Is this hard drive okay

[emperor76]

Hi all, a guy I recently built a computer for is at some point going to get a new hard drive as I put an old untested one in for now to temporarily save on cost, he's looking to get a 1tb one, the one I have in my computer I got for £40 new it's a Samsung spinpoint and I have a bit of a thing for Samsung and their hard drives have never failed me, but I couldn't find one new that's nearly as cheap, so I came across this WD 1TB 3.5 inch Internal Hard Drive - Caviar Blue: Amazon.co.uk: Computers & Accessories Now I've had nothing bit bad experience with WD, but it seems to be in a laptop every time and I suspect the users are mistreating (dropping them), my concern is that it says "item under review", has amyone had any experience with this drive? thanks in advance

 

[BK_123]

If you read the reviews they are mostly positive. Everyone has their own opinions and experiences when it comes to this kind of thing. I mainly use Western Digital, When I upgraded my laptops hard drive I got WD and all of my external hard drives are WD and haven't had much trouble.

 

[BikerEcho]

I think i have a had only 2 or 3 WD drives. Nothing wrong with them.
The only drive i have had dying on me was a Seagate. Any drive can fail.
And since WD isn't considered a budget brand, i don't have a reason to believe that it's more likely to die than others.
I believe that WD is a more popular brand among computer manufacturers. I see quite a few of them here at work. So it's properly more likely to replace a WD drive because there are more of them. (Just a theory, I am not sure if it's actually true that they are more popular)

 

[BikerEcho]

Ohh wait. I did actually have a WD drive die on me 7 years ago. But it was hardly the drives fault. That laptop overheated all the time.


But anyway. I found an interesting article. They put the 3 most popular HDD brands failure rate up against each other.
The 3 most popular are Seagate, WD and Hitachi. Hitachi and WD are rather close, Hitachi being slightly more durable. Seagate came in last of the 3. Looks like Seagate had a huge problem with many of their 3TB models last year.
Look at the colored bars. They are the most updated. (failure rate for 2014)

http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/175089-who-makes-the-most-reliable-hard-drives

 

[emperor76]

Thanks for the replies, it says it's £34 new with their "frustration free packaging" which seems like a bargain to me, I hope this means they will still provide adequate protection during transport being a hard drive, I'm sure it would be more than worth their while to reduce the number of DOA drives that would be sent back.

 

[BK_123]

I think i have a had only 2 or 3 WD drives. Nothing wrong with them.
The only drive i have had dying on me was a Seagate. Any drive can fail.
And since WD isn't considered a budget brand, i don't have a reason to believe that it's more likely to die than others.
I believe that WD is a more popular brand among computer manufacturers. I see quite a few of them here at work. So it's properly more likely to replace a WD drive because there are more of them. (Just a theory, I am not sure if it's actually true that they are more popular)

I think I've had a Seagate drive and it died.

 

[Celegorm]

At the moment I'm running nothing but Seagate drives. With the 20 or so drives I've had over the last 6 years, only 1 has died within the warranty period. The rest filled up and were replaced.

That said, I'd say the article Biker linked to is pretty much debuneked. Their data source for their write-up has been found to be unreliable with the source's own admitted issues (like heat and vibration) being big factors quickening a drive's death. Dispelling Backblaze's HDD Reliability Myth - The Real Story Covered

But still this just proves the point that all drives can fail - they are mechanical after all and who knows what happens to them when they are shipped. Any one drop while on the big boat can mean a DOA drive.

 

[setishock]

I've had a Hitachi 40GB 1.8 inch micro drive in my Panasonic video camera. Not one moment's problem with it.
I used to swear by Samsung's Spinpoint 80 and 120. When I did use them they were rugged and trouble free. Don't use them as of late.
I've had a couple of Seagate's back in the day. Both were almost full and crapped right on out. Replacing the controller boards did nothing. It was a bad batch and Seagate refused to replace them. Screw them. I lost a lot of pictures. The bad taste still lingers.
As for WD, I use them exclusively now. Never had one moment's problem with any of them. The only problematic product I got from WD is the 3TB USB 3.0 My Book external drive. The problem is not in the electronics or the hard drive itself. The problem lies in the flaky USB 3.0 jack on the enclosure. It will drop out and I had to jigger the plug in the jack to get it to come back. As soon as I find a USB 3.0 breakout board, it's going to get replaced.

Bottom line is all brands have their ups and downs. It's the nature of the beast. Just make sure you BACK UP, BACK UP, BACK UP, all your data.

 

[~Darkseeker~]

Just like any brand of drive, there are good ones and bad ones.

Some good ones arrive DOA, shipping damage or whatever, some cheaper drives go on for years. In terms of reliability for hard drives it really is on a per-drive basis.

The drive you linked in the OP was a Caviar Blue, these are 7200RPM drives but are not the top end. For gaming or faster read/write you probably want the Black edition, which is on the whole a bit faster due to caches and such, still 7200RPM though.

Samsung, Seagate and Western digital all make decent drives for the most part, occasionally they have DOAs and sometimes they degrade quicker due to thermals or poor parts or whatever; bottom line is, that's what S.M.A.R.T is for!

 

[Celery]

I had my share of good and bad drives from at least 3 brands. After the internet was released to us I had better luck of getting good drives because of user reviews. Just look for a run of bad batches and avoid that model at the time.

I have the WD Green 500g in my i3 system that's about 6 years old and still going strong. I ran the diagnosis on it and it's still 100%. Thanks to the reviews.

In my i5 system I'm using now I have a Seagate Constellation 1TB that's 100% in the reviews. It's an enterprise drive so it's not cheap.