Most Reliable Hard Drive?

[WrathOskvro]

So out of the blue, my main hard drive died (WD Caviar Blue. 250GB). No pun intended. Dropped my cousin's hard drive in and installed Win7 again. Cousin said I could use his since he hasn't built his rig yet. I also have 500GB Caviar blue, and an old refurbed IDE 250GB, by Maxtor (yeah, I know). Well, even after the 250GB WD drive died, I'm still hearing this constant reading/clicking noise from one of the hard drives in my computer. I'm guessing it's from the old IDE. I'm pretty sure I remember the same noise before I bought the 500GB WD drive thankfully.

But anyway, just to be safe, I'm ready to get another hard drive. But, according to reviews, there is no such thing as a good one. From what I've seen anyway. So, my question to you guys is, what's the most reliable hard drive brand and/or model? I'm sick of wondering if I'm going to have a failure or not -_- I know all hard drives will eventually fail, but I had the WD Caviar Blue for only a year before it failed, without warning. I would prefer to get one 500gb or higher. Maybe even a 1TB but every single 1TB drive I see on the market has tons of people saying that theirs failed after a short time, so maybe not.

I also looked into some SSD's but I saw reviews where even those failed.

[isiolia]

HDDs are one of the most common failure points in a PC - any moving parts are. On top of that, they're really very high precision devices. It doesn't take much to screw one up.

Any series of drives are going to have people who wound up with a bad one. You can look at, say, Newegg reviews though - if the vast majority are positive, then you're likely just looking at a standard failure rate. Maybe the drives were jolted during shipping. It's pretty rare that an entire series of drives is failure prone (like, say, Deskstars were back in the day, earning them the moniker of Deathstars...before IBM sold off their storage division).

I've not had problems with WD Black drives - I've put them in my own PC, and in PCs built for several family members, etc. In addition to being slightly higher performance drives, they also carry a 5 year warranty as opposed to the 3 year on the Blue series.

That said, I'm confident that someone else has had theirs die after a month. Even knowing that, I'd still buy one. Now, if I looked and saw that every other review was negative...that'd be different.

Simple thing though, really, is to always keep more than one copy of important stuff, distributed across multiple drives (ideally from different production runs).

Since your 250GB should still be under warranty, I'd maybe still look at an additional drive, and just make use of the replacement one for backups.

[irixith]

The WD Black series and Samsung Spinpoint F4 series are the best of what's around. All hard drives die, and quality control seems to be a thing of the past, but those two drive series seem to have consistently less failures and problems than the cheap stuff.

[SpoonyBard]

I picked up my first WD external about 6 years ago and it's still running perfectly to this day. I've always been a fan.

That said, I recently tried a Seagate 1.5TB and it made a clicking noise right out of the box. I strongly dislike the fact that you have to configure it to be hot pluggable. After moving about 200GB of backups, I got a Delayed Write Error. It's fixable, and the data can usually be restored within minutes - but I don't think i've ever been more upset than when I thought I lost that data.

That being said, every drive has its problems. My roommate owns the 1TB version of the same Seagate drive and has never had a problem with his whereas i've only run into them. I know people who have had the same WD drives as I, and they've died within months.

That being said, I like the WD series, the black caviars are nice. I still don't trust them to keep any truly important files, but they're nice for media storage.

[vlame]

most any solid state drive(less moving parts and faster speed) or 74k rpm or faster drive(faster seek time, and less work for the drive).

as your OS drive these should be great, although these have very low capacity, use other slower drives to play media and such.

as far as failing, its all about abuse. ive taken care of a wd 1.5tb advanced format drive, just used it for data and sometimes not even having it plugged if i dont need it. do not stream, view or drop slow files to (making disc images, slow file transfers)

[WrathOskvro]

I was actually thinking about getting a 1tb Caviar Green for storage. Due to it having a slower RPM wouldn't that make it less likely to fail over time? Caviar Black is another one I was thinking about going for, because of the supposed feature where the head doesn't hit the disc..or something like that. I forget exactly what they call it.

[isiolia]

The slower RPM won't really change the reliability. The Green series are decent for mass storage, but aren't good for system drives (they spin down too much, in addition to being slow to start with).

I've had some mixed experiences with them anyway - my home server has three of the 2TB ones in it, which emulate 512 byte sectors despite being 4KB sectors...which wound up being an issue for me trying to run non-Windows servers

Basically, they're fine if you're just looking at 'em for dumping media files on, and using them in Windows. The Black series drives are better for running programs off of, or overall speed.

[opethfan]

The most reliable drive is the one that hasn't failed on you. Useless answer, but it's the only one I can give.

Some love Seagate. Some Seagates fail. Some love WD. Some WD fail, etc.

The most important thing is to ALWAYS BACKUP your data regularly. Once a day, once a week, etc. Just always keep a second, preferably third or fourth copy of all essential data. If it's extremely important, keep the backup away from your house, in case of a fire or natural disaster. Backup on a server in another country, just keep extra copies of your essential data, and then if and when a drive does fail, it's just an inconvenience, not a life shattering loss.

[Inazuma]

The best configuration is an SSD for your OS and programs, and a large HDD to store your pornography. SSDs are really amazing. The speed is very nice and no moving parts means there is much less risk of failure. However, after 5 years, it may die anyway. They won't last forever. They can only rewrite to the same location a certain amount of times, so the more you use it, the sooner it will die.

Like others have said, you have to backup your data. You should have backups of your backups as well. Hard drives fail, so if you care about your data at all, you will make backups. Good luck.

[WrathOskvro]

^Def true. The most important stuff really is my lyrics and random recordings of guitar riffs and things that I think up. And raw mixes that I do..though it is a real pain in the ass getting back a huge library of games and music too though. o_o Anyway. I just got my replacement drive in the mail from WD. It's a recertified one so hopefully that means this one will be more reliable.