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[urgannagru]

It's been a while, so I figured it might be time for another poll / rant on Hard Drive brands. My newer Seagates have all been dying on me lately within a year at best, so I'm curious what other people's favorites are these days.

[wonko]

Well, I haven't purchased a new HD in about a year, but I'm still choosing/using the Hitachi deskstar 7200 rpm drives.  They have a whole line of "star" series drives that are supposed to be optimized for specific applications, but I don't have any experience with them.  I have one deskstar that I've had for almost 8 years and never had a problem.  I bought a seagate laptop drive a while back for an external enclosure I had, and with one hard bump it was toast.  I'm sticking with the Hitachi drives.

[blafrisch]

Made me think of my rant almost 6 years ago to which you replied first.  

I just go with whatever is cheapest.  My failure rates are by PC:

• Server - 0 out of 2 Samsung 160GBs; 0 out of 4 Maxtor 500GBs; 0 out of 4 Hitachi 1TBs
• Gaming PC - 0 out of 1 Hitachi 500GB
• HTPC1 - 0 out of 1 Western Digital 500GB
• HTPC2 - 0 out of 1 Samsung 160GB
• Laptop - 0 out of 1 Toshiba 60GB
• Current Carputer - 0 out of 1 Seagate 160GB; 0 out of 1 OCZ 60GB SSD
• Old Carputer - 0 out of 1 Seagate 120GB
• External - 0 out of 1 Western Digital 320GB
• Spare Drive - 0 out of 1 Maxtor 80GB

All older ones that I've had I just gave to other people, I've never had one die.  I have too many computers and hard drives.  

[Glitch]

I'm running two Seagate drives in my main machine and another in my htpc. They are not new about 3yrs and have been fine, never hard any issues. Also have an 8 year old Western Digital 20GB which make a horrible clicking sound in an external enclosure and has been working all these years. Had a Hitachi drive once, very good drive.

On the other hand every Maxtor I have had has died miserably. I installed a new 80GB, loaded the OS and afterwards for cable management decided to switch it to a different bay. Upon restart to my surprise the drive was never detected by the board or any board/cable config I tried. Box to dead in 60mins. Haven't touched Maxtor since 2003

[GideonX]

In recent months, all I have been running are Samsung F series. Very fast and reliable thus far.

[urgannagru]

I just realized there might be a better way to think about this question. What is the best way to increase HDD reliability?

How much would it help if I started going with SSDs? Am I better off spending the extra money to get server grade HDDs rather than consumer SSDs?

[blafrisch]

What is the target application?  The only thing I'd say is to reduce heat since I don't know exactly what you are doing.  Less heat = longer lifespan.

[urgannagru]

Target application is my general every day computer. Work, games, always on, always crunching away on something. The drives aren't warm to the touch, do I need to cool them further?

At any rate, I decided to go SSD for my OS disk, games, and apps. For everything else I will use a couple of old 500GB drives and mirror via a backup scheduler. I will miss RAID, but I will survive and it won't cost me much.

[urgannagru]

I just wanted to say that I am loving my SSD so far. After researching, I bought a Mushkin 60GB Callisto Deluxe. It is undoubtedly faster. Here's hoping that its more reliable too.