Most Reliable Notebook Hard Disk Manufacturer

[INTJ]

Hi,

Going to stick a 160 GB hard drive into my laptop.

Looking for input as to the most reliable manufacturer.

It boils down to :-

1) Seagate

2) Samsung

3) Hitachi

4) Western Digital

Any experiences re. failures, problems with any of the above manufacturers most appreciated.

Cheers.

.

[Guest Reimar]

I would take a Hitachi/IBM (both same production) because there faster than Seagate or Samsung and WD is out of any questions for me because of bad experiences!

[calibanjr.]

WD (the ones available here) are usually manufactured in Thailand, make of that what you will.

Edited August 7, 2007 by calibanjr.

[INTJ]

IBM/Hitachi and Seagate drives are also manufactured here.

But I have heard bad things about Western from other people.

Cheers

[think_too_mut]

High end disks (4,000US$ 146GB Fiber disks): nothing better than Hitachi. Has no ball bearings, all liquid.

Seagate did the same 2 years later.

Low end: Hitachi again - HDD based iPods all have Hitachi.

For notebook disk price, I don't know how much they differ but WD is out of question.

Friend's Apple macbook pro has Fujitsu disk.

Edited August 7, 2007 by think_too_mut

[Guest Reimar]

IBM/Hitachi and Seagate drives are also manufactured here.

But I have heard bad things about Western from other people.

Cheers

Hitachi HD manufactured in the former IBM Plant in Prachin Buri's 304 Industrial Park, Hitachi bought the Plant from IBM a few years ago.

Anyway Hitachi the most relaible HDD's!

[Firefoxx]

There will be no consensus on this, as all models and all brands have failed for some person at one time or another. The only time there was any real tie-in between brands and failures was during the era when IBM was making their Desktars (which users dubbed Deathstars), and which failed quite often. Right now it's just luck of the draw. Buy whatever model fits your needs.

[Guest Reimar]

There will be no consensus on this, as all models and all brands have failed for some person at one time or another. The only time there was any real tie-in between brands and failures was during the era when IBM was making their Desktars (which users dubbed Deathstars), and which failed quite often. Right now it's just luck of the draw. Buy whatever model fits your needs.

Funnywise the "Deathstar" you talking about wasn't make in Thailand was from Phillipines and Malaysia! I had thre of them but not one from Thailand and that 3 was 3.5" not 2.5"! In the meantime the Phillipines and Malaysia is closed down completly app. 2 years!

[nikster]

I remember Google once did a real study on this some time ago and found that all manufacturers had reliable batches and unreliable ones. There was no statistically significant difference between the manufacturers. Because specific HD models are out only for a very short time - before getting replaced by newer models - it doesn't mean much.

Why did Google do this? Well they have thousands of cheapo linux boxen running their site so finding a reliable HD would immediately translate into cold, hard cash for them.

ps: Glad everyone likes Hitachi here, I just put one in my MacBook Pro... so far it, umm, works.

Edited August 7, 2007 by nikster

[Richard-BKK]

The most reliable notebook hard disk manufacturer is TOSHIBA, Toshiba is by far most experienced and has the longest history of making notebook hard drives.

http://www.toshibastorage.com/

[Guest Reimar]

have 17 brocken or whatever Toshiba HDD 2.5 inches in old stock and just waiting to write off!! Thas for the best on! the next are WD HDD's, thats 9 and Seagate 4!!

[Richard-BKK]

He Reimar,

Your broken hard drive stock is compatible with the availability of the brand names Toshiba makes 2.5 hard drive as long as I can remember, and for a few years Western Digital started to make them also and as last you have Seagate who re-started to make 2.5"hard disk not so long ago.

Anyway, this discussion will never stop...everybody seems to have other experience with other brand names, personal I use for the "larger" hard drives Seagate (my experience with the Seagate distributors in Thailand is perfect, bring Panthip, wait 10 minutes and get a new one) I use Western Digital hard drives on less important systems as they seem to offer a bit more performance for the price. This are all 3.5" hard drives.

For as long as I can remember I had only one 2.5" hard drive to fail on me, which was a 3.2GB IBM and was about 6 to 7 years ago.

My priorities for hard drives are maybe different then they are for others, I not care that much if a hard disk fails. I have always backups, but what I cannot accept is waiting for them to replace a hard drive. I have very bad experience with WD raptor drives which needed to be replaced after 14 days, but they "run-out-of-stock", the WD Raptor is maybe the fastest hard drive around but with waiting for the drive to be replaced I lost more then 4 times the cost of buying a new one.....(Of course I bought a new one, probably parallel import as many shops had them on stock).

