Help, Relyable hard drives

S

stupid_me85

Member
hey,

I'm in the middle of building a new system and i need to know who makes relyable hard drives, i've heard people on this forum saying that Wester Digital are to be avoided. but i don't know which makes are relyable.

Can any one help. i don't want to lose all my work.

by the way i don't know if it make any difference but my mother board is a ASUS P5B Deluxe.

Jay
 
From what why fiancee's who is a business major explains to me, the warranty a manufacturer gives is usually how long they expect it to last. Extended warranties aren't worth it either because if it doesnt break by the original warranty it probably isn't going to break.
 
Agreed, look at MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures) on the disks. Asus makes great motherboards so don't worry about it. Of course, your mileage will vary if:

1. You have inadequate cooling (overheating bearings and components)
2. Physically bang around the disk drive
3. Have power spikes, lightning strikes, brown-outs, bad a/c wiring (floating neutral/ground)
4. Have a punishing application or improperly set OS or application (thrashing disk drive heads)
5. Get poking your fingers on the board (static discharge zapping a chip)
6. Get inferior disk drives or insist on buying one on the bleeding edge (super-fast, super-high density pushing the limits, etc)
7. Get inferior power supplies
8. Leave the equipment running 24x7
9. Constantly turn the equipment on and off
10. Are unlucky, have really critical data on the drive, and think backups are for sissies, etc.

I trust if you really care for your drive and data, each month you do comprehensive diagnostics using SpinRite on the drive.

Regards, Michael
 
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If your using PCIe SATAII you can't beat Seagate and if you want to go a little bit down the food chain Western Digital makes some nice drive with 16MB cache.

I'd suggest staying away from Maxtor.
 
I second the comments regarding Maxtor. I personally have had six, yes 6, Maxtor drives die over the past three years. All were in controlled environments on machines varying in ages, so not the same batch, that never moved with clean power supplies. During that time I've had no failures from Seagate or WD drives. I would suggest either of those.
 
Seagate Barracuda is the way to go. We have had zero failures after two years using only these drives for capture, DI work and short-form edits (projects < 10 minutes TRT / < 10:1 ratio) when RAID isn't utilized.

e
 
We, too, have had a LOT of Maxtor drive failures... and the replacement drives have failed as well. Probably at least 6.

It seems like Western Digitals were terrible in 2005, but we didn't buy any in 2006, so can't say if they still suck or not.

Seagate is the only major manufacturer that puts a 5 year warranty on their drives, and (knock wood) we've found them to be reliable so far.

I would VERY HIGHLY recommend spending $600 or so and buying a Buffalo Terastation. It can be run in RAID-5 configuration and will yield about 750 gigs of storage in that configuration. We had a drive fail on one of our Terastations, but thanks to RAID, we turned it off, swapped out the bad drive with a new one, turned it back on, hit the reset switch, and went right back to work while it rebuilt the array on the new drive.

If you do a lot of large projects, or like to keep a lot of edited stuff online for easy access, it's worth it to invest in a hardware RAID solution. We built a dedicated Linux box with an Adaptec RAID card and 4 - 750 gig SATA drives, giving us 2.2 terabytes of storage that Premiere sees as one gigantic drive. It cost about $2200 all in, and has been a vast improvement in our workflow, and will, I think, be particularly helpful as we move to HD.
 
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