Need advice on replacement hard drive

[tony]

I have a which is Hitachi HDT721025SLA380 ATA
Hitachi HDT721025SLA380 ATA
Which is now causing me problems. I need to replace quickly but I haven'rt bought a hard drive for quite a while and its quite confusing what to buy. I am looking for a good one, but not too expensive to replace and preferably as big as possible with amount of work I do with my comp. Any help would be appreciated

Tony

[Sope]

Different people are naturally going to recommend different manufacturers and models depending on their particular experience.

Having said that, my personal preference would be a Samsung SpinPoint F3.
Any of the Western Digital Caviar series (Green, Blue, or Black, depending on your needs) would also be a good choice.

You should easily be able to find a 500GB Samsung SpinPoint or WD hard drive for under 35 quid online.

Obviously it needs to be a SATA going by your current drive.
Ideally the bigger the cache the better.
7200rpm would be desirable from a performance/speed point of view while I believe the low energy/eco models tend to be slower but more energy efficient (eg. Caviar Green).

[MidnightCowboy]

I second Samsung. My tech now includes these with all the machines he builds because according to him they have the lowest failure rate. I have a 160 internal and 320 external, this combination being adequate for my needs.

[Ritho]

I've had good luck with Western Digital, and Seagate. It seems that while Seagate used to be highly respected they have fallen a bit in some peoples opinions.

I think loyalty to one manufacture may be a bit misguided sometimes so I always check reviews on a particular drive that I am considering. I look for drives that have been on the market for about at year or so. They might not be leading edge technology, but they will be cheaper, and there will be a lot of reviews on them already. Often if you find what appears to be a real good deal on a drive you may check reviews and find that they have a higher failure rate too.

I have found one of the better places to check "real-world" reviews on drives is newegg.com. It is a US based site, but often a drive will have a thousand reviews or more. I read all the negative ones to see if there is a re-occurring problem. Then you should be able to find the same drive in the UK. Maybe from BestBuy or Amazon or something.

[Ritho]

To add to this a bit. There are drive failure ratings that are supplied by the Manufacture MTBF or AFR. According to recent studies Mean Time Between Failure is pretty much worthless to the end user. Average Failure Rate is a bit more accurate, but still pretty much unreliable. In the real world average failure rates are much higher than the sub 1% that Manufactures usually give.

I would say that a 5-6% failure rate in the first year is close to average and within acceptable rates. So if you were to see a large set of consumer reviews, and find that the failure rate is nearer to 10% then you may want to steer clear of it.

For more accuracy, you probably should not count DOA (dead on arrival) drives that are shipped through the mail. I always try to buy my drives locally if possible because your typical mail personnel don't exactly always handle them with "kid gloves" if you know what I mean.

Also don't forget to make sure of what type of drives your computer supports. Old motherboards (pre 2003 or 2004) only supported ATA, often called IDE, drives. SATA appeared in 2003, and by 2005 it was hard to find a motherboard for sale that was ATA only. If your computer is newer than 2005 you are probably safe with SATA drives. (If your current drives use the little "red" sometimes other colors, with the small black usb connector size ends, they are SATA) IDE has a large ugly gray cable like many CD or DVD drives use. (Although those are going SATA as well)

[Anupam]

I have been using Seagate since a long time, but since some years, I have been disappointed by them. I have had two Seagate hard drives failed in 2-3 years. Recently, I saw another of Seagate drive fail, which my friend had bought less than a year ago. Their quality has declined over the years, in my opinion. All failed drives have been SATA ones.
I have an old Seagate PATA drive of 8 GB, which came when I bought the first computer in 2000. It is still running without any major problem. I have installed Windows on it, and I use it in the case of emergencies, when my other hard disks fail. But, newer hard drives of Seagate have been pretty disappointing for me.

In India, Seagate is quite popular, and they keep that in abundance. I don't know any other brand which I can trust, so I have bought Seagate this time too. But, I would like to know which other brands are good. I know about Western, but I read that their failure rate is comparable to Seagate too.

I have also read and heard that the failure rate of external hard drives is high too.

[MidnightCowboy]

Originally Posted by Anupam

I have also read and heard that the failure rate of external hard drives is high too.

According to my tech, the stats for external drive failures can be misleading. Where I live for instance it's cheaper to buy a standard internal drive and stuff it into an external case than it is to buy a custom unit. This being the case, such external "kits" are more prone to resent being knocked or otherwise abused than a purpose built unit. Consequently the failure rate it likely to be higher.

I should add that I have no personal experience of this, I'm only repeating what my tech says who works with this stuff every day

[tony]

Wow great response guys. Thank you. I think it will be a Terabyte as the amount of images I go through and work on is phenomenal and it allows me to put Linux on as well. I have had issues with Linux before, but that was a couple of years ago. I am hoping they have improved a lot of the old issues. But I will be using Windows much of the time for my photography. It is too much of a pain to work with anything other than photoshop. Wine doesn't quite make it work that well and it has always been hit and miss

Thanks again

[Sope]

I've also experienced a couple of Seagate HDD failures though these were all PATA/IDE drives.

There's always a risk that any HDD will fail. IMO the best way to protect yourself against loss is to buy drives with a decent length of warranty while still performing regular backups.

As we are mentioning online stores, I find the user reviews can be useful at eBuyer.com, which I find is a reliable and competitively priced UK site. Scan.co.uk is another good one.

[Sope]

Originally Posted by tony

I think it will be a Terabyte

In that case, I would recommend you consider a Samsung HD103SJ Spinpoint F3
These are very popular for good reason (speed, value for money and reliability).