Hi all,

As a general rule if I replace any hard drives I generally like the Western Digital brand. What is the general feeling here in the forums about particular brands? Or what should you look for in a good hard drive. For your own systems I'm talking here .... after all the problems thru the forums would you consider the the WD's to be ok.

I have a QNAP/NAS and have put in two of these

WDC WD5003ABYX-01WER01.0 RE4 in raid 1 and they seem to be very quiet and run fairly cool as well.

Your input appreciated

All drives fail sooner or later. I would recommend that you keep a couple of drives of the same specs to use as parts just in case.

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Hard Disk Drive, SSD, USB Drive and RAID Data Recovery Specialist in Massachusetts

AIUI, Seagates and WDs are regarded as comparatively unreliable at the moment.

Study: A Look At Hard Drive Reliability In Russia:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/hdd ... ,2681.html

Reliability Survey:
http://www.storagereview.com/php/survey/survey_mfr.php

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

My observation -

1) seagate 7200.12- firmware issues cheap low profile single platter design ,pcb corrodes in 2 months
2) wd - cheap electronics and media ,can fail anytime ,servo alignment crtitcal recovery difficult
3) Hitachi -laptop most reliable among all breed
4) hitachi desktop - better build quality , dont know when wd-hitachi will comeup , purchase and stock as much as possible.

I used to lean towards the Maxtor drives myself, until I needed a bigger drive, but Maxtor did not have it at the time. I dived in a got myself a Seagate drive and held my breath.... Its working to this day and seems fine, just gets hot, but I placed it upside down in my PC to allow the PCB board to stay cool.

I then got external drives by Fujitsu, Toshiba and Seagate. Toshiba crapped out, one of my Fujitsu crapped out too and the other seems okay on my laptop, but it might have some bad sectors.

Truth is, any drive can fail, you have to pick one. Test it, keep your important stuff backed up and after a few months to a year, if the drive works continuously without a hint of a problem. Then keep it like gold.

Nothings certain.

Second hand drives might be a good option too, ask the seller, if you trust them, the history of the drive. But in the end, any drive can fail...