to have a total meltdown any day. The most I've gotten out of an external was a WD MyBook, which lasted a little over 10 months (It actually died yesterday, and is likely the source of my apparent hatred of all hard drives, hahahahah...).

P.S. Seagate and Maxtor have been the same company for years, not sure if they actually have different factories, but I seriously doubt it because of the economic impact of maintaining two facilities vs one. Also, I'm pretty certain that the first 3 options in your poll aren't even hard drive manufacturers, dude. As far as I can tell, they're just "companies" who put WD, Seagate/Maxtor, Samsung or Hitachi drives in the previously-mentioned, likely pre-fabricated, death-traps-for-hard-drives cases. You could do the same thing and sell your "unique product" for the same, enormous markup that they do with no training, experience or special tools necessary.

I'm not exaggerating the situation there. Evidence:
$50 drive
PLUS
$14 generic case
PLUS
About 90 seconds of installation time
PLUS
some clever marketing BS about how you're the best putter togetherer of external drives
PLUS
A sticker with your name on it
EQUALS
Insane profits for...nothing!

Quite a profitable sucker/vulture-business, huh?

edit: My next experiment will be a LaCie, on xstatic's endorsement. I'll cross my fingers and hope for the best. :D @xstatic: Do they actually manufacture their own drives?
 
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The reason I go through so many drives is because I hardly ever delete anything. I have lots of projects and I save all takes, good or bad so hard drives fill quickly. Rather then deleting, I just add another drive, and remove one from the system. Therefore, I have a shelf and a drawer full of drives;) My experience so far has been that I have had maybe 15 drives in 10 years go bad. These are not power supply issues or anything, just hard constant use and abuse. I usually have 5 drives + 1 external drive running in my system at once. Of the 15 failures, only 1 has been seagate, 2 have been western digital, and ALL the rest were maxtor drives.

As for Lacie, I have a firewire external Lacie drive that I have been using for about 6 years or so now and that includes tossing it in and out of vehicles and backpacks etc.... and it still works perfectly. The Lacie stuff I have been using now is the Quadra series stuff. They have good heavy casings that seem to protect things well, run quiet, and still look good. What I love the most is that they come with LOTS of connection possibilities. The one I have next to me right now is a 500 gig D2 HD Quadraexternal drive with a 16mb cache and runs at 7200 RPM. It has connectors for eSATA, USB2, Firewire 800 (x2) and Firewire 400 and I think it sells for less than $100 now. 2 years ago I paid $175 I think for it.
 
Ahhh, I see now. I'm pretty religious about burning finished, paid-in-full projects to DVD (used to be CD), and deleting the files from my drives, so I have a few books full of disks, and my drives see a TON of reads and writes. This accounts for our differing experiences, no doubt.

I would venture to guess I have had somewhere around 30 drives die (in various machines in various locations, also over about 10 years). Anything I ever put in, or that came in, an external case dies FAST, despite rarely, and in some cases never, being moved around, and anything that actually lives inside a PC dies eventually. Again, though... I don't know the exact numbers, but I've never been struck by a "Wow, this manufacturer really sucks" epiphany....it's been pretty even across the board. I'll order a LaCie right after Christmas, and see how that goes. I was actually trying to ask if you know if they manufacturer the drives that are housed inside their cases, though... I'll google it. :D
 
You might be right about G-Tech and LaCie just putting other drives in cases, but I think that they still stand on their own as brands. I've heard a lot of good things about LaCie, so even if they use another brand's drives, they must be doing something right.

Also, I was more interested in external drives, but if you've had a better experience putting an internal in a case, feel free to bring that up. Also also, I think some external drives might work better on one OS or the other. For instance, my MBP can't seem to ever bring my Maxtor out of sleep, so I always have to tell it to never put hard drives to sleep. Maybe that's just a Mac thing, but maybe it's also a Maxtor thing. So maybe you could also mention how that's worked out for you on whatever OS you're using?
 
Lol. I've pretty much cooled off now. The failure yesterday was just seriously bad timing requiring an all-night rescue mission to get through today. Sorry for venting in your thread :o...although it was quite relevant :D. I wouldn't say it quite as vehemently now, but I still stand by what I said, except for maybe the over-simplification of all external HDD companies at the end of the post.

In cases of waking the drives up when I've been away for a while, it's happened here and there on both Windows and Linux, but I can't think of it ever happening when using my drives on other people's macs. However, that is an extremely rare occasion, so not really a fair comparison.

Generally speaking: Loudly cursing whatever drive was acting up, and some combination of powering on/off the drive and re-plugging the USB/FW/ESATA cable always resolves the issue (the cursing part being most important, of course).:D
 
I've traditionally been a Maxtor fan, though I hear they have high failure rates (one of mine went down, but I managed to save most everything on there).

As far as I can tell, Seagate bought Maxtor and they don't make Maxtors anymore. Seagates are freaking awesome!

