Who makes the worst IDE hard drives?

Geeky1Geeky1 University of the Pacific (Stockton, CA, USA)
edited November 2004 in Hardware
What manufacturers' IDE (including SATA) hard drives have you had the most problems with?

And, since I can't post a poll ATM because there's something wrong with my internet connection, here are the options I WAS going to list within said poll...

//EDIT
Tnx. Keebs
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Comments

  • ThraxThrax 🐌 Austin, TX Icrontian
    edited November 2004
    Fujitsu. My dad is a high-level manager at the primary michigan mail sorting facility for the USPS, and part of his responsibilities include parts acquisition. Fujitsu was offering a massive shipment of harddrives (400+) for a good price -- so the USPS processing/sorting facility in Troy, MI bought them. After 1 year, 0 survived.
  • GnomeWizarddGnomeWizardd Member 4 Life Akron, PA Icrontian
    edited November 2004
    fujitsu I worked a a computer store for over 2 years and we sold them as our " top of the line drives" i told the owner he was a complete bafooon for doing that and it came back to bite him in hte butt. 1 out of every 15 was defective
  • floppybootstompfloppybootstomp Greenwich New
    edited November 2004
    Fujitsu. I only ever bought one. It lasted 6 months.

    Alternatively, with every make, make a list, blindfold yourself and stick a pin in the list. There's your answer ;)
  • primesuspectprimesuspect Beepin n' Boopin Detroit, MI Icrontian
    edited November 2004
    strange. I've never had any problem with fujitsu. I have had many, many problems with IBM drives. I was burned in the ass very badly by selling those hunks of crap to my customers.
  • LincLinc Owner Detroit Icrontian
    edited November 2004
    Poll added. I actually just realized I could do that for the first time... it's at a weird place in the thread tools menu :p
  • DanGDanG I AM CANADIAN Icrontian
    edited November 2004
    IBM for me. I've seen so many deathstars die, it's sick. Second worst would be Fujitsu.
  • Geeky1Geeky1 University of the Pacific (Stockton, CA, USA)
    edited November 2004
    Interesting... I haven't had any hard drives die on me, but my dad says he's had more Seagates fail than any other brand... a lot of our older (P2-400) machines at work have Fujitsu drives in them, and as far as I know, they've been mostly reliable... haven't had any problem with IBMs either (altho our Deskstar drives are too old to be affected by the problems with the 75GXPs)
  • danball1976danball1976 Wichita Falls, TX
    edited November 2004
    I thought that Conner didn't exist anymore, same with ExcelStor and Trigem.

    I've never had any problems with Maxtor. My oldest Maxtor, a 60GB ATA133 7200RPM drive is 2 years old, and the other two are both 120GB ATA133 8MB cache 7200RPM drives that are about 10 months old.

    Western Digital on the other hand... I bought a 17.2GB drive, lasted about 3 years (2000-2002), my Brother bought a 40GB Western Digital, it lasted about 1 year (2003- Oct 2004). I then had them buy a 60GB Maxtor for that computer.

    I originally bought a 20GB Western Digital in 2001, I gave it to someone after buying the 1st 120GB in 2003, I don't know if its still going.
  • LeonardoLeonardo Wake up and smell the glaciers Eagle River, Alaska Icrontian
    edited November 2004
    I can't say worst, as it would require an equal sampling of many drives of each brand. I'll just provide my history:

    Brand: Owned/bad-died

    Conner: 2/2
    Western Digital: 16/0
    Maxtor: 4/1
    IBM (Deskstar): 1/1
    Hitachi: 3/3
    Seagate: 2/2
  • Geeky1Geeky1 University of the Pacific (Stockton, CA, USA)
    edited November 2004
    I thought that Conner didn't exist anymore, same with ExcelStor and Trigem.

    Conner doesn't, ExcelStor does, dunno about Trigem. Just because they've gone out of business doesn't mean that they're not the worst manufacturer tho... it just means that they were so bad that they went under ;D
  • JChretienJChretien Vancouver, BC, Canada
    edited November 2004
    i have a 6gb fujitsu hdd and it works great my sister is still using it ;p
    as for the other brands, i have one of each of the major brands in my computer.. seagate a maxtor and a WD i'll let you know which dies first ;p oh and i've also got an IBM deathstar so i'll see how it goes ^^
  • lemonlimelemonlime Canada Member
    edited November 2004
    I've used many WD drives over the years, probably 6 various drives, not a single failure. I have also had maxtor drives (maybe 3 or 4).. I've only had one bad maxtor, and it was an immediatly apparent problem with a new drive. Our Dell Optiplex systems at work use WD drives (older GX110 and GX150 machines), and out of <50 machines, I remember seeing one bad drive. Some of the newer Dell Optiplex models are using Maxtor drives, and again.. no problems.

