Its that time of year, I need massive hard drives for 2008. UGH

To do Seagate or Western Digital?

Come on, lets here the horror stories and figure out which flakes less...

my 500gb external seagate drive just crashed (i had to change the enclosure, and it seems to be working alright now. apparently it was overheating).. but I wouldn't buy another seagate drive. It was only 6 months old. Plis their costumer service sucked when I called for help.

My brother has a terabyte western digital drive thats almost full, never had any problems... I'm gonna try them next.

K N O C K

O N

W O O D


but I have three Western Digital drives -- two 500 gb and 1 tb and I have a portable 200 gb La Cie and so far so good. I've had the La Cie for a year and a half and it's gone with me everywhere I go, and I've had one of the WD drives for a year, one for about 8 months and the new 1tb one for about a month.

please don't die please don't die please don't die

I've used all kinds of drives and the only ones that don't give me fits are LaCie's. Now I won't buy anything else.

I keep saying it doesn't really matter. The models and the technology changes too fast for the brand to have any meaningful difference. But you can get some good feedback by going to sites like NewEgg and checking the user ratings.

The most important thing you can do is keep them cool and have multiple backups. And don't buy a drive that is bigger than your needs. Bigger drives run hotter, have less tolerance for problems, and put a lot more eggs in one basket.

I love my WD mybook drives.. The look pretty all stacked up on a shelf and they're easy to grab if my house is on fire.

I have had 2 Lacie drives fail on me. Love my Western Digitals but prefer to stay away from the mybook line. No power switch and they power down randomly. Now I buy the internals and use external cases.

Everyone has different luck and different results as you can tell just from the varied replies already.

My dad will not touch a WD drive, yet I have had years of hassle free storage with them until just recently a MyBook drive fried my FireWire ports on my G5 and my MacBook Pro. I did not know what had happened until after I took the drive back, so I do not know if it was a faulty cable or the drive enclosure. So now after a long, prosperous relationship with them, I won't buy another WD.

I use to use all LaCie drives with no problems, but have heard too many complaints about their recent stuff - but then again wiljax swears by them. I have been using Seagate with no problems the last few months, but AshleyB says hers crashed and customer service sucked.

Point is, that unfortunately I do not think there is a hard drive company right now that you can really put unfailing trust in. It isn't like my Mac, where I know it will just work every time I need it(unless i hook a faulty drive up to it)

My dad uses Maxtor with great success, and I have started to use them along with Seagate.

Seagate and WD are both excellent choices. As has been said before, all hard drives WILL fail at some point in time... you can't get around that. Buy multiple drives and keep multiple backups (I back everything up twice to hard drives, so i have three copies on HDD, and once to DVD)

The MyBooks are a fantastic buy as long as you get the right one - in this case the premium or pro editions. Don't get the cheaper line of MyBooks. Seagate FreeAgent hard drives are really nice too. For Mac, they don't support remote access but you can set that up through your Airport Extreme or Leopard if you want. I've also got a Seagate FreeAgent Go 160gb pocket hard drive that works REALLY well for traveling. It fits in my macbook pro case or in my back pocket and weighs all of a few ounces. I've banged the thing around quite a bit and it's never had a problem.

So... WD or Seagate?

Either one.

Good luck!

My post should have said "good feedback on specific drives from places like NewEgg."

Thats a great idea, I've done this myself a few times too. Just remember anyone can comment so try and get a grasp of someones knowledge from their post. Any tool can say they it sucks but if you weed out the one's who actually have an honest opinion it can really help you decide.

Seagate owns Maxtor now, so the pool of HDD manufacturers is shrinking a little.

I'm reluctant to try Samsung drives, but I've been happy with the Hitachi drives we've had for some time.

We're all LaCie and I've never had a problem. I literally have 11 of their drives sitting in my house in over 3 TB of storage and haven't had any issues.

I'm with the others though.... I don't think it really matters that much. Any drive will eventually fail and every company has had drives fail so it's kinda a crap shoot.

My 500GB MyBook just died on me today. AWESOME.

edit: And I've only had it for 2 months.

I have an 80GB Samsung Pleomax 2.5 inch drive that I love!
Ok, it is gorgeous chrome and black, comes with a nice case and a polishing cloth that is nicer than what I use on my lenses.
Oh, did I mention that I got it at Circuit City for $23 after rebate? I wish I had bought a few more.
It has one button backup too.

I have had bad luck with two SeagatePro 320GB externals. They both overheat and then give a devicce not recognized error to my PC. I returned them and went with the same drives on an internal SATA. My PC case is nice and cool and they seem to be fine. Two in a RAID 01 array. Not only that, but I was able to find the internals at Best Buy for $60 each 3 weeks ago on sale. Now they are back to $119.

HD prices have been dropping and there are some great clearance sales out there.

Same basc problem with me and an external seagate, but the drive is unrecoverable accept by a 3rd party. The low-bal estimate for recovery is $600, the high-ball is $2 G's.

This may or may not be a weakness with Seagate, but this is such a bitter pill that I am inclined to not buy from them again.

4 WD drives (2 500's, 1TB and 1-250gb-mini that travels with my laptop).

Haven't had a problem yet (k.o.w.) I've been pleased enough to stick with them--but I NEVER stack them. I had two right next to each other for a while, thinking "how cute" but I noticed that they run a lot hotter that way, now they stand upright with 4-ish inches between them. Seems to work well.

As Trevor says, all drives will probably fail eventually, so redundant backup is still important.

I've had some issues with Maxtor / Seagate in the past, so I'm trying Western Digital next on the advice of our IT guy...so we'll see. Lots of different experiences here for sure.

I'm a pretty big fan of HD's that work....

I've used a lot of different ones. I liked the My Books, but I now use the Lacie d2 Quadra's and am digging them. I buy a couple at a time and mirror them and when they're full I keep on hooked up and take the other over to my moms.

Like people said, HD's will fail with use...eeny-meeny-miney-mo...

It doesn't really matter which brand you go for... There's always a chance you'll get one that will pack up sooner rather than later. So as that means you need to perform regular backups anyway, get the one with the longest warranty (I was about to order two Western Digital 500GB drives to put in a RAID1 array, but they only have a three year warranty. I got two 500GB Samsung drives for the same price with a five year warranty. I figure that if Samsung are prepared to give out a five year warranty, they can't be that bad (and even if they are I'll get free replacements for the next five years)

I manage about 40TB of data for my day job. Number one rule, is every drive will fail. Sucks to think about that way, but it's my way of life. Heat is the enemy, power surges suck also. So fans, plus nice UPS power and you give your drives the best chance. Just pick a drive with a nice warranty, and buy 2. For me currently that's Lacie, but i mostly just find they work really well with the Apple's i run.

If you have the money a nice RAID setup is helpful. But most of us don't have that cash, so 2 drives, that get sync'd once a night would be perfect. A 3rd to rotate off-site would be idea. I personally have one at home, and one at my day job, and take a laptop back and forth. And DVD's in a safe.