[WOPR]

Following on from my previous thread about a mate buying an extra internal drive for his QS G4, are all drives pretty much of a similar standard these days, or has anyone had a nightmare with one particular brand?

Any comments appreciated!

[d.fine]

I've had bad experience with Seagate HDD's. I've bought over 6 Maxtor's and they all still run, I've bought 2 Seagates, and they're both dead, after 4-5 months I might add ... just my experience.

[cal6n]

I agree on maxtor. I usually get the diamondmax 9. Had no problems, unlike the "deathstar" range!. Don't know about seagate or WD

[Randman]

I've not heard of too many Western Digital drives giving up the ghost. Great experience with the brand myself.

[power142]

This won't help you much, but I've had good experiences overall from Maxtor (IDE and SCSI), Western Digital (IDE) and Seagate (SCSI) in a collection of desktop and server machines over the past couple of years.

IBM/Hitachi on the other hand.... I'd think twice about one of those

[WOPR]

Thanks for all the help, I've recommended a WD Caviar. Do you know if they come with the screws I'll need for fitting it in the G4, or are they in the Mac waiting to be used?

Sorry to be dumb!

[scottiB]

If you've bought a "bare" drive--not in retail packaging--no screws are provided. with retail, screws, ATA cable, etc. come in the box. My G4 came with extra screws in the box, but they can be found at any computer store--they're standardized.

[yfan]

I just bought 2x WD 74 gb raptors from Newegg. Its a great rebate deal that ends today. I've always had success with Western Digital harddrives as well as a failed one which was promptly replaced in a matter of days. Get a raptor, the 5 year warranty is hard to beat!

[egleband83]

I've had horrible experiences with Western Digital drives. I've had 2 of mine personally go bad after a year of use and my cousin has had over 3 go bad in a row for him.
I've had a Seagate barracuda for 3 years now and it's been a fast, quiet, and reliable drive.

[rotuts]

Ive had WD drives andd Hitachi drives and both have given me no problems.

sorry previous forum-er had bad exp. with Hitachi. I like them vwery fast andd quiet.

Fry's periodically has 250GB Hitachi/IBM for $99. Ive gotten 4!!!

good luck

rotut

[11011001]

My 640 GB RAID is all WD. 2 x 120, and 2 x 200. They are good, well performing drives. (8 mb cache/drive)

[Paul Huang]

I have encountered more Maxtor dead drives, but that does not mean it's less realiable. I have two 40GB drives that I installed four years ago and they continue to work fine in my office G4.

For my own computers, I never keep a hard drive for more than one year. Anything more than a year old is a growing risk factor.

[cmoney]

From the looks of it, all hard drives go bad. Personally I've had great experiences with Western Digital, probably 10 drives in the past 10 years and had only one go bad. On the other hand, I've had an equal number of Maxtors and have had 8 die on me. The shortest life-span was a Maxtor SATA 250GB I bought for my G5 that died 2 months after purchase.

Best advice so far has been to replace drives every year! Also a good strict backup policy will render this discussion moot.

[t6hawk]

I have a stack of Maxtors ranging from 30GB and up. No problems except with one and that's cause it was on 24/7 for a few years straight never spinning down. I also have an IBM Deskstar and had no problems at all with it. I have had some peroblems with seagate for a while but that was years ago when 4GB drives were considered huge.

I think overall it depends on the batch of drives. One person could have a 80GB maxtor for example and it works great, and another person could have the same model of drive and it dies on them.

[mike3k]

The Maxtor 80G drive in my B&W G3 server just died a few days ago. I installed the drive about a year ago.

[Link]

Generally I like to stick with seagates and MAYBE maxtors

[Luca Rescigno]

I have heard of people having bad experiences and good experiences with all brands of drives. There are a few standouts (ie, no one recommends a middle-aged IBM drive, like the Deathstar 75GXP), but in general, I've heard people say both good and bad things about Western Digital, Seagate, Maxtor, and Hitachi. I'd say get one of those four brands, and make sure it has 8 MB of cache. Western Digital is known for having slightly faster drives, while Seagate is known for slightly quieter ones, but I think the differences are fairly minimal in most cases.

