Which HDDs models / vendors are most reliable in 2010?

[vindicator8]

I am considering to upgrade my hard drives. Since I only buy 1 or 2 platter design, I think 1TB solutions would be the best choice with 5OOGB platters available today. There are some models using 667GB - 750GB platters, but those are only Green Drives (Caviar Green and F4EG), and one Samsung Spinpoint F4 320GB utilizing on-side of the platter.

Considering WD, I think their drives are very good, especially Black and Blue lines maybe the best drives on the market. But they usually defraud the customer by mixing different platters in the same model. For example you can buy 3x330GB or 2x500GB WD1001FALS and you can recognize them only by revision number. WD officially refuse to tell you which revision use which platters. Although you can find this information on the web, I see this as very ugly practice. In addition I am not satisfied how WD treated load_cycle_count case in Caviar Green drives, and I do not like proprietary command requirement for configuring the drive like WDTLER or WDIDLE3.

Seagate has a very very bad reputation after 7200.11 fiasco. Their approach to customer was not good, for a long time they even refused to admit, that some problem existed. Their 7200.12 seems to be more reliable, and I think Barracuda LP drives have better performance than Caviar Greens and does not have aggressive head parking feature. Seagate is the best when you request more information about the drive. They have most extensive spec-sheets including information of number of platters and heads used. Barracuda 7200.12 drives are more than year on the market, and although they read very fast, their writing performance is told to be slower.

Samsung is a little bit unknown to me. They produce drives with excellent sequential read and write, but I am not sure about heir multitasking capabilities or NCQ implementation. Some of the benchmarks shown, they are weak in this tasks. Samsung does not mix platters in the model line, and include the platter info in the spec-sheet, although those spec-sheet are quite modest.

I would like to buy 2 drives for RAID 1 for main data storage, and I am considering one drive for eventually (not necessary) replace my system WD6401AALS Caviar Black drive. Since 500GB platters are highest available for 2 platter drives, I think 1TB models would be enough for some time. Especially I consider Western Digital WD10EALS 1TB, Samsung Spinpoint F3 HD103SJ 1TB and Seagate 7200.12 ST31000528AS. Caviar Black WD1002FAEX is highly overpriced comparing to practically similar WD10EALS.

I am not sure of any 4kB sector drives, since those drives are crippled and does not report correct sector size value. These drives work just because partitions are aligned, but non of the Operating systems is able to align them purposely, because wrong sector size is reported. Since latest Windows and Linux starts partitions on LBA 2048, partitions are aligned by default, but OS does not know about this. It is just a workaround until drives start to report correct physical sector size. I don't understand, why it is not possible to report 4kB physical and 512B logical sector....

Thank you for any advice. I give a priority to reliability, good multitasking and NCQ abilities and standard configurability.

[Dirge]

Hi you could try checking out StorageReview's reliability survey. I have entered a number of drives in there already. Hopefully the more data they collect the more reliable their survey will be.

I also got burned by Western Digital and their mixing of different platters in the same model HDD. I bought a WD Caviar SE16 WD3200AAKS hard drive expecting a single platter design but got stuck with the lower density dual platter instead. But I agree their drives remain some of the best on the market.

I would like to get a WD Caviar Black due to their StableTrac technology - The motor shaft is secured at both ends to reduce system-induced vibration and stabilize platters for accurate tracking, during read and write operations. Correct me if I am wrong but I think this is only done in enterprise class drives? Though on the negative side, being a performance drive the Caviar Black is reportedly very noisy.

I would like to know more about Samsung and their new F4 line of drives with 667 GB platters, I cant wait to see them ramp up to 1TB designs.

[zsero]

Check what I wrote about Samsung F4 in the other thread. It's the only 2 TB drive on Newegg with 5 star average rating. For anything reliable, just forget about WD or Seagate. But Hitachi or Samsung.

[vindicator8]

But Samsung F4 7200RPM models with one or two platters are nowhere....

And I am not sure about multitasking and NCQ implementation in Samsung drives...

[aristide1]

About Seagate, yeah they have some models with issues, but all I've bought from them were Entrerprise class drives, a few bucks more, larger cache, never had a problem.

All companies seem to have 1 or 2 dogs in their lineup. I use NewEgg ratings to stay away from the dogs. For instance I was considering the 500GB hybrid drive (4GB of flash inside) but too many people have had DOAs, so I'm not going to drop a C-Note ($100) on a drive that fails so often.

I've been buying 7200 rpm drives for years, almost all Seagate.