As far as WD goes, they've been big for years, but they had pretty big problems in the late 90s with their quality control, which made me steer far away from them, even after this was supposedly fixed. Even now, I still have that preconceived notion that WD's are bad drives in the back of my mind, and I will probably never buy one.
 
I have a couple of WD drives. One is really quiet and one is a steamer.

But I will say the one that cost $200 is the quiet one even though its supposed to be the same as the cheap one(under $100).
 
I've had the Maxtor one touch die WITHOUT warning. Never with the Seagates.

I've read A LOT, and most people echo the above comments in reviews
 
WD or Seagate is my preference. The only HD I have had take a dump with my information, and on two occasions, is the Maxtor. I am still using it though for a few things, but won't buy another.
 
Seafroggys said:
...they don't make Maxtors anymore.
Click to expand...

Whoah... I hadn't even noticed this until now, but you're right! Maxtor drives have been discontinued, except for those external ones, which are almost guaranteed to be Seagate drives inside of cases that say Maxtor on the outside.

Somebody who has a Maxtor external drive: Open it up (you won't hurt it, I promise, as long as you use a screw-driver and not a crowbar to open it with, lol) and see if it's a normal Seagate on the inside, please :) Let's get to the bottom of this once and for all.

edit: Actually, on second thought, even if the drive inside says Maxtor on it, this still doesn't rule out the likelihood that they just slapped a different sticker on the drive at the factory, so this might not be as beneficial as I initially thought...unless, of course, the drive inside does say Seagate on it.

edit#2: A quick google search for Maxtor "rebranded Seagate" reveals reports like this: http://www.fatwallet.com/forums/hot-deals/693304/m10006902/#m10006902
with Maxtors popping up with their Seagate Barracuda model numbers still intact. So... while not authoritative, I believe further research would be a waste of time and only confirm that Maxtor is extinct, (which will apparently bring a resounding "good riddance", lol) and all the current "Maxtor" drives are, literally, Seagates with different stickers slapped on the outside. As I mentioned in my first post, this only makes sense, because it would be financially beneficial to condense operations down to a single facility.
 
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Seagate used to be my favorite. Then I had three of them go south this year in the course of a couple of weeks.... Then, a few months later, I lost my Time Machine backup drive, which upon ripping open the cheap USB case, I found to be a Western Digital. Fortunately, the company didn't buy a WD OEM drive. It was a WD retail drive with a three year warranty. So now I have a spare 250 GB drive lying around waiting for its chance to replace the next dead drive. :)

At this point, I've concluded that all hard drives suck, and that the only good hard drives are the ones that are backed up fully on at least one other drive (and, ideally, two).

Just to put those numbers into perspective, four drive failures means that with the exception of the two new backup drives I bought after the WD time machine backup drive died a couple of months ago, 100% of all of the drives I have purchased in the last two years have failed already... under fairly light use. There's a horrifying stat for you.... Suck is probably too mild a term. I would trust Michael Jackson, Mary Kay Letourneau, and Roman Polanski locked alone in a bedroom with my kids before I'd trust ANY hard drive with the sole copy of important data. (No, I don't have kids yet, but... you get the picture.) Yeah, they're really that bad.

I also periodically have had drives by Toshiba die. I've never lost a Fujitsu, but they only build laptop drives and are pretty rare, so I can't say with certainty if I've ever even owned a Fujitsu. Maxtor is now Seagate, so that's moot. I think that covers all the HD manufacturers in the world, flash devices notwithstanding.
 
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Are SSDs immune to these sorts of failures? Or are they just prone to other sorts of failures?
 
I use Seagate and Western Digital inside my machine. But I use a Glyph as an external drive which I record to plus it actually holds all my other data. I back up the contents of that to two external drives.

I've never had a hard drive crash on me. I did have a brand new Western Digital do some strange things right after I installed it. I removed it immediately and was not about to take a chance on it.
 
thebigcheese said:
Are SSDs immune to these sorts of failures? Or are they just prone to other sorts of failures?
Click to expand...

Too soon to tell. Eventually, you'll start to run up against the write count limits of the flash parts. Up until that point, it's anybody's guess how reliable they will be. I would expect them to be much more reliable because there are no moving parts. Again, though, there isn't enough data on them yet to draw any real conclusions, IMHO.
 
dgatwood said:
At this point, I've concluded that all hard drives suck, and that the only good hard drives are the ones that are backed up fully on at least one other drive (and, ideally, two).
Click to expand...

I was starting to think I was all alone in this opinion. It's just unavoidable: They all die eventually. I can't say it enough. Losing your data is terrible. There was a time, long ago, that I had never lost a hard drive... That first time was quite the bitch-slap of a wake-up call. :D

This rep thing never lets me add to your rep (must spread some around), but I'm not sure there was ever even an initial time I pos-repped you that it worked. Is this rep-system buggy?
 
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