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False Economy to Buy Cheap Hard Drives?

The 2 year warranty is a ploy to make the buyer feel secure and entice them into buying their product. Being a victim of many HDD failures, I have observed that most Mechanical HDDs usually start to fail after the 2 year warranty has passed. That's why most HDD companies like Seagate now have a 5 year warranty as standard.

As for your question: "will I be better to pay for a more expensive drive?", the answer is "yes".
 
Haemorrage said:
I have observed that most Mechanical HDDs usually start to fail after the 2 year warranty has passed.
Click to expand...

Wow... um... my experience would deem otherwise. I've never had a hard drive fail.

We bought an LC 575 in 1994. That hard drive is still fine. So is the hard drive in our iMac DV.

I even have a 5.25" HDD that still works...

Okay, I got a 1.5TB Seagate that I had to return because it wouldn't work before OR after the firmware update, but I've never had a drive FAIL. It was just defective from the start.
 
I've only had one HDD fail on me, ever (except for a couple old ones that were dropped). The oldest hard drive I own is over 25 years old and it still works!

I did have a 160GB Maxtor fail after about a month. Fortunately it was in my Windows box which I didn't use much.

But I would not be afraid to buy a "cheap" HDD. Hard drives are very reliable these days.
 
Formac is a good brand.

What you're buying is a regular internal hard drive (these are made by only 4 or 5 major manufacturers, all of them pretty good/reliable) plus an external case and electronics which in this case is made by Formac.

Internal 320G drives cost around £40 (including VAT) these days, so £62 seems to be about the right price. It's certainly not insanely cheap, and at £22 for the box you should be expecting a good quality product.
 
I've never had a hard drive fail, but I inevitably end up replacing them with higher capacity drives long before they'd likely fail... :rolleyes:
 
firestarter said:
Formac is a good brand.

What you're buying is a regular internal hard drive (these are made by only 4 or 5 major manufacturers, all of them pretty good/reliable) plus an external case and electronics which in this case is made by Formac.

Internal 320G drives cost around £40 (including VAT) these days, so £62 seems to be about the right price. It's certainly not insanely cheap, and at £22 for the box you should be expecting a good quality product.
Click to expand...

Exactly what he said.
Formac is a decent brand, the price is normal, with a few exceptions it's mainly the interface that makes an externeal HDD more or less pricey.

As for SSD drives, a 320GB one would be crazy expensive .
 
Considering that we don't know who made the drive mechanism itself in this particular enclosure (as is normally the case in other non-WD or Seagate externals) I really would not be concerned about buying them.

If one has a particular preference for the manufacturer of the hard drive mechanism itself they can pick a WD or Seagate external or build an external themselves with a particular mechanism as an alternative, but I would not be hesitant to use the ones linked.
 
hard drives are generally a commodity.

The real false economy is in buying a cheap enclosure. I have had tons of problems with cheap external cases that use garbage FW chips. Stick to an enclosure that has good reviews and you will have far fewer issues.
 
Tallest Skil said:
Wow... um... my experience would deem otherwise. I've never had a hard drive fail.

We bought an LC 575 in 1994. That hard drive is still fine. So is the hard drive in our iMac DV.

I even have a 5.25" HDD that still works...

Okay, I got a 1.5TB Seagate that I had to return because it wouldn't work before OR after the firmware update, but I've never had a drive FAIL. It was just defective from the start.
Click to expand...

I'm guessing the saying "they don't make them like they used to" does hold some truth to it. I'm also guessing that Apple always uses high quality parts in their machines because the hard drive failures I was talking about were in PC's. For some strange reason, the HDD's controller board would die on me :confused:
 
BryanHarig said:
hard drives are generally a commodity.

The real false economy is in buying a cheap enclosure. I have had tons of problems with cheap external cases that use garbage FW chips. Stick to an enclosure that has good reviews and you will have far fewer issues.
Click to expand...

Trouble is that some of the more expensive enclosures aren't necessarily that great either.*cough* LaCie
 
Haemorrage said:
Being a victim of many HDD failures, I have observed that most Mechanical HDDs usually start to fail after the 2 year warranty has passed. That's why most HDD companies like Seagate now have a 5 year warranty as standard.
Click to expand...

Actually, Segate has just trimmed down their warranty to 3 years, as the other manufacturers have a long time ago.

If you want quality drives, you should ask Apple to support SAS, which is downwards compatible with SATA.
 
Cheers for the replies.

I think I'm going to go with the Formac drives. £63 is a bargain, been doing some searching and they are roughly £80 everywhere else.

Well, from my experience they either fail in the first week or last for years. So the 2 year warranty should be sufficient. In any case, they are relatively inexpensive anyways.
 
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