    By a landslide, the worst drive I have seen/worked with are IBM travelstars. We use Dell Latitude C600/C610 laptops at work, and all of the C600 models had IBM travelstar drives. We had approximatly 60-70 of them. Today, I believe there are just a handful of original drives still alive, maybe <5. All of these machines were purchased 2-4 years ago. Dell never admitted that there was a 'known issue' with these drives, even today. What a joke. :shakehead

    On the flipside, we had many old IBM 300PL/GL machines with older 6-10GB deskstar drives, and I dont remember a single bad drive from that era. Looks like it was just a mass defect that was not addressed.
  • ThraxThrax 🐌 Austin, TX Icrontian
    edited November 2004
    By in large, I've owned Maxtor and Western Digital my entire life. 3 or 4 of each. I've had one Maxtor drive fail on me, but it was five years old and I think it was just luck of the draw.

    Maxtor was exceedingly prompt on getting me a replacement, so no harm done. I'll stick with WD/Maxtor until I see a clear third contender.
  • LeonardoLeonardo Wake up and smell the glaciers Eagle River, Alaska Icrontian
    edited November 2004
    Nearly same story. All the drives in which I've had a part in the purchase decision have been WD or Maxtor. As your experience, one Maxtor went bad, but was replaced amazingly fast by Maxtor's online RMA process. I have much respect for both manufacturers.
  • edited November 2004
    Seagate 3/0
    WD 11/3
    Maxtor 2/0
    That's all the drives I've bought in my experience and the ratio with WD is way too high to make me recommend them highly. I like the way they work when they're not dying but still a 30% failure rate is unacceptable to me.
  • SimGuySimGuy Ottawa, Canada
    edited November 2004
    Brand: Owned / Failed / Reason

    Conner: 2 / 0
    IBM: 12 / 1 (all UltraStar SCSI Drives... so they don't really count)
    Seagate: 3 / 0
    WD: 7 / 2 (2 died mysteriously - no idea why either)
    Maxtor: 4 / 2 (HDD still works... just won't take an OS. Screwed up somehow).
    Fujitsu: 1 / 0 (still chugging along today - 2.62 GB from 1997)
    NEC: 1 / 1 (died due to age... 2.1 GB drive just wore out after 7 years)
    Quantum: 2 / 0 (drives were still working when sold)

    While the data above shows I've had the most failures with WD's, it happend as a freak accident, so it really can't be attributed, as there was a Maxtor hard disk hooked up at the time that died as a result of the same system malfunction.

    Worst hard drives in my view? Gotta be the old 60 & 75GXP IBM DeskStar's that were/are dropping like flies.
  • Geeky1Geeky1 University of the Pacific (Stockton, CA, USA)
    edited November 2004
    NEC made hard drives? o_O
  • SimGuySimGuy Ottawa, Canada
    edited November 2004
    Geeky1 wrote:
    NEC made hard drives? o_O

    AFAIK, back in the mid 90's they did. The label on the drive was purple and read NEC very clearly. I think Versa or something like that was the main model name. :)
  • mmonninmmonnin Centreville, VA
    edited November 2004
    Ive had more WDs die on me more than anything else. I had one 80gb die on me and the other several were small >4gb HDDs. I would still rather buy a WD over all other brand tho.
  • Straight_ManStraight_Man Geeky, in my own way Naples, FL Icrontian
    edited November 2004
    In mfr order, worst to best:

    Seagate & Conner (bearings, stepper motor and rotaional motor drive trains, and embedded HD controller card O\H on the drives with rubber\polymer sheets under the controller for noise absorbtion-- they could randomly be good to gawdawful lemonish things).

    Quantum (media coatings, stepper motor drive trains)

    Fujitsu (QC, not evenly reliable, and note a lot of the so-called Deathstars WERE mfr'd OEM to IBM by Fujitsu, and that IBM uses more Hitachi OEM'd HDs now). Mitsubishi was about in line with Fujitsu, between them and Maxtor. Samsung is about at Maxtor's level.

