What is the most reliable Hard Drive Brand/Model | Hacker News Reader

What is the most reliable Hard Drive Brand/Model

5 pointsmadmaze6 comments

I had some hard drive issues over the weekend and am in the market for a new drive for my server(24/7 use).

these are my current drives:

WD 250GB WD2000BB-00GUA0 @ 19700 hrs Still running

Seagate Barracuda 200GB ST3200822AS @ 3000 hr Still running

Seagate Barracuda 250GB ST3250623A @ 6200 hr works intermittenly/seek error/

Seagate Barracuda 250GB ST3250623A @ ~5400 hr dead as a door nail

Hitachi 2TB JK1101YBJESBXF @ 100 hr brand new & still working

What are your best and worst experiences with what hard drives?

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Each manufacturer seems to oscillate between building a very good drive and then finding out how far they can cut corners before inadvertently releasing a disastrous production run with huge quality issues. Seagate is the most recent to bottom out with their 1-1.5 TB drives.

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/seagate-7200.11-failing,684...

My advice, check Toms Hardware. They're usually on top of things.

A trick I've learned is to follow the big name server manufacturers. If IBM puts a certain hitatchi model in eseries servers, its a good bet that this is a decent drive. The downside is that these drives are going to be far behind the curve as far as the latest-biggest capacity goes.

Never buy the latest, just released supercapacity drive at Best Buy. This is how they work out the problems before selling them into the "serious" markets.

Thanks for the pointers,

Ive been looking into WD raptor drives, I dont really need much space. Itll only be my root&home partition so a 150-300gb drive will do. Even though i havnt had the best experiences with Seagate, i was also looking at the Constellation ES drives, which seem to promise high reliability, but after consulting newegg reviews i decided otherwise.

Why not get an Intel SSD 160GB? The majority of my hard drives died due to mechanical failure.

hmm those are ~425$, for that kind of money I could raid a bunch of regular drives =/

You said reliable; not cheap :) A SSD should outperform regular drives in RAID anyway.

True, maybe i should have mentioned that im a average college student and thats != $$$

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