Looking at larger HDD options, I noticed a lot of reports of growing reliability issues in both Seagate and Samsung drives. These have been my 2 favourite makes recently so it was a bit of a surprise.

Has anyone here had a drive failure with either of these makes?

Seagate

I'm running some of the older 7200.10 500GB SATAII drives and have had no problems. They are fast, quiet and just get on with it. On looking around they don't seem to have any problems.

However the newer 7200.11 models seem to have a firmware bug that makes disks inaccessible at power on. Disks affected by this are not detected by the BIOS after a reboot. Sometimes a power down will make them appear again, but a lot of the time the firmware just bricks the drives and only an RMA under warranty is an option, so all data will be lost.

Some more info here.

Seagate have released firmware updates to fix this problem, so if you are running any 7200.11 drives I recommend you update the firmware ASAP.

There is also now the newer 7200.12 drives. Some people report reliability issues, but on the whole not much compared to the .11 drives.

Samsung

I've been using some 1TB Spinpoint F1's for some time now and have been really happy with them.Now the Samsung range has expanded to both Spinpoint and EcoGreen drives. The latter more for data storage than software or OS loading as they spin at a slower RPM and use less power. Both ranges also come in 4 variations from F1 to F4.

There have been reports of their reliability going down recently, but equally loads of people saying how happy they are with them. It could just be the usual failure rates and people getting annoyed as is always the case. I've not found anything specific about a cause of failures though.

Western Digital

WD is one of the oldest makers, but for a long time a lot of people have been avoiding them for being noisy and having reliability issues.

That is unless you wanted the fastest performance, whereby the WD Raptor 10KRPM drives have been a firm favourite of gamers. And more recently the SATA version, called the VelociRaptor.

However, for their current range of drives I couldn't see any evidence of this. Seagate drives are meant to be faster and a bit quieter, but most people are saying WD drives are currently more reliable.

I do like their recent drive naming, splitting their caviar range into the three Blue, Green and Black ranges.

Anyone had any issues with WD drives?

Hitachi

We all know the horror stories of Deskstar drives from the past. The click of death and the nickname Deathstar they gained.

I've still got 2 IBM Deskstar drives (60GB and 120GB IDE) and they are both still working fine. So maybe these drives did have a higher than normal failure rate, or people just jumped on the band wagon and attacked the make. Who knows.

Not sure of the reliability of their current range of drives. The prices seem very good for the drive capacities, sometime lower than any other make. And they often seem to release larger capacity drives before any other maker.

However, I probably wouldn't buy one from them just because of their long running reputation. In the IT industry issues stick and it can put people off a brand for life.

Other makes?

Any other makes of drive anyone here uses and would recommend?
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