Hard Drives - Which are best

I will probably keep this poll going for another week or so and then tell you what our findings are.

We deal with hundreds of data recoveries per day, so my information will come from the amount of drives that we receive.

Best regards,

Simon

If I may ? , the poll is not "accurate" in the sense that some of the listed options are not related to actual drive manufacturers

Seagate
Western Digital
Buffalo
Maxtor
Freecom
LaCie
Hitachi
Toshiba
Home Brew Versions

Bolded above represent AFAIK firms that mount in their external cases hard disk from one or another manufacturer.

I mean, is the poll about failure of the hard disk or about failure of the external hard disk controllers?

Or there is any record about failure of a xxxxx hard disk because inside case yyyyyy?

For example due to overheating/too high voltage power supply or the like?

I have a few LaCie's that mount Samsung harddrives (a manufacturer missing from the poll list), but still one of the five biggest
http//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_defunct_hard_disk_manufacturers
http//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_disk_drive#Manufacturers
and Seagate and Maxtor should actually be mostly same hard disks branded differently. ?

If I may express my personal opinion about the known Seagate 7200.11 case, I personally find regrettable but perfectly "normal" that a firmware may have been mis-set in factory, nothing against Seagate for this, but the way they managed the issue is simply appalling.

jaclaz

Jaclaz,

Thanks for your comments.

You are of course correct, I should have included Samsung, my mistake. Your comments are of corse correct also about Seagate and Maxtor being the same company, however, they are still sold as seperate brands and are manufacturered in different facilities, (amalgamation is coming).

As for the OEM branded ones, they dont use a single manufacturer of hard drives, they use what ever brand they get at the best price at the time, (LaCie use Seagate, Maxtor, WD, Samsung et al).

Dont forget, this is not a scientific test, its just a bit of fun!

Best regards,

Simon

It would actually be interested to know the results for external drives. I am very concerned about the cooling of some drives. They often have plastic cases and no cooling fan. Do suppliers (eg Lacie) ever use the new 'Green' drives that probably run cooler.

I personally use either Western Digital or Seagate, and I've only had a problem once with a Seagate.
Hitachi in the 3.5 inch version for me has had a low success rate. The 2.5 inch ones seems to work better.

Samsung?

From my experience
Seagates are more reliable, but are more difficult to recover once they fail.
Western Digitals are also good, and easier to recover when they fail.

I personally use Hitachi and Seagate drives.

So, are you going to reveal your findings then?

I have to admit, I am quite shocked by the responses. We see loads of failures from drives that leak oil(!) through to the more common firmware and head stack problems.

IMHO I believe that Seagate, Samsung, (which I know, I omitted - sorry), take some beating, however, here at Disklabs, my engineers state that the best drives they believe are Seagate, Samsung and some Maxtor.

Some of the comments about the cooling of drives was quite damning, (WD, LaCie and Freecom). I explained that over 50% of the forensics community state that WD is best, they were shocked.

I suppose as a WD partner, we see excessive amounts of the WD drives, which mean that what we receive to recover data from is disproportionate, but they still say that the probs are contact issues and overheating.

The poll was for a bit of fun and to see what other people thought.

All the best,

Simon

I guess that more or less the only (possibly independent) and wide enough to be significative case study is the reknown google one
http//labs.google.com/papers/disk_failures.pdf
(which does NOT take into account actual "makers/models")
and that actually concludes in extreme succinctness more or less that "drives fail when the feel like it", and there is no way to know why.

Storage Review holds a "survey", that, in order to guarantee maximum transparency 😯 , is only viewable after registering and logging in
http//www.storagereview.com/map/lm.cgi/survey_login

I personally, and out of personal experience and "common sense" only, think that it is rather meaningless to use manufacturer as a reference, as each "family" from the same manufacturer could be flawed in it's entirety or only in a given size range.

The usual "car parallel" applies.

Do all FORDs suck?
Well, they made the PINTO. wink

Of course, the Allegro actually means that ALL Austin/British Leyland (with the only exception of the original Mini) are BAD!

D

jaclaz