Cheap Hard Drives

Does brand matter, anymore? Everything is "Made in China."

EDITOR'S NOTE: As a rule, I try to avoid products made in China. I'd much rather pay a few dollars more, get a quality product, and support the economy of my own country. That said, I don't know if any hard drives are manufactured in the USA. Anyone know?

Thank you very much for the info on hard drives I found it very useful.

. "Pay less attention to comments like "Brand X sucks" or "Brand Y is the best" -- and more to patterns of comments about problems with a specific model"

That is very good advice, I have always had good luck with Seagate and Western digital, but I will also buy Samsung and others, if the reviews are good. Seagate did put out some bad ones for awhile. It was a firmware problem I think. My old dell Latitude D630 laptop came with only an 80 gig drive. I went to Microcenter and found a Seagate 320 gig drive, with 7200 rpm and 16 MB cache for 65 U.S dollars. Most laptop drives even now are only 5400 rpm and 8 MB cache. So it was a great cheap upgrade. Most hard drives only have a 3 year warranty. Mine is an enterprise class drive though, so it has a 5 year warranty. It can also detect if the laptop is falling, and can park the head before the laptop hits the ground, which will save you from data and hard drive loss. This is a feature anyone buying a laptop hard drive should look for. Along with S.M.A.R.T monitoring I think Seagate and Western digital both offer the free fall detection, on the higher end models. I also bumped my ram up to 4 gigs from 2, with Windows 7 64 bit I changed out the T7100 Core 2 duo @ 1.8 GHZ to a T7250 @ 2.00 GHZ. So I have a very strong running little laptop, considering it's an old 2007 model. I sold the old ram for 30 bucks and payed 80 bucks for 4 gigs. What is really annoying me is, why is ram selling so high these days. Do you think it will ever come back down to where it was?

EDITOR'S NOTE: I read on a forum that vendors are shifting to DDR3 RAM, and producing less DDR2. Also there may have been some price fixing going on. See http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/18/technology/18iht-chip.html

Brand name do matters...
Altough the drive is made in China or elsewhere, the company facing its name backups the manufacturing.
What is important is after-sale service.

All drive manufacturers "lose their Mojo" for one reason or another. For example the Seagate 7200.11 AS family had many failures, some say due to poor firmware. In some cases a firmware update didn't fix the problem.
Nor are the so-called enterprise drives a guarantee of long trouble-free life. I had a pair of WD 400 RE drives fail in a RAID1 configuration. I was lucky that I was able to recover the data before the 2nd drive failed.

Hitachi makes some of the best enterprise drives. After all they bought IBM's hard disk division. However they are notoriously in short supply.

The moral is to research the exact model that you want to buy and ALWAYS backup your data.

I keep no less than four copies of critical Data on a system that I am responsible for.

I've been reading comments from folks who have bought large "green" drives and stuck them in as primary drives. Any thoughts on the use of these green drives as a system drive?

Quick computer search shows Seagate Barracuda ES 400GB HD selling for around $200 at 10 best known retailers. Bob, where do I get the $37 bargain????

Good article. I prefer Western Digital, but have used Seagate and Maxtor, as well. I stick with well known brand names usually, but, I did purchase for my daughter a MDT hard drive and that puppy is working fine.

I think, the best advice is about good tech support. I had an 80GB WD hard drive 'die' on me, when it was only 6 months old. I called WD Tech Support, gave them the 'status code number", was immediately issued a RMA number and a new WD 80GB hard drive was mailed out to me that day. A good solid company will provide good tech support and stand by their products.

Another good piece of advice, when investing in a new larger hard drive, remember that they usually run hotter and your computer case needs to be adequately cooled.

It might be worthwhile for folks to review Google's hard drive study based on its own experience of using over 100,000 disk drives in its servers, from 5400 to 7200rpm, 80GB to 400GB. This links to the PDF of the report:

http://tinyurl.com/2bfcgfp

If you search for Google hard drive report you can find plenty of sites that created a synopsis of the report. Google doesn't call out names, unfortunately, but does point to a few things that you can watch for ("after their first scan
error, drives are 39 times more likely to fail within 60 days than drives with no such errors...a large fraction of our failed drives
have shown no SMART error signals whatsoever"), so it's worth the research.

I don't use Hard Drives. I have 300 floppy disks setup in a RAID0 configuration for a blazing fast setup. Boot time is a bit slower (25-30 minutes to bring my system up) but once it's logged it is lighting fast, IOPS are off the chart low. Comparable to a fibre channel SAN. I recommend this for any setup. Thanks for the info Bob! Any idea when these manufactures will come out with larger floppy's?

@ Igor, The drive you are looking at is a year 2006-2007 server hard drive, If you look at new model 1 terabyte Seagate or Western digital, Hitachi, drives, you can get one for about 80 U.S dollars. And it will be bigger better and faster than that old school thing you're looking at. But if you really want that one Geeks.com has it for $37.99
Super cheap price, huge size high quality brand name hard drives really are for sale all over the internet.

I'm told that refurbished drives may generally be *more* reliable than a new drive as they are tested more thoroughly. I also understand that refurbished drives have not really been used, but are returns and such. So why the hesitation?

EDITOR'S NOTE: The hesitation? I guess it's from the "I'm told", the "may generally", the "not really" and the "and such". That, and there's no way to know if your used drive simply was shipped in a machine that never sold, or if it came out of a machine that was used 24/7 for 2 years.

Do they still make floppies? When I used to use them, some failed while in a storage box, not being used.