Advice on hard drives?

[dr4b]

Hey, does anyone know about hard drives? That is, do you all know more than I do about hard drives? It can't be hard to, since I know very little.

Since I'm so deadly paranoid about my hard drive since the last time it blew up and Roman saved the day for me, I decided to go get a new hard drive before my current one dies. (I don't actually think my current one is anywhere near dying, and I was actually thinking I might use it as a backup now that I have a new one.)

My old one's a Maxtor 40GB drive. My new one's a Seagate 80GB drive, 7200 RPM ATA/IDE blah blah blah. But I honestly can't remember what I've heard about Seagate. So can one of you hard drive gurus enlighten me? Am I doomed? Should I go exchange it before it blows up my system?

Comments

[thatenglishguy.livejournal.com]

Seagate drives are OK, if it's new you should have any problems, it probably one has a one year warranty, but that's unfortunately becoming the standard. My current preference is Western Digital drives due to their performance and the tendency for them to have large rebates at retail. IBM/Hitachi are also very good, they've had problems in the past, but all seems good again now. Maxtor drives are generally cheaper than the rest and I'm told there's a reason for that, I wouldn't buy one. I've had a Seagate drive in the past and it was fine. I think now they have some of the quietest drives and appear to be well respected. StorageReview.com (http://www.storagereview.com/articles/200306/20030615ST3160023A_1.html) believes the current models to be a "safe buy".

[rmitz.livejournal.com]

Whereas I use almost exclusively maxtor drives, and am biased against WD. :)

Basically, all the drives are pretty good these days, except for the occasional bad batch.

[kieferskunk.livejournal.com]

I ran into one bad batch of WD SATA 10000-RPM drives recently - got two in a row that started grinding their bearings within the first 10 days. Not a very loud sound, but still a really ugly one.

But bad batches will happen to anyone. I think IBM has had the worst luck in recent years - they're reputed to have an entire line with low reliability, but I think that time has passed as well. Hard to say.

[somnium-.livejournal.com]

Over the years I have seen many hard drives from all major manufacturers die, though the problem seems to have gotten worse in the last 5 years. I don't think you can trust a brand anymore. Some are better than others but all have had a least one or two lemon product lines. My personal advice is to research specific drives online and see if people complain about their reliability. It's the only thing that's worked for me.

[shandrew.livejournal.com]

I agree completely. I've had more hard drives fail (most recently, a Seagate 80 GB and a Toshiba portable 20 GB) in the past couple years than in my entire life. Luckily, they are cheap. Do nightly backups, and don't worry so much about your data. A really good program for handling simple backups on unix systems is "rdiff-backup".

If you are using a desktop system, i suggest getting a hardware RAID card and a matching drive so you can mirror the drive you have.

[bzarcher.livejournal.com]

We've had decent luck with Seagate at my shop, but oddly enough, mostly as replacement drives in Mac towers. I don't really recall using them in PCs at all. However, those Macs have worked well, so I think you'll be OK. I'm iffy on Maxtor because their lack of support after warranty is pretty blah, but I have seen them perform at times. The only HDD manufacturer I really dislike is Quantum, and I'm not totally sure they're in full business anymore.

[meerkat299.livejournal.com]

Maxtor ended up buying Quantum around 2 years back and they merged their product lines.

[bzarcher.livejournal.com]

Well, that explains my distrust pretty well, then.

[bk1e.livejournal.com]

Even the brands that don't suck fail sometimes. Meaning that they all suck. If you don't want to lose your data, you need to keep it on multiple hard drives or back it up on some other media (like CD-R or DVD-R).

^^ good advice

[aquatwo.livejournal.com]

i second this, heartily. pick up a copy of ghost if you're a win user. download a freebie equiv if you're running *nix at home. backup your system load to removable media and reload regularly. archive your data files on a schedule to removable media. DVD-rs are cheap nowadays, <$150 for good ones. media is <$1.50/4.7gb disc. feel free to splurge for a rw if ya want, use thatf or your ghosts/images and use cheapo DVD-rs and CD-rs for data files.

drives going bad should only impact $$ and whatever you hadn't backed up that day/week (whatever your archive frequency is), nothing more.

discipline = t3h win! ^_^

Re: ^^ good advice

[luminifer.livejournal.com]

what's the long-term reliability prediction on dvdr's these days?

Re: ^^ good advice

[aquatwo.livejournal.com]

i'm not sure. long enough for me though...

[rkane.livejournal.com]

I've had both IBM/Hitachi and Maxtor drives die, but I tend to think I'm cursed in such matters. I've generally heard good things about Seagates, but I'd just make sure that whichever brand you get has a 3 year warranty...that's usually a good indicator that the drives are of better quality, in my book.

Anyhow, make sure that you back up (onto a non-HD media) anything that's actually important to you. It's not at all reassuring to hear that "Brand X rarely dies" when yours has and you've lost everything on it. Back it up now.

[sorakirei.livejournal.com]

I'm hoping to invest in a hard drive array sometime in the next year or so. An array can be set up such that if one or two hard drives die, no data is lost.