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plunar

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Sep 7, 2003
334
0
I have a la cie porsche that i bought a bit over a year ago. a never ending barage of complaints online now about la cie drives failing at the 1-year mark has convinced to invest in a new drive. i'm leaning towards seagate currently.
 
I went with Seagate. They have 5 year warranties on their Momentus SATA HDD. They may be a tad bit higher in terms of power consumption (maybe heat?) compared to other manufacturers (but they have 3 year warranties) if you're looking at the spec sheets but it's worth the 5 years. :D
 
I have a la cie porsche that i bought a bit over a year ago. a never ending barage of complaints online now about la cie drives failing at the 1-year mark has convinced to invest in a new drive. i'm leaning towards seagate currently.

I like Seagate's because they have been very reliable for me (I am running about 5 of them right now.) Also, most Seagate's come with a 5 year warranty.

Western Digitals have also been pretty reliable. I'm not sure about their warranty, but I think that it might be between 3 and 5 years for most of their products.

Maxtor's have not been reliable for me. Also, most of their warranties are only good for one year, which stinks. The redeeming quality is that their customer service has been excellent when my drives have failed within the one year period.


I forgot to add Hitachi. While they have been pretty reliable for me, I did have one of their laptop drives fail recently. Their RMA process was VERY SLOW, and they would not do an advanced RMA. So, I had to buy a replacement drive in order to make my computer work. Otherwise, I would have had to gone two months without a drive in my laptop.
 
I like Seagate's because they have been very reliable for me (I am running about 5 of them right now.) Also, most Seagate's come with a 5 year warranty.

Western Digitals have also been pretty reliable. I'm not sure about their warranty, but I think that it might be between 3 and 5 years for most of their products.

Maxtor's have not been reliable for me. Also, most of their warranties are only good for one year, which stinks. The redeeming quality is that their customer service has been excellent when my drives have failed within the one year period.


I forgot to add Hitachi. While they have been pretty reliable for me, I did have one of their laptop drives fail recently. Their RMA process was VERY SLOW, and they would not do an advanced RMA. So, I had to buy a replacement drive in order to make my computer work. Otherwise, I would have had to gone two months without a drive in my laptop.

BTW as of Dec. 9th, Maxtor changed its warranty from 1 year to Seagate's 5 years
 
I have 6 seagate drives in all but one computer and that has a 250 maxtor in it which has been good to me. so my vote goes to seagate.
 
I have never had a la cie drive fall apart on me...

I personally love the look and feel of the external drives and they work peachy, for me.
 
I've had two Maxtors fall over, but no problems with Seagates (and I've probably had about 10 of them over the years).
 
I have a Samsung and it's never let me down, just 10 months old though.

Seagate are supposed to be good (or so I learnt from this thread!)
 
It's all luck if it will fail or not. Just buy one and hope it doesn't. There's no "better" brand out of the most popular few. Just like some people's Macs fail every week, and DELLs last for years without problems, it's random.
 
Seagates are nice but I find the newer ones to be too loud for my taste. If I had to buy a drive right now it'd be one of the newer Western Digitals. Those are the best drives out there right now IMO.
 
I have never had a lacie drive die on me, i used tons of them for my LAN. I was disapointed with WesternDigital, i bought one which dies the next day after i took it out of the box. LaCie also builds good protections which helps if you move around a lot.
 
Seagates, Hitachis, Western Digitals, they are all good really. I also have a Maxtor somewhere and that is just as good.
 
They're all fine. If there was any one particular brand that was having quality control issues right now, you wouldn't be able to avoid the discussions on online forums. IBM was the last company to have major QC issues and it was impossible to miss. They refused to admit there were problems. Killed their reputation and they sold their hard drive division to Hitachi. Before that, Western Digital had problems with drives in the 6 gig range if I remember. They stepped up and took responsibility. They're still around.

Today, just shop by warranty and price (and noise level if that matters to you). You're only going to get anecdotal incidents asking about reliability on a forum. Everyone will have their story about a brand they'll never use again but the information is statistically insignificant.
 
My dad had a seagate in an external enclosure. It was on and sitting vertically and i accidentally knocked it over while i was messing with the printer next to it.

I ruined the HD. I should go take a look at it to see if it's salvageable.

I have a Seagate in my own computer (after 3 failed Western Digitals)...while it does get quite hot it hasnt done anything drastic yet.
 
I've never had anything but trouble with Seagate drives. Like a fool, I've bought at least six of them over the years, thinking that 'this new one will be better!' only to have every single drive fail. I've found WD's to be pretty reliable, and Maxtor somewhat so. I will never, ever, ever buy a Seagate product again.

I have an old Quantum Fireball drive that is older than most people I know, and it still works. I wish they made drives like that today...
 
Today, just shop by warranty and price (and noise level if that matters to you). You're only going to get anecdotal incidents asking about reliability on a forum. Everyone will have their story about a brand they'll never use again but the information is statistically insignificant.

The only bit of useful information thus far for the question at hand.

For what it's worth, I've had hard drives from a number of manufacturers and only one failure for seemingly no particular reason. It was a Maxtor.
 
I've had two hard drives fail, one was Hitachi, the other, quite recently, Western Digital. WD1200VE Scorpio to be precise. I know that because it sits on my desk as an example. I look at it and think, "hmmm, have I backed up recently?" It's very encouraging it is, the little bugger. That's the only things it's ever been good at. That, and acting as an expensive paper weight. It's very good at that.

When will one of you intelligent tech. people invent a proper storage medium? We're wasting our money on these fallible hard drives. Hurry up for crying out loud. :p

Go with Seagate when possible. :) Although treat them all with the same amount of caution. They'll all fail eventually. Backup when possible.
 
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