FYI, I have two Western Digitals - an 80GB w/ 2MB buffer and an 80GB w/ 8MB buffer. The one with more buffer is definitely faster, the other is just used for storage and it's not a boot drive or anything. Why'd I buy WD? Because they were the least expensive available at the time .

[tooki]

WD had some trouble some years back, but seems to have gotten back on track.
IBM (now Hitachi) had some troubles with ONE model of drive, but also seems to be OK now.
Maxtor is solid.
Seagate is also solid -- but I'd trust them more. Why? Because Seagate now offers a 5 year warranty on their consumer drives, where all the others offer just one year. The warranty says a lot about how long a company expects a device to last at minimum.

tooki

[Luca Rescigno]

Western Digital has a three-year warranty on their 8MB buffer drives. The ones with 2MB still just have a one-year warranty. I suppose the 2MB buffer version is the "consumer" drive, but considering the difference in price is something like $5, you should definitely get the one with 8MB of buffer. Faster, AND comes with a nice warranty.

And yes, Seagate's five year warranty is nice .

[rastatero]

My dad has a PC computer store and he has experimented with many brands over the last ten years, but not he only stocks Western Digital. He has always had the fewest problems with Western Digital, and when he does have a problem with a WD drive the RMA service at Western Digital is amazingly simple, easy, and quick.

Since this is what my dad prefers, I have come to trust the Western Digital hard drives. I have owned several drives and have great experiences with them all. Some of the drives I currently have running are a handful of 40BB's and a 160JB in an external enclosure connected to my iBook.

The company where I work also seems to share a favouritism towards Western Digital as well.

[Lateralus]

I've been a loyal Seagate buyer for the past 3 years. Between my Macs and PCs, I must have bought 12 drives from them by now and have yet to have a sour experience. Their drives are fast, very quiet, cheap, and as stated above, they now come with the longest warranty in the industry.

The true measure of the quality of any product is the length of the warranty the company that manufactured it feels confident enough to put on it.

[badtzmat]

Originally posted by egleband83:
I've had horrible experiences with Western Digital drives. I've had 2 of mine personally go bad after a year of use and my cousin has had over 3 go bad in a row for him.
I've had a Seagate barracuda for 3 years now and it's been a fast, quiet, and reliable drive.

i had to replace three internal caviar drives in a six month time period for my QS G4. i bought a drive from tekserve.com (forget the manu) and have had no troubles. (knock on wood)

avoid them...

m

[badtzmat]

Originally posted by WOPR:
Following on from my previous thread about a mate buying an extra internal drive for his QS G4, are all drives pretty much of a similar standard these days, or has anyone had a nightmare with one particular brand?

Any comments appreciated!

i had to replace three internal WD caviar drives in a six month time period for my QS G4. i bought a drive from tekserve.com (forget the manu) and have had no troubles. (knock on wood)

avoid WD...

m

[legacyb4]

Interesting...

Personally, I will never buy Maxtor no matter how good the price. In the several networks I have managed/am managing currently, 99% of my drive failures have been Maxtor drives (20-60GB capacities) with the drives inexplicably going AWOL (particularly for users who have shut down and powered up the next morning).

My $0.02...

Cheers.

[SEkker]

I've had good experience with Maxtor and WD drives.

I've had a 2.5" Fujitsu and a 2.5" Hitachi drive fail (in the same week, no less).

When Quantum was bought out, the last brand name with any meaningful resemblance of notable quality disappeared (argue what you like, most Quantum drives were rated for 5 years of use and usually lasted until they were obsolete).

Just remember -- windows default settings do not put HDs to sleep, which is sure death to these mechanical devices.

