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!
You've just reminded me, I was a little naughty when building it, I noticed S.M.A.R.T was disabled by default, I enabled this and noticed the computer was running horribly, I disabled this, ran a lot better, don't know if this was just coincidence, but since I had no better one's and he couldn't afford another yet, I warned him it's an old drive, it may fail and I'd be sure to backup anything important until you can get another, but it did worry me a little, especially considering it was a little noisy
---------- Post added at 02:30 AM ---------- Previous post was at 02:25 AM ----------
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.
This has actually created a little fear in me actually, I'm finally getting around to getting an external backup drive, after working at my place for five years, I get a five year service award which is now nearly a year late, but I've managed to get a number to find out about it, it's a £75 voucher for selected stores, I've gone for Amazon, thought if I get the other half something and buy myself a 1tb usb backup drive for about £40 which I have seen before, because I've been bricking it for a while as I have a lot of data on my 1TB internal I don't want to lose, I take it I should avoid this one
---------- Post added at 02:32 AM ---------- Previous post was at 02:30 AM ----------
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!
He's certainly not a gamer, I built him an Athlon x2 2.7ghz, upgradable to some of the Phenom's (can't remember which) and 2gb ram (upgradable to 8GB) he uses it for web browsing, burning cd's and MS Office, so it doesn't need to be particularly fast, so just big and reliable really
