Hard Drive Recommendations

[phrehdd]

As someone else put it - pretty much everyone has a favourite maker and also makers they think are terrible. I have good and bad luck with virtually all the main makers and it depended more on the specific model of drive. That being said, if money was not an object (and as someone else recommended) go for enterprise drives which cost more, have longer warranties and tend to be made with tighter specs.

On a side note, a less popular drive made years ago by Samsung turned out to be the best drives I have ever owned in the sATA lines. In fact, I still have 5 running in a NAS with zero problems and at 5400 rpm they are performing better than the WD Red drives that I have in another NAS with similar power and number of drives. I was admittedly surprised that they performed better, were cooler while running and quieter. Bottom line is that you still need to do your homework on reviews and also learn to read and filter real user reviews for real information on performance and issues.

Years ago I had an early Mac Pro and used Seagate 1.5 tb drives in OSX based RAID with no problems. They ran for about 2 years before I sold the system. Again, might be good luck on my part or the drives simply performed as specified by the maker and backed by some reviews.

In short - take a look at enterprise drives and for cheaper drives, to to various sights and read the reviews by both pros and typical users to get an idea of what might be an ideal fit for your needs.

 

[designs216]

Forgot about Hitachi. They have a "Deskstar" model, right? I recall something about those being great drives (?). It seems Western Digital and Seagate dominate the consumer market for me, thanks for that advice.

Yeah, I've never had an issue with my Western Digital drives until recently. I had 1 Caviar Black fail earlier this year which they replaced in warranty. They're sending two replacements out for the 2 recent drives with bad sectors. Can't believe it happened after I erased my Time Machine backup to start fresh. Hoping my data can be read and copied, or in the least recovered.

Thanks again for the recommendation.

Ooops, I googled the Hitachi Deskstar and realized why I remember the name. Seems that model had issues for a while.

Yep, Deskstar it is. Every drive manufacturer has fans and haters. Like you, I do my research to make the best pick possible but the paramount thing to me is a good backup plan as any drive can/will fail. Did you checkout Anandtech and Tom's hardware?

 

[TrashCanBin]

Hitachi, Seagate and WDC are all good choices.