[badtzmat]

Originally posted by SEkker:
I've had good experience with Maxtor and WD drives.

I've had a 2.5" Fujitsu and a 2.5" Hitachi drive fail (in the same week, no less).

When Quantum was bought out, the last brand name with any meaningful resemblance of notable quality disappeared (argue what you like, most Quantum drives were rated for 5 years of use and usually lasted until they were obsolete).

Just remember -- windows default settings do not put HDs to sleep, which is sure death to these mechanical devices.

i was as dumbfounded. they did replace all and eventually gave me money back but nonetheless never again will i buy one of their drives. started with a 150GB Caviar and another. they replaced the second with a 180GB and then the same happened.

m

[badtzmat]

Originally posted by SEkker:
I've had good experience with Maxtor and WD drives.

I've had a 2.5" Fujitsu and a 2.5" Hitachi drive fail (in the same week, no less).

When Quantum was bought out, the last brand name with any meaningful resemblance of notable quality disappeared (argue what you like, most Quantum drives were rated for 5 years of use and usually lasted until they were obsolete).

Just remember -- windows default settings do not put HDs to sleep, which is sure death to these mechanical devices.

running my drives nonstop seems to work out much better. i turned sleep off for this drive and it has been great so far. less issues for me. i think sleep may have added to my woes.

[Xapplimatic@Ade]

The only desktop drive I ever had fail on me was a Fireball (Quantum) which was in my iMac... of course it was over 2 years old and to Maxtor's credit, the design was not theirs, but inherited from Quantum... but I also had numerous Quantums before that and they all still work. One of them is now over 10 years old (SCSI for my Amiga)...lol. I replaced the Fireball with a drive of comparable size from IBM and the IBM drive is much quieter and faster.. Much happier with the IBM drive..

Now my laptop drive was a 10GB Fujitsu which failed in my iBook.. I would never ever buy one of those noisy rachets again... It didn't have half the use my Fireball had.. Fooey on Fujitsu

[ralphh]

I worked as a Mac and PC repair tech for CompUSA for several years. The other techs and I learned to prefer the Maxtors over other brands.

The worst by far was Quantum. And in a strange twist, Quantum proved their wretchedness by going out of business and being bought by, of all companies, Maxtor. Maxtor then blundered by using crappy, failure-prone Quantum controller boards in some of their drives. I suspect that you who have had bad experiences with Maxtor ran into these drives. They are easy to spot: the chips on the controller boards were stamped "Quantum." You could also tell the pure Maxtors from the Quantum-contaminated Maxtors by the serial number on the box. We learned to tell them apart and tried to steer our favorite customers away from the bad ones. They did a lot of damage to Maxtor's reputation.

The Western Digitals were okay, but still not as good as the Maxtors. Fujitsus and Seagates were brands we saw too rarely to tell much about, but they seemed pretty good.

IBMs used to rule until the DeskStars (which we soon renamed "DeathStars"). Seems to happen to IBM whenever they try to make something on the cheap. IBM PCs were absolutely the best until they concocted the disasterous E2U line.

Bear in mind I quit working as a tech almost a year ago. The quality of any line of drives could have done a one-eighty since then.

[Link]

Be careful to build a preference on IBM/WD/Hitachi. They were all made by the same place.

From what I've found so far, seagates are not only quiet, but have longetivity (then again a lot of their drives are used in servers for the long haul). The higher end maxtors are awesome, while the really cheap ones are loud as hell.

You can always tell if a machine has a cheap maxtor by that high pitched whine they make.

[gundamguy]

I have purchased alot of drives over the past few years, I have had and seen every Quantum drive fail (Out of business now but Maxtor owns their tech rights, only saw 1 maxtor fail, every Samsung drive I have ever owned or knew of someone owning has failed ( I had 1 that lasted 1 week), I purchased a Western Digital last year that started making the whineing noise after about 3 months, now I have a few Seagate sata drives that while Im not happy about the access times have proven very reliable. They have been able to handle nearly a year of heavy video editing without showing a sign of failing.

