05-24-2008, 05:52 AM
My anecdotal evidence is that I'll stay the heck away from Western Digital. It's the only make of drive that has failed for me in personal systems from normal usage. I've had an IBM and a Seagate fail from outside influence. The Seagate fell 15 feet onto concrete and then died a week later, I got the data off it. The IBM drive had one of my friends leave a soldering iron on the exposed PCB on the bottom of one. I've had 2 WD drives die while in systems that had no other issues. One was under warranty and the warranty service was horrid. The other was out of warranty. The Seagate was under warranty and was replaced even though it technically shouldn't have been. I told them what happened, they sent me another anyway.
A batch of WD drives also died at work. 32 out of 150. Several other WD drives I've been around have developed high pitched whines. They didn't fail but I couldn't stand to have them in a system that wasn't in a soundproofed enclosure.
Seagate has been my drive of choice for about 10 years now. That's not say I haven't gotten the odd Maxtor, IBM or WD in that time if the price has been too good to pass up. But I'll pay more for a Seagate than I will for other brands if it isn't too much more. I admit a lot of that has to do with the warranty replacement on the dropped drive and the 14 year old 2GB SCSI drive I have from that that is still in service. It also helps that none of the several dozen or so I've had for personal use have never died while I still owned them and some of them are still kicking in other people's machines to this day (there is a 10 year old 12 gigger in my parents machine).
A batch of WD drives also died at work. 32 out of 150. Several other WD drives I've been around have developed high pitched whines. They didn't fail but I couldn't stand to have them in a system that wasn't in a soundproofed enclosure.
Seagate has been my drive of choice for about 10 years now. That's not say I haven't gotten the odd Maxtor, IBM or WD in that time if the price has been too good to pass up. But I'll pay more for a Seagate than I will for other brands if it isn't too much more. I admit a lot of that has to do with the warranty replacement on the dropped drive and the 14 year old 2GB SCSI drive I have from that that is still in service. It also helps that none of the several dozen or so I've had for personal use have never died while I still owned them and some of them are still kicking in other people's machines to this day (there is a 10 year old 12 gigger in my parents machine).
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It's all just zeroes and ones and duct tape in the end.
It's all just zeroes and ones and duct tape in the end.