Hard drive brand reliability survey - vote your experience

There are no large scale tests of hard drive reliability that I can find that name brands, I thought it might be interesting to run a poll to find out what peoples experiences are. It won't be particularly accurate given our small sample size, but should give us at least some idea about any really good or really bad brands.

Important Notes:

• Please only post your direct experience from the past five years. Technology changes so fast I don't think older experiences are relevant. Even five years might be a bit much.
  
• Please only comment on internal drives. External drives have multiple points of failure.
  
• 3.5" drives of 500GB and over please, not laptop drives or small old drives.
  
• Please ignore the Seagate firmware issue of a year or two ago. It's a once off and it would probably skew the results.
  
• If a brand is been bought out by another brand, don't vote for the new brand. Eg Maxtor, IBM, etc.
  
• If you regularly have problems with various electronic equipment failing in your home, not just hard drives, please don't vote.
  
• If you're a very large user of hard drives, and have had relatively small number of drives fail, please vote for a single failure.
  

i been using mostly Seagate, currently i have 4 Seagate and 1 WD hd. I was pretty scare when i got my 1 tb Barracuda 7200.11 . There were a lot failure with those hd.
In the last 10 years. I haven't got any hd went bad on me yet. One of reason is because i used sell my old hd to family members and keep getting bigger ones. Now i got tire of reinstall Windows and transfer files. I don't sell my hd anymore.

1 Seagate 2 TB External .. All Good so far for about a year
1 WD 1 TB External .. All Good so far for about a year and a half
1 WD 1 TB External .. Croaked after about two years (IIRC)

1 WD 2 TB External .. Waiting to be added (once I get off my lazy behind and do some re-cabling)

Have both Seagate Baracuda & Western Digital and none of them in the past 6 yrs have failed and even on my original build over 10yrs still spinning perfectly.

Seagate 4x320gb
western digital 2x 1tb & 1x750gb
External WD mybook 1tb
And a external lacie with 2x 1tb Seagate

all kicking hard still

I had Western Digital Drive fail. It was a 150GB Raptor. I would like to add though, my experience with WD was awesome. The drive was purchased bare, and WD still warrantied it and even sent me out a new drive before I sent in the old one.

All WD drives here with no issues.

500GB about 2 years old
640GB about 1.5 years
2-1.5TB drives less than a year old

Unfortunately this poll is meaningless without knowing the size of the sample set.

gjl711 wrote in post #11014859
Unfortunately this poll is meaningless without knowing the size of the sample set.

I was scratching my head and thinking similar thoughts... How will you interpret this data?

ChasP505 wrote in post #11014975
I was scratching my head and thinking similar thoughts... How will you interpret this data?

Exactly, I can have 10 WD failures and 1 Samsung failure which on the surface would make it look like the Samsung drive is more reliable. But if my pool had 100 WD respondents and 1 Samsung respondent the actuality would be quite different.

Not sure how valid the results will be, it's more of a poll of what brand of hardrive is most popular I guess you could compare percentage difference between the brands.

Anyway I've had no failures personally, I've only 1 western digital (excluding my external) and it's going strong after many years.
I have 2 seagates which currently work, although one is starting to become noisy now.
I have 1 Samsung which works beautifully.

So far one maxtor failure, one western digital failure and one lacie failure (dont know the actual drive that was in it.)

They're all good, and they all fail eventually. All internals on various computers.

Seagate desktop: 5/6 good (I had a problem with the first lot of their 1.5 TB drive like lots of others)
Western Digital desktop 1/4 good
Samsung 5/5 desktop good
Hitachi 3/3 good (4/4 if you count an old IBM drive from many years ago)

Jeeze, I had no idea how many hard drives I've gone through over the years.

I've had a lot of WD drives kick off on me over the past 5 years, though none within the last year (that were the fault of the drive, I had a PSU fail that killed off two 300GB Velociraptors), so I think they've improved reliability as of late.

Anyway, my server at home uses a crate of WD-GP 2TB drives and none have had issues. At work I use exclusively Seagate 7200.12 500GB drives and they're wonderful. I've not had a single failure, and the single platter design keeps them quiet and cool.

My experience with Hitachi is limited to the crap they sell Dell. I had a couple fail in a short span of time with financial info on them (bad batch?) and I now rip them all out when they're delivered and replace with Seagate 7200.12 in RAID 1.

gjl711 wrote in post #11014859
Unfortunately this poll is meaningless without knowing the size of the sample set.

I know, it's only going to give us anecdotal information, without someone like google doing it on a huge sample of disks it's not going to give us precise information. It's most just to see if any one brand is particular bad, or any brand particularly good.

Actually I used to work at a computer refurbishment center and one of my jobs was to wipe hardrives from old computers.
I seem to remember there being a lot of dead Hitachi's and Maxtors, whereas Samsung and Seagate seemed to have better mortality rates.

It was interesting working there, I learnt that Dell surprisingly were consistently more reliable than any other PC's that came in for refurbishment.