Oh yeah every Fujitsu drive I have ever owned failed too and about 30 at work, I was kinda mad to see that my new g4 ibook came with one while my old 900g3 had a hitachi.

[Stephen.S.]

In the last two years, I've purchaased 5 Maxtor, 4 Seagate and 4 Western Digital drives. Of these drives, 3 Maxtors and 1 WD went belly up within the 9 months. To date, none of the Seagates have expressed a desire to retire early. From reading this thread, it appears users mileage varies per manufacturer. Call it bad luck, bad Quality Assurance; whatever. I for one will not consider buying another Maxtor drive any time soon.

[Stephen.S.]

In the last two years, I've purchaased 5 Maxtor, 4 Seagate and 4 Western Digital drives. Of these drives, 3 Maxtors and 1 WD went belly up within the first 9 months. To date, none of the Seagates have expressed a desire to retire early. From reading this thread, it appears users mileage varies per manufacturer. Call it bad luck, bad Quality Assurance; whatever. I for one will not consider buying another Maxtor drive any time soon.

Apologies for the duplicate post. Don't appear to have the ability to delete.

[mikema1701]

I work in 8 schools and care for some 500+ machines. Basically all the drive failures we've run into were Quantum drives in our iMacs (mainly of the 4-6GB variations). I've seen 1 Seagate die, and maybe a handful of WD's. But, I've had easily over 15-20 Quantum failures ever since I started working for these schools, which was 5 years ago.

In my servers, I only have 2 brands: Seagate and IBM. There is only one server that has an IBM drive, and I may replace it eventually.

Out of these 16 some odd servers, which have been run basically 24x7x365 (with the exception of power outages and restarts), I've had all of the Maxtor drives I've tried to put in them die--several times with some slight data loss, because the backup hadn't run properly the day before or whatever. I've had 1 Seagate die.

I'm not sure why lots of people have had failures with Seagates. We buy the Barracuda series 7200RPM ones.

In the desktops at home, I've now switched to Hitachi. They seem to make the quietest drives, what with their fluid bearing technology and all. These drives never run 24x7 by a long shot, so I'm not sure if they'd perform adequately in a server.

One saving grace, I think, is that I have some heavy duty APC 700XL UPS's attached to all my servers (help filter out any power spikes), and I have a pretty reliable Retrospect backup happening every single day, with Retrospect set to Email me every time it finishes a backup.

[ArcticBear]

IBM had major problems with their drives. Check the TechReport, here and here.

I've had Maxtor drives (stock Quantum Fireball in the iMac and 60 GB DiamondMax). They all grew intolerable loud. I RMAed the 60 GB because of this. The RMA was painless, but the replacement was just as loud.

So I switched to a 60 GB Seagate Barracuda IV because it was rumored to be the quietest. And it was. I think because of their "fluid-dynamic" bearings vs. the ball bearings the Maxtors used. There was an initial problem with noise due to a disk-checking routine built into the drive which produced this high-pitched squeal (very uncomfortable -- analagous to scratching your fingers on a chalkboard). I thought it was going belly-up on me till I found you could disable it via a DOS program. After the short trip inside a PC (no Mac version of the software), it was quiet again.

It did die on me a little after a year, unfortunately. Drive spindle froze (as I later discovered, after sending it out for recovery). It was still under 3-year warranty so I RMAed it without a problem. I've bought Seagates since the crash and none have given me any problems. No disk-checking-squeals either. For my purposes, quiet is more important than a millisecond of faster operation here or there. I'd have to have more than one drive fail on me to consider it more than a fluke. I've never come across any swarm of complaints about Seagate drives compared to others as to their reliability (vs. IBM) or noise (vs. Maxtor), etc.

