Vulkan wrote on Mar 7, 2011, 13:52:
Not getting enough sleep? Turn off the technology Minecraft.

Turn off Internet.

It's not necessarily that the whole brand is bad, but that certain lines of models come out the gate with a shit load of problems and it causes an uproar in intertube-land. People could be doing fine with X brand now, but all it takes is for them to release a single clunker and their entire reputation will go down the crapper even if the next model they release is the most rock solid drive on the market.

And of course, the thing about it is that if a line turns out to be shoddy, the problem doesn't rear its ugly head until much later when millions of consumers already have the drives in their PCs and browning shorts worldwide over massive amounts of lost data.

This was most recently seen with Maxtor's DiamondMax line, with the drives failing to be detected over a BIOS quirk that some crap engineer overlooked while the drive was in its design phase. Very easily fixed, but only if you have the hardware to do it.

Seagate's Barracuda 7200 and ES.2 lines also came out with a batch of screwed up drives where the drive would fail to read completely even though the platters are perfectly fine, due to a circular reference bug within the event logger built into the firmware. This particular batch of drives can be fixed with a swift firmware update, but only if you do it before they fail completely.

So yes, when it comes to buying a brand new, unproven hard drive, it's pretty much a crap shoot when it comes to quality regardless of brand.

The Advocate wrote on Mar 7, 2011, 10:49:
This sucks. I buy Hitachi drives because they have a stellar reliability record in everything I have deployed them in. Western Digital drives have always been junk, barely above the crap that Seagate shovels in to a box.

Guess I'll be giving Samsung a shot.

I have the exact opposite experience. Recently out of 3 2TB Hitachi drives I bought, ONE works. The other two were DOA. I've not yet had an issue with WD drives which I have several of right now. WD buying Hitachi's HD unit is very good news to me.

I've always liked WD, Seagate and Maxtor drives. I would like a Samsung SSD though for my OS drive.

It seems I'm not the only one with Hitachi 2TB 7200RPM drive issues. I've seen quite a lot of negative reviews on this drive on newegg and elsewhere. Hitachi's quality control seems to have been slipping so it does not surprise me they're selling to WD.

Not getting enough sleep? Turn off the technology Minecraft.

This sucks. I buy Hitachi drives because they have a stellar reliability record in everything I have deployed them in. Western Digital drives have always been junk, barely above the crap that Seagate shovels in to a box.

Guess I'll be giving Samsung a shot.