I remember reading a thread somewhere about hard drives and you guys were saying to stay away from one of them. I can't remember which one it was, LOL! Help a brother out?

Also, would it be cheaper to just go to http://www.frys.com/ or go to http://www.newegg.com/ for parts?

Opinions, thoughts?

Here's my opinion

Also, it was most likely Seagate you were told to stay away from. i don't use any HDD's except Western Digital. I've only had one crap out on me...ever.

I only use Western Digital also. Personal preference, but they make good stuff.

There's a 1.5TB HD from Western Digital on sale for 99.99$ on TigerDirect.ca
http://www.tigerdirect.ca/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=5764103&Sku=TSD-1500EARS

wait, y should we stay away from seagate. i have a seagate 500gb hdd and it works great, i have heard great things about seagate and western digital. i only but from 1 of them, which ever has the best deal at the time i need a hard drive.

Coach, if you don't mind Seagate :
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=4813792&CatId=8

$39.99 sounds good to me.

I would go with going through Newegg.Nothing but a positive experience for me! Thats where i bought everything to build my comp!

You could try this 1TB: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... -_-Product


I went with the 640GB: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... roduct40GB:

Obviously your preference!

Seagate fucked me hard about a year ago when they shipped a 1TB HDD with a crappy firmware bug that caused the drive to permanently go to sleep when you hibernated the computer. If you put your system to "sleep" and the drive got into this condition you were absolutely hosed and your only option was to take the disk out, pack it up and send it in to Seagate so they could replace the controller board.

Bastards knew that the drive had this bug and they chose not to recall the units they had shipped out to the retail stores...not only that but they continued to ship it with defective firmware anyways for almost 6 months AFTER the issue was reported in the field.

Bottom line...Seagate is crap and I will never buy another drive from them. I go with Western Digital now.

They're all the same, really. Every manufacturer does shitty stuff like Shredder talked about. Maxtor (they were bought out by guess who? SEAGATE), Western Digital, Fujitsu, etc.

There are horror stories about every single hard drive manufacturer out there.

Know what kind of drives I buy? Whatever I can get for cheap.

I do have an 80gb 10krpm Western Digital Raptor as my primary, and a 300gb something-or-other as my secondary.

I think you were told to stay away from Seagate cause dirtbag works for them (I think) -- Also, google says that the brands really don't matter. I haven't read this in a while but I'm pretty sure that they say that there's not a significant correlation or something.

If you ask me, WD and Seagate are the same -- fine hard drives -- most likely made with the same components if not at the same facility -- and backing up is key regardless.

One thing to note though, that as you increase storage size and density, you increase the frequency of error and it would make sense (although I'm not sure this is fact) that it would decrease also decrease lifespan.

Definitely agree, last time I checked ReadWrite manufactured something like 95% of all the magnetic heads used in all hard drives and the platters are manufactured in one of 3 major facilities. Almost all the manufacturers use the same basic components, but the controllers are usually designed in house for the major companies.

There really is very little difference between the manufacturers, I just despise Seagate now because that firmaware bug really bit me in the ass and they should have bit the bullet and pulled those drives off the shelf before I ever had the chance to buy one.

To tell you the truth its really just a lesson I learned a long time ago but I got lazy on it. Always keep your firmware, BIOS, and device drivers up to date. If I had downloaded and flashed all the latest device firmware when I built the system it would not have happened.

my biggest question is, how long were the drives out that had the bug, and how long was it knon about, u said something about it being out for 6months, how many of those hard drives were bought, and was it every single drive with that firmware that had the problem. just wondering if seagate purposely let these bad drives stay on the market too long, or was it just because it takes time for big companies to do anything, especially if it involves losing money, im sure WD and all other companies have had, or will have similar problems at some point.

I use Newegg to get the parts. Knowing what I want, I sort the results by the best rating and pick the one within my budged.

Just a tip: 4 eggs != 4 eggs. 76% of happy customer vs. 55% (http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductRe ... 6822136284 and http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductRe ... 6822148433).

Companies like Seagate will routinely issue tech bulletins when they discover a flaw in their product to inform customers who have active support contracts or watch their tech forums for this kind of information. In this particular case the tech bulletin describing the issue was published around 6/2008. The tech bulletin gave a firmware version that was affected and the stated resolution was to upgrade the firmware to a more recent version.

My drive had a manufacture date stamped on the unit indicating it came off the line in 1/2009, but the installed firmware was the same version as the one listed in their tech bulletin which was published back in June of the previous year. Basically Seagate was well aware of an issue that could cripple the HDD and leave their customers high and dry and had a fix available, but continued to manufacture product for months loading defective firmware with a potentially critical flaw.

Why would they do this, you might ask. Well the answer is simple...if you have ever worked in an ISO 9000 manufacturing environment you would know that ANY change in the manufacturing process for a given product is quite expensive. HDD's typically do not have much shelf life in the manufacturing world due to the fact that they are constantly being replaced with new models which are larger and faster, so there is usually not any process in place to change things like firmware version in manufacturing. Instead they leave updating the firmware of the device up to the customers and OEM system manufacturers, most of which do not know that its even something they need to worry about.

Basically Seagate made the decision to keep manufacturing and selling defective product simply because it was too expensive to change the manufacturing process to load a fixed firmware version...probably due to the fact that the drive was only going to be sold for another 6 or nine months anyways. I am sure that they also figured that most users would probably never see the problem or just assume the hard drive had failed and go buy a new one rather than research what might be wrong with it, so the fact is that they would only be on the hook to fix a small portion of the potential junk units they sold.

Anyways, I am sure that this same problem could easily occur with any manufacturer, but the fact is that it happened to me personally with Seagate and as a result I will never buy another Seagate drive as long as I live.

F*CK off Shredder -- I hoped I left ISO9000 when I left industry -- now I have to go back to Dr. Williamson for my nightmare problem...

lol

gman and fom are absolutely correct, if you're storing anything of importance, you need at least 3 failsafes. I believe google has every single e-mail that we have stored on 3 separate drives in 3 separate random geographic locations, and failovers are completely transparent. at home it's a little less transparent but it doesnt have to be a huge headache when a drive inevitably fails.

using web based storage is always one good failsafe out of the 3. my "essential" files are stored on my dropbox, where they get versioned, delete-protected, and of course backed up.

Then at home I have a 3-tier drive system, with the active drive, and 2 "backup" drives. Couple that all with a solid battery backup for clean power & outage protection, and my shit's solid for the past 6 years or so. It took lots of headaches and perma-lost-data to get to this point.

lol, I agree completely...I will never mention those ugly words again.

Definitely backups are more than a little important. When this thing hit me I had full backups...what screwed me was that I also had a huge deadline which I missed because I had to troubleshoot the problem which took an hour or so and then waste another hour or so dealing with incompetent Seagate tech support to get an RMA number. After that I had to go get a new freaking drive and do a full restore to get back up and running because I could not just stay offline for a week while they fixed the damn thing.

Basically my dev box was down all day and people at work were pissed.

Ok no if you want an amazing hdd go with this samsung hdd 2x winner of newegg customer choice awards and is only 90 bucks for 1TB http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822152185