It turned out the failed drive was not recoverable. I lost about a year's worth of projects (more hobby stuff, nothing essential to employment), my e-mail database and addresses, and all the photos I had taken with my digital camera. The last was the worst. I had just bought a CD-burner (DVD too expensive at the time) and was beginning to back things up. I had a few things saved, but I hadn't gotten to the pictures yet.

Moral: Always have a backup. Because your work/pictures/etc. is important.

I've since gotten a DVD-burner and have done backups with that. But now, with hard drives so cheap, if you're getting a new drive get another of the same capacity. It's more stable than CD/DVD media. Put it in an external case (or something. After all, you can swap out your backup drive and use the case for something else when you're not backing up). Use software like Carbon Copy Cloner to back it up every week.

I think hard drive quality is pretty good all around, but you never know when your dog will eat your homework^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H perfectly normal disk on you (to mix metaphors). Just have a backup and a good warranty and you'll be fine.

[ReggieX]

The only drives I've had that actually failed were a Micropolis (notice you don't hear about them anymore ) and a Maxtor. Really, it comes down to anecdotal evidence 95% of the time. Just don't expect a large capacity, 7200 RPM drive to last forever without proper cooling.

And Seagate SCSI drives last forever

[UrQuattro]

The real question should be: which brand of drive will die and still let me get my data back?

In my 5 years of experience in tech work, i've seen all brands die, but not all of them will give up the data that's on there...

Maxtor's, actually, seem to give it up better than most.. The most common failure that i have seen is a clicking drive, and that is easily rectified by swapping controller cards with a known good one, and then pulling the data off with any utility (it should mount normally at that point).

As a previous poster said, there were some maxtors that were horrid, and even when you tried to swap controllers, you wouldnt have any success... you'd just end up with another dead controller card.

But WD, some IBM, etc... tend to just die inexplicably.... I dont know why, but when they die, they are generally irrevocably damaged in some way...

Just my thoughts... All drives will fail at some point... some faster than others... what is important is that you back up your data regularly, and never use your backup drive more than is necessary to get the data

[Scotttheking]

Whatever brand you ask about, some will say it's good, some will say it's bad.
I've worked with hundreds of drives, and all have had failures. That's why all important stuff has raid1, and / or backups, and the really important stuff is on raid1 and daily tape backup.
The last batch of drive's I bought were Deskstars (about 3 months ago), but now I'm switching to seagate for every machine that doesn't need every tiny bit of speed it can get. Seagate's 5 year warranty is fine by me.

[xGrape]

WD generally has high performace and low pricing, but they make quite som noise compared to other drives. So if you want your Mac to be as quiet as possible I would rather consider disks from Maxtor or Seagate.

[macvillage.net]

Originally posted by Scotttheking:
Whatever brand you ask about, some will say it's good, some will say it's bad.
I've worked with hundreds of drives, and all have had failures. That's why all important stuff has raid1, and / or backups, and the really important stuff is on raid1 and daily tape backup.
The last batch of drive's I bought were Deskstars (about 3 months ago), but now I'm switching to seagate for every machine that doesn't need every tiny bit of speed it can get. Seagate's 5 year warranty is fine by me.

The Deathstars were the worst drives IMHO (thinking of the 75GXP).

I've got Seagate, and WD, and Hitachi (that 7200 RPM drive for laptops). All 3 are great, especially that Hitachi. Made a world of difference on my extra slow Thinkpad. I'd bet it would really rock a Powerbook.

[Al G]

There sure is a lot of talk about bad IBM drives that were discontinued years ago. If anyone is buying a new drive now, chances are pretty slim that a vendor will dust off a buried 75GXP and try to sell it to you. Can we move on, please?

[Deckard]

Seagates are the only drives I'll buy these days. As of June 1st this year, they increased their warranty to a whopping five years, and I haven't heard of any major problems with them in many years. On the other hand, I've always heard Western Digitals should be avoided, Maxtor was noted for giving off peculiar "chirping noises" awhile ago (with drive failures too), and the problems with IBM (now Hitachi) "Deathstar" drives have been well documented.

