Barking cheap hard drives

[Toby]

If anyone's in the market for a new drive, Ebuyer are currently doing 1TB Hitachi drives for £59.99 delivered! Bonkers price and I just couldn't say no to more space for the server :)

[Zirax]

Good price. This might be out of date, but after the Hitachi / IBM fiasco I wouldn't go near them with a barge pole. With that kind of volume data I presume you have a backup solution?

[Toby]

Been a long time since the Deathstars and I've been using Hitachi drives for ages with no problems.

As for backups - the drive is going in the server and will be the backup drive itself so I'm only in trouble if both my own drives and the server's drives fail at the same time :)

[divine]

I think i'd rather pay £10 more and get a Western Digital.

[Psymonkee]

I think i'd rather pay £10 more and get a Western Digital.

This is my take on it too :(

[A Place of Light]

This reminds me I need to get hold of another 320gig Sammy F1.

[SiD the Turtle]

Cheap, but as others have said I'd rather pay the difference to get Sammys or WDs.

[Jingo]

I've bought a new HD but decided to pay £15 more for a Western Digital Caviar Green with a 32mb cache.

The difference between 16 & 32 mb caches may be dismissed as neglible by some but I noticed a staggering difference personally :) Choosing a personally tried-and-tested company in addition to this was worth the £15 extra in my opinion :)

Thanks for the heads up though Vertigo- competitor prices like this have no doubt brough the price of my drive of choice somewhat :)

[iCraig]

Probably just paranoia these days, but I stick to Westerns personally. Although I haven't tried Samsung. Out of all the drives I've had, my Westerns have never died prematurely. In fact, the only one that recently died was from my old old machine. 120GB IDE drive that had been working hard for nearly 6 years in a stifling case. Not bad.

I've had a Maxtor. Died after 2 months. I've had Hitachi and Seagate, died in under a year as well. When I was doing my training on our hardware side of the business, we had loads of DOA Maxtors. Same courier, same sort of padded boxes. Must have been just crap quality control as the Westerns were fine 99% of the time.

[Chuckles]

That's a bargain. I think I'll pick one of those up. I've got another 1TB Hitachi and its been fine so far.

[Mark]

I had one WD die after a month or so. It was in a RAID-1 array and not particularly well cooled. RMA replaced and all the rest in that set were fine until I retired them for bigger drives. They still work, but they're loud from running 24/7 for several years.

[Toby]

The allegiance some people seem to show to certain drives does make me chuckle a bit tbh. We all seem to stay away from brands which have "burned" us in the past or even just had a bad reputation yet I'm sure the overall failure rate of each manufacturer is roughly the same.

Personally I've not had any issues with IBM/Hitachi drives in all the years I've had them. Given that this drive will be used in the server for storing backups, it's not the end of the world if it does go pop at some point, nor is outright performance a big issue.

Actually I say "will be used" when I mean "is currently being used" as the thing turned up this morning and I only ordered it on Friday using their free 5-day delivery option. Not bad!

[iCraig]

It's no different to any brand though really. Some people prefer Sony over Grundig etc etc. Some reasons are subjective to personal experience. Even the HDDs with the best production methods and quality control lines will have units which slip through the net and perform pathetically to the customer, thus deterring the customer from buying from them again, even though the manufacturer is superior overall. Other choices are straightforward though, IME the cheaper drives are cheaper for a reason. Cheaper materials, manufacturing process, testing, development etc. Same with PSUs, cases, monitors etc. You often get what you pay for and paying an extra 5-10% can often mean the difference. :)