I’ve always gone with something like a general-purpose 7200 rpm HD from Western Digital-- there’s one from the Black line at Newegg that’s fairly well-reviewed, although it’s a bit on the spendy side: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822236624
Any particular brands/models to stay away from?
Anecdotally, I’ve had really bad luck with the cheap seagate drives lately. I switched back to western digital at a substantial price premium, and no problems since. But really that’s probably just poor luck on my part.
It’s cyclical, but the guys at the cloud storage firm Backblaze had a blog post on this earlier this year.
Basically, stay away from Seagate right now. Yikes.
It’s cyclical, but the guys at the cloud storage firm Backblaze had a blog post on this earlier this year.
Basically, stay away from Seagate right now. Yikes.
Huh. I guess my personal experience does extend to the entire world. Neat!
Stay away from kiwis, your throat will seize up. The fruit, not people from new zealand.
Go watch passenger 47 again.
John Cutter: Charlie, ever played roulette?
Charles Rane: On occasion.
John Cutter: Well, let me give you a word of advice. Always bet on black!
In my experience blacks are simply much more reliable than greens and any other brand i’ve tried. Not to mention the speed. The reliability and warranty are the things that matter to me the most. Even if i can recover the data, it is simply a huge frustration and a lot of wasted time if one of my hdds dies. I’d rather pay a bit more to worry about that a little less.
If i’m buying a hdd and not putting it in a raid, it is ALWAYS going to be a black.
Disclaimer: I just bought my first reds (for a raid i’m putting together) but it doesnt sound like you want a raid so they shouldn’t apply anyway.
The real kicker is that Seagate bought out Samsung’s hard disk business a few years ago. I liked Samsung hard disks :/
Hitachi…is gone, sadly, split up. WD’s are plain expensive here. I guess I’ll be investigating Toshiba next time I want to buy.
(I’m very happy with my HD204UI Samsung’s, but they’re a pre-acquisition design)
Be careful with Toshiba HDs, we ordered a few batches of those in the last half a year and had quite a few faulty ones. It came to about 10-20 percent.
I’ve been buying the various versions of the WD Black for years. Have a 2TB version in use and am feeling it’s as solid as ever.
RickH
10
Yeah, I’m seeing Seagate drives fail pretty consistently in my systems. Might as well go with WD.
Isn’t that interesting. I really thought I was an outlier on the Seagate thing.
I got that exact drive late last year as my gaming hard drive and it’s been running great.
Thanks for all the replies. I just ordered the WD Black drive I linked to above. As it turns out they had a promo going so it came to about 125. I’ve had awesome luck with WD drives in recent years–I have one 500GB in my system (the one I want to replace) that probably started its life two computers ago, so at least 5 years, with nary a hiccup.
On the one hand, every drive I’ve had problems with except maybe one were Seagate drives. On the other hand, pretty nearly all my drives have been Seagate. And the ones I haven’t swapped out for more capacity have lasted 3+ years on average under fairly heavy usage.
DoA? That’s not so bad, it’s when they die 6 months in…
Lamalo
16
That happened as well. The smarter clients had backups. The dumber clients didn’t.
Bah then. I guess I hope that by the time I need new hard disks the market will have changed. Fortunately it’ll be a while ^^ (1.1TB free, on mirrored hard disks)
(Bleeding Seagate buys the hard disk businesses I like…Maxtor, Samsung…)
Editer
18
A couple of years ago, I had 6 Seagate 1TB or 1.5TB drives fail. The originals, and the replacements under warranty. The replacement-replacements are still working, but I didn’t install them in systems – I just use them as rotating “backup cartridges” in an external USB dock, so they run about 60 hours a year. Not trusting Seagate for day-to-day data until I hear a lot of good things about quality improvements.
My WD and pre-merger Hitachi and Samsung drives have been rock solid in the system that the Seagates died in.
I put a 4TB Seagate drive into my new system last year and this thread made me go check and…the ‘uncorrectable’ count is non-zero. Dangit. It’s only 64 sectors with no sign of it increasing yet, so maybe it’s still well within tolerances, but now I’m going to be paranoid about it…
As long as SMART says it’s OK, it’s OK. The instant I get a SMART error I replace the drive.
