Shoutbox

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Originally posted by traxor

A cheap price usually means that it's not as good quality

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Oh please. So when an item goes on sale, is discounted, cheap or etc it is not as good quality as others?

You don't know how much it costs to manufacture a hard drive so you can only base your judgment on prices you've seen drives for at other places. Business can afford to discount really close to the RRP if they have the customer base, have purchased a larger number of stock etc.

$95 is standard price for a Western Digital 320gb HDD (8mb cache) - I can get them for $123 AUD which is roughly $96.

quote:

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Originally posted by traxor
Doesn't seem that way.

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3/4 drives in my current machine are Western Digital drives (and they're also 320gb drives which I paid $128 AUD for - because they're SATA) and I've never had a problem with any of them.

You get unlucky sometimes, but it doesn't mean you go around and blurt out that it is an unreliable brand or product.

Chris, I agree 100% with your comments.

I agree with Chris as well.  You sometimes get unlucky and get a bad one.  Not just WD, any maker.  Every HD I've ever owned (Except for the Maxtor and Seagate I have now) has been WD.  Much more reliable than anyone else, or at least IMHO.

Woraug, I read good comments on Seagate hard drives. Woould you rate Seagate as high as WD?

A great many people like Seagate, but I don't.  Every SG drive I've dealt with has died within a year.  The one I have now it broke.  It's an 80gb, but it only shows up as 40 (Yes, I've tried the jumpers, repartitioning, formatting, the Seatools, ect) The only way I've been able to see the other 40gb is if I run Linux.  The only reason I haven't returned it is because I can't find the receipt for it.  And I don't trust SG's RMAs.

While they deal more with performance than reliability, I usually buy whatever is currently on Storage Review's LeaderBoard for the appropriate category, or at least consult their reviews of the drives I am considering.

Like the endless AMD vs. Intel fanboy battles, no blanket statement about any hard drive manufacturer means much.  Different product lines perform differently and can be more or less reliable -- you really should be looking at specific drives, not the manufacturer.

Seagate has a long history of making fast and highly reliable high end server hard drives, so they definitely know how to make a good drive.  Whether they put the same effort and materials in low end products is another question. 

My old HDDs (100MB, 256MB and 512MB) from my 386 were Seagates, they never died on me and they still work even now, after 10 years of abuse...