Reading this, there is one drive that everybody seems to have forgotten.
The Samsung 1TB F1 - HD103UJ.
I've got 2 of these and 1 x 750GB version of this and not had any problems.
They are amazingly fast and have come down in price so much recently.
I do have to warn you against Seagate personally.
Out of all the hard drives I've owned in the past 8 years, (4 western digital, 3 samsung, 2 seagate)
The seagates have all packed up on me and given me the click of death. Yet my older western digitals which have had more stress (data and windows installed on them, where as the seagates were only ever storage) are still working.
So my personal experience, leave seagate and go WD or Samsung.
Seagate currently account for approx 60% of the drives we receive for data recovery. Problems on 7200.10 and 7200.11 series include Service Area corruption, Spindle Motor seizure and head assembly failure. A 5 year warranty means nothing when the drive fails with your important data on it.
We currently use Samsung and Hitachi drives. I've never been a fan of Western Digital. From a recovery perspective, they are probably the most difficult drive to deal with. Stay away from Lacie, they usually have Seagate in them, although I recently bought a couple and was pleased to see Samsung drives within.
Problems on 7200.10 and 7200.11
The .12's are getting poor reviews as well for noise and RAID issues. (
Stay away from western digital.
I second that emotion! (
I've had to replace the 250GB WD drive in my desktop 3 times at 18-month intervals.
Switched to Seagate. Still going two years on….
Greetings,
And I've been using WD Passports and MyBooks for field collections via eSATA, FW, and USB for going on two years with very few problems. Both my Mac Pros have 1TB WD Greens in them, and no problems.
-David
Seagate currently account for approx 60% of the drives we receive for data recovery. Problems on 7200.10 and 7200.11 series include Service Area corruption, Spindle Motor seizure and head assembly failure. A 5 year warranty means nothing when the drive fails with your important data on it.
We currently use Samsung and Hitachi drives. I've never been a fan of Western Digital. From a recovery perspective, they are probably the most difficult drive to deal with. Stay away from Lacie, they usually have Seagate in them, although I recently bought a couple and was pleased to see Samsung drives within.
I agree - although we receive more WD drives than Seagate for recovery.
We consider Hitachi 1TB drives to be the most reliable - it used to be Samsung, until we had a few in for recovery recently - but they were manufactured in China, rather than the usual Korea.
We are finding even Chinese-manufactured Hitachi 1TB drives reliable.
We would strongly advise *against* anything that says LaCie, Seagate, Maxtor, Mybook - and any enclosure that doesn't have at least an 80mm cooling fan.
You want quiet - you get heat. Just accept that you need "noisy" cooling fans if you want reliability. Just turn the music up - it will hide the noise from the fans.
The reason WHY you see seagates with so many problems is because people do not follow the data sheets. (also seagate has the largest market share, hence you will see more returns)
The segate drives run FASTER, so they run hotter( actually a lot hotter), if you do not force cool a modern drive then you are asking for problems.
I ran a data system for a large company and in 16 years I can honestly say we only ever had 4 defective seagates, 3 of which failed within 4 months of us loosing the aircon in one of the server units.
the other issues was the drive failing to read after power down and power up , but it had been running continuous for 3 years (24*7*52).
our desktops were a mixture of WD, Hitachi, Maxor, I have a full shelf of 'defective' out of warranty drives.
The longest i have had out of a seagate is 10 years, that drive failed becasue the rubber head stop in the unit disintegrated and went sticky.
biggest tip people, you MUST force cool a modern mechanical disk drive.
The reason WHY you see seagates with so many problems is because people do not follow the data sheets. (also seagate has the largest market share, hence you will see more returns)
Sorry, I don't agree at all. The reason we see so many Seagate drives are because they are now total rubbish. It's well known that there is a massive number of Barracuda 7200.11 drives with dodgy firmware which have either failed or are waiting to fail. Seagate have acknowledged this by implementing a free repair for some of the drives.
Data Sheets are not something that should be read by a user. Most users don't know what drive is inside their laptop/desktop/external HDD. If you are going to blame heat, then it is the OEM or external HDD manufacturer who are responsible for ensuring adequate cooling functionality.
BTW…my Hitachi 3.5" SATA's run far far hotter than my Seagates.
We've been using Hitachi 1TB for quite a while now and haven't had any problems. Have had multiple problems with the Seagate sata (they use to be our drive of choice and now we avoid them–especially after their bricking incidents on drives 250gb and > ).
Isn't Lacie just a company that markets their enclosures with a WD or similar drive inside?