I figure any company willing to back their product with a five year warranty must believe in their products. Warranties of that length were more common years ago, now I don't know of any company besides Seagate that even comes close.

[Scotttheking]

Originally posted by macvillage.net:
The Deathstars were the worst drives IMHO (thinking of the 75GXP).

I've got Seagate, and WD, and Hitachi (that 7200 RPM drive for laptops). All 3 are great, especially that Hitachi. Made a world of difference on my extra slow Thinkpad. I'd bet it would really rock a Powerbook.

Western Digital has had some nasties in the 90% RMA range, too. They were more recent then the Deathstar line (BTW, all my servers have deskstars).

Currently residing in my Tibook is a 60GB 7200RPM Travelstar

[bighead]

As a service technician, I have the joy of replacing dead hard disks for customer as well as trying to explain why they fail and why I can't get the data off of the drives for them. My experiences are different from some of the other folks who have posted.

I've replaced far more Maxtor drives that have died than any other brand. FAR MORE. In fact, where I work, we bet on whether or not the drive is a Maxtor with cans of Red Bull (based on what the failing drive sounds like.) I'd say more than half of the disks I've replaced are Maxtor. I count Quantum drives in with Maxtor, since they're now one company. I think I've replaced more Maxtor branded drives than I've replaced Quantum branded drives.

A second place finish in my estimation would be Seagate, though a distant second at that. I've not seen many of them fail, but recently I've seen some older, moderate capacity Seagates giving out. They don't tend to be as noisy/rattling like Maxtors that are kicking the bucket (hard).

I've replaced a few of the IBM Desk(Death)stars but not as many as some have. I think I've replaced ONE Hitachi branded Deskstar, so Hitachi actually improved reliability in my estimation when they bought IBM's drive division.

I've never replaced a single Western Digital hard disk. Ever. I've got two WD2000JB 200 GB drives in my server at home, in a RAID setup, mainly because I trust their reliability. I've installed only Western Digital drives in my machines over the past few years (save one instance with Samsung drives.) They've never ever let me down, and I have yet to see any evidence firsthand that they are anything but the best drives out there.

PS: That one instance with Samsung drives involved three 120 GB drives in a Power Mac 9500 and they all worked very well without a hitch. I haven't had extensive experience with them, though.

[tport]

We had Maxtor 120 Gigs at work (20) two years ago. Used them as backup drives in FW cases. After the 7th one died on me I lost all faith in the Brand and ditched all other drives.
We then went out and bought the IBM Deskstar 180s - now Hitachi. We use 35 of them for the last 1.5 years and never had a problem.
Personally I have also used Seagate alot, SCSI and IDE.
Have also used 8 or so Fujitsu disks (SCSI) and was happy with them also. Two died after 7 years of service. I figure thats pretty darned good life out of a disk. I'll forgive and disk that dies after 5 years or more.

[Link]

I think this is one of the "This drive is the best because I use it" threads.

Hitachi/WD/IBM all come off the same assembly line though as I said a dozen times, They generally look the same, fail the same, act the same and crash the same.

The last WD I had started going bad within 2 weeks of getting it because one of the ball bearings was shot. It made this REALLY loud *EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE* sound like someone scratching a needle against a piece of china or something.. damn

Before that I had a 2 year old WD give out on me. I took that thing with a freaking sledgehammer I was so pissed. Ahhhh the relief

I've had a seagate go on me before too.. but it was only a few days old so it was DOA. NO biggie

[legacyb4]

Agree heartily. I took over a network that had BTO machines which included the goddawful 20GB cheap Maxtors. You can pick the machines out by the that teeth-gritting whine coming from under the desk.

Amazing that my users don't find that annoying...

Originally posted by Link:
You can always tell if a machine has a cheap maxtor by that high pitched whine they make.