

What is the most reliable Hard Drive Brand/Model - madmaze

I had some hard drive issues over the weekend and am in the market for a new drive for my server(24/7 use).<p>these are my current drives:<p>WD 250GB WD2000BB-00GUA0 @ 19700 hrs Still running<p>Seagate Barracuda 200GB ST3200822AS @ 3000 hr Still running<p>Seagate Barracuda 250GB ST3250623A @ 6200 hr works intermittenly/seek error/<p>Seagate Barracuda 250GB ST3250623A @ ~5400 hr dead as a door nail<p>Hitachi 2TB JK1101YBJESBXF  @ 100 hr brand new &#38; still working<p>--<p>What are your best and worst experiences with what hard drives?
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noonespecial
Each manufacturer seems to oscillate between building a very good drive and
then finding out how far they can cut corners before inadvertently releasing a
disastrous production run with huge quality issues. Seagate is the most recent
to bottom out with their 1-1.5 TB drives.

[http://www.tomshardware.com/news/seagate-7200.11-failing,684...](http://www.tomshardware.com/news/seagate-7200.11-failing,6844.html)

My advice, check Toms Hardware. They're usually on top of things.

A trick I've learned is to follow the big name server manufacturers. If IBM
puts a certain hitatchi model in eseries servers, its a good bet that this is
a decent drive. The downside is that these drives are going to be far behind
the curve as far as the latest-biggest capacity goes.

Never buy the latest, just released supercapacity drive at Best Buy. This is
how they work out the problems before selling them into the "serious" markets.

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madmaze
Thanks for the pointers,

Ive been looking into WD raptor drives, I dont really need much space. Itll
only be my root&home partition so a 150-300gb drive will do. Even though i
havnt had the best experiences with Seagate, i was also looking at the
Constellation ES drives, which seem to promise high reliability, but after
consulting newegg reviews i decided otherwise.

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jolan
Why not get an Intel SSD 160GB? The majority of my hard drives died due to
mechanical failure.

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madmaze
hmm those are ~425$, for that kind of money I could raid a bunch of regular
drives =/

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jolan
You said reliable; not cheap :) A SSD should outperform regular drives in RAID
anyway.

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madmaze
True, maybe i should have mentioned that im a average college student and
thats != $$$

