Hard drives

Neil_Jones

There are only two hard drive manufacturers these days: Seagate and Western Digital.

Western Digital make all the Hitachi/HGST and Western Digital drives, and Seagate make all the Seagate drives and what is still around of the Samsung drives.

Toshiba originally left the market but came back after Western Digital bought Hitachi and Toshiba bought the production assets of Hitachi, so technically Toshiba drives are now rebranded HGST/Hitachi drives and any Fujitsu drives still around are now made by Toshiba.

DCFC79

Fightsback wrote: »

What are you going to use a NAS for ?
/

I have or had an Iomega network attached storage until it stopped working, had various files on it.

I was thinking of replacing it with a similar product or just an external drive.

TrickyWicky

ARandomMiser wrote: »

There is less of a choice generally I would go for Hitachi or Western Digital. History has shown me not to trust Seagate drives for critical data.

I had an external Hitachi drive years ago and it was the most unreliable piece of junk on planet earth. In fact the only reliable thing about it was that it was unreliable.

It made very strange lound squeeking noises, clunking noises, head resetting noises...

I then realised there was a reason the untrustable sharks at Tesco had reduced it... and took it back!

They may have changed their quality now but Hitachi used to be a well known brand years ago.. but these days you barely hear of them. There must be a reason for that... they're quality is about as good as that of Bush.. and incidentally when my Wharfdale TV was recalled years ago by Tesco, it was a Bush product that they wanted to replace it with... I told them no and got a Daewoo instead.. which went on for years without fault!

S0litaire

What ever drive you decide on take note of the warranty provided!

Some companies will only give you a 2 year warranty.
A few will offer a 5 year one if it's a Drive designed for NAS usage and it's being used in a NAS enclosure of some description.

Also their has been a merging of some HDD manufacturers over the past 5-10 years:

Hitachi (now called HGST) is now owned by Western Digital

OCZ (Now defunct SSD drive maker!) was absorbed back into Toshiba last year and re-emerged as a brand rather than a company.

I Like Toshiba SSD's (and original OCZ SSD drives!) never had a problem.

Nodding_Donkey

pappa_golf wrote: »

nas drives use RED drives , not green

this

Well worth the extra few quid.

Johnmcl7

TrickyWicky wrote: »

I had an external Hitachi drive years ago and it was the most unreliable piece of junk on planet earth. In fact the only reliable thing about it was that it was unreliable.

It made very strange lound squeeking noises, clunking noises, head resetting noises...

I then realised there was a reason the untrustable sharks at Tesco had reduced it... and took it back!

They may have changed their quality now but Hitachi used to be a well known brand years ago.. but these days you barely hear of them. There must be a reason for that... they're quality is about as good as that of Bush.. and incidentally when my Wharfdale TV was recalled years ago by Tesco, it was a Bush product that they wanted to replace it with... I told them no and got a Daewoo instead.. which went on for years without fault!

Hitachi have one of the best reputations currently for hard drives and have done for quite some time and although they've been absorbed into WD, that division is still producing enterprise drives and their higher end consumer drives are rebranded enterprise drives. Although people question Backblaze's data, I'm not aware of anyone else who has provided similar data over thousands of drives and they found Hitachi drives by far the most reliable - if I based my opinion on hard drive companies on a single drive failing, I'd never buy any drive from any company.

I've been using HGST 4TB drives for the last couple of years, have five of them now and no failures but small sample size and they're all backed up.

John

grumpycrab

AndyPix wrote: »

Western Digital "My Passport" external drives are good,

DCFC79 wrote: »

I have or had an Iomega network attached storage until it stopped working,

Avoid external drives which come packaged with a bespoke integrated (usually USB3) interface card. MyPassport drives used to be like that - not sure about current drives.

DCFC79

grumpycrab wrote: »

Avoid external drives which come packaged with a bespoke integrated (usually USB3) interface card. MyPassport drives used to be like that - not sure about current drives.

Thanks, I'll keep it in mind.

stockton_2

I have a Nas drive with WD Reds for main backup. They are my "Fort Knox".

Then I have two computers with 1TB Seagate drives. I got those drives because they were cheap. About £44 each in Argos, as I recall.

One of the Seagates did go funny on me and I lost all the data. But I had it all backed up so it was no big deal. I reformatted it and it is working ok at the moment.

I once lost a huge amount of data on an old HD, cannot remember what brand it was. Since then I have adopted the double belt and braces approach. I never have less than three copies of my valuable stuff. I also have back-ups of some programs on old IDE drives.

KevBalls

I would only buy one that supports USB 3 now

most of the cheap ones mentioned above are very slow