    Maxtor (compatibility and reliability issues in batches at once), for consumer grade HDs, but for Enterprise level HDs they are very good (and expensive in those high-end grades, to very costly for the fiber-channel Maxtor lines and the Atlas lines of HD).

    WD and Hitachi are some of the best, overall, HDs I have used and sold. WD edges Hitachi a bit, not much.


    That's my experience. Samsung is middle-of-the-road to equal to Maxtor, more compatible but with some batch problems moreso than WD overall.
  • TheBaronTheBaron Austin, TX
    edited November 2004
    excluding the IBMs and other manufacturers that dont make HDDs anymore and thus dont fit the criteria of who MAKES the worst IDE hard drives

    I'd have to say the ones i've had the most problems with have been WDs
    my maxtors and hitachis are rock solid, my WD has some problems...
  • ShivianShivian Australia
    edited November 2004
    Mmm been a long time since I've had trouble with a drive (touch wood) but you guys reminded me I had trouble with some Fujitsu drives back in the 486/early Pentium days :p
  • danball1976danball1976 Wichita Falls, TX
    edited November 2004
    Our electronics shop uses a trailer that uses a Conner hard drive. The trailer is 6 feet wide, 5 feet tall, and about 7 feet long, used to troubleshoot electronics systems on the B-52. The trailers are being replaced by a hardened Sony laptop.
  • GrayFoxGrayFox /dev/urandom Member
    edited November 2004
    Owned /Died
    Maxtor 5/4 ( i had rma the dead drives all were taken but after they were repaired they failed again shortly after after)

    Westren Digital 4/1 (only drive by them that died was a 2gb drive on my p1 (computer got knocked over durring a defrag :rolleyes: . Drive still worked kinda made clicking sounds when starting (think heads got stuck on park stoped after the drive went for data) and had bad sectors)

    IBM 1/0 (had a 20gb one very relieable never had one problem)

    Seagate 2/0 (had a pair of 20gb drives sold them to a friend there still working today)

    Samsung 1/1 (had a 500mb in my 586 cyrix died a year after buying it)

    Fujitsu 1/0 (500mb Used in my Cryix till i sold it no idea if its still working)

    Quantum 1/1 (got it for $20 from a buddy a 10gb bigfoot drive was extreemly slow,loud and didnt have a park mode died durring this summer when i moved into my new house durring moveing)

    Trigem (i havent owned any of these but i do co-op at a computer store and we have 10 dead ones pilled on top of each other. more of these dead then any other brand.
  • Geeky1Geeky1 University of the Pacific (Stockton, CA, USA)
    edited November 2004
    Ok, all you people voting for Maxtor need to stop ;D

    I've got like 14 Maxtor DiamondMax 9s... altho they've been flawlessly reliable so far :)
  • GrayFoxGrayFox /dev/urandom Member
    edited November 2004
    Only relieable maxtor ive had was a 20gb 5400rpm drive :rolleyes:
  • Geeky1Geeky1 University of the Pacific (Stockton, CA, USA)
    edited November 2004
    wonderful
    /me goes to back up <strike>porn</strike> important documents
  • FlintstoneFlintstone SE Florida
    edited November 2004
    In other words -- imporntant -- documents!

    ;D;D;D
  • MERRICKMERRICK In the studio or on a stage
    edited November 2004
    Sorry geeky1 but all I can add is:

    Own 11 maxtors since '99 one died last month (bought in '99)
    (Own one Quantum from '98 still going strong)

    Had a Segate die on me within one year back in '98

    Own 2 WD's one died but got a new one(?) RMA'd immediately

    I have a Segate 512MB drive that actually still works (I keep it around as an antique souvenir).

    As a side note, I opened up the dead (past warranty) Maxtor two days ago. Very cool! Now here's my question:
    There are two magnets in the drive and they are quite strong. I'm wondering if one needs a magnetic force as strong as these magnets to be able to corrupt the data on the hard drive. In other words, how strong a magnetic force in actual contact to a hard drive will corrupt the data?

    BTW I don't expected anyone to answer this.
  • LeonardoLeonardo Wake up and smell the glaciers Eagle River, Alaska Icrontian
    edited November 2004
    BTW I don't expected anyone to answer this.
    OK then, I won't. :mad:



    ;D
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