Everything with a hard disk is about priorities, and in short when need fast you get less service, you need service you get less speed.....(Think it has little to do with the brand of the manufacturer)

[Firefoxx]

As can be seen, people have different experiences with different brands. No brand is perfect. For Seagate drives, my experience with their main Thai distributor used to be pretty good. Bring the defective drive to the distributor, have them check it while waiting, and then it's replaced with a new drive and a new warranty. However, last year it was not so. I brought the drive to the distributor, and they said I had to wait at least one day. This wasn't very good, since getting to their location wasn't easy, but what the heck. I went the next day to pick up the drive. Instead of a new drive, they gave me a different refurbished (as in repaired) drive that looked fairly worn (much more so than the one I sent in), and the warranty period remained the same (no extension). I used it for a few months, and the drive died, right out of warranty. Maxtor's distributor, IMHO, had a better warranty policy, and they even allowed for drive upgrades (pay the difference, get a bigger drive). Too bad they got bought out by Seagate.

As for Toshiba notebook drives, I have in my possession 3 recently (in the past couple years) dead Toshiba 2.5" drives.

[Guest Reimar]

As can be seen, people have different experiences with different brands. No brand is perfect. For Seagate drives, my experience with their main Thai distributor used to be pretty good. Bring the defective drive to the distributor, have them check it while waiting, and then it's replaced with a new drive and a new warranty. However, last year it was not so. I brought the drive to the distributor, and they said I had to wait at least one day. This wasn't very good, since getting to their location wasn't easy, but what the heck. I went the next day to pick up the drive. Instead of a new drive, they gave me a different refurbished (as in repaired) drive that looked fairly worn (much more so than the one I sent in), and the warranty period remained the same (no extension). I used it for a few months, and the drive died, right out of warranty. Maxtor's distributor, IMHO, had a better warranty policy, and they even allowed for drive upgrades (pay the difference, get a bigger drive). Too bad they got bought out by Seagate.

As for Toshiba notebook drives, I have in my possession 3 recently (in the past couple years) dead Toshiba 2.5" drives.

May you never had SCSI HD from Seagate.

For example: the 146 GB SCSI III 320 cost as little as 26,000.00 and from 8 HDD's 5 was going bad within 6 m,onth. To replace them via DCom with Company repaired one, that's the one with green border on the Hd Lable, was need as little as 6 week's!

So, how to "play" with thios one?

SCSI Hdd from IBM was need 3 days for replacement!

Ok you're right: No Brand is perfect! How that can be if the humans who designing the drives are imperfect?!

[Richard-BKK]

With SATA and SATA-II I totally give up on SCSI drives, and yes I belief that I know which SCSI 146GB you mean. We needed to turn the airconditioner in our office a bit higher to work with an external RAID case (5x Seagate Cheetah ST3146754 = 735GB total) this drives got so hot that it was possible to burn your fingers on the external aluminum RAID case.

I belief in the time that we used this drives, we replaced 2 of them. With 15,000 RPM this 146GB SCSI hard drives where the fastest things available. Today we switched to Seagate ST-3320620AS (320GB 16MB cache SATA-II) and we use them as 2 per RAID with enough money to spare for a few backup drives.

[nikster]

Reliability Survey of a large Russian shop in the year 2005 - they don't seem to have more recent data. Nevertheless, interesting: http://pro.sunrise.ru/articletext.asp?reg=30&id=283

The % are failure rates of components.

Notebook drives are here: http://pro.sunrise.ru/docs/30/image002.gif

3.5" hard drives are here: http://pro.sunrise.ru/docs/30/image001.gif

Google article doesn't name brands but says that all manufacturers have good years and bad years (warning: this is a real scientific article, e.g. rather dry and detailed): http://209.85.163.132/papers/disk_failures.pdf

Edited August 8, 2007 by nikster

[Firefoxx]

And again these articles only prove that there is no real correlation between brands and reliability (or anything, actually). You might be able to say something meaningful about a certain run of a certain model, but to actually give a blanket statement about any one brand (something which people just love to do, and love to ask for) will pretty much always prove to be wrong. No brand stays static, and no brand is consistent with regard to all its products. Something that someone says they have had excellent experience with may prove to be a nightmare for you, and vice versa. Keep asking, and you'll inevitably find people with good and bad things to say about every single product and every single manufacturer. These days, if a manufacturer in indeed *really* horrible in manufacturing its products, it's made very public very quickly.

Brands are there for recognition, and the fact that people *think* that any one brand can be as good as to make great products all the time is proof that marketing and advertising do their job very well.