HD reliability: brand, and how do they die?

[furball]

I'm freaking out now as I'm on my 3rd Western Digital HD...

In the past 2 days I hear the disk heads doing the 'head crashing prelude of death' noise in the middle of the night...

What I generally do is quickly run out an buy a new HD before data loss....

I've had this for a 18G WD, 120G WD, and now my 160G WD...

Has anyone come across any non-biased reliability results? I checked StorageReview.com, couldn't get to their 'poll results'....

Another thing to consider..... At least WDs give me a warning sign by their head crashing noises....... is that 'better' than other brands????

I'm leaning towards a Seagate Barracude 7200.9 IDE drive, 5 yrs warranty.... Performance-wise they're midpack, but it seems they're pretty good...

[pfdude]

My question to you would be how come you're just thinking of switching brands now? ;)

Go with the Seagates. At least you'll have a 5yr warranty. You might also want to ensure your case is getting enough air flow. Hard drives can crash from too much heat buildup. Maybe one of those cheap little hard drive fans would be sufficient.

[Amourek]

No matter what brand, warranty only applies to the drive, not the data on it. Always have a backup solution. Hard drives can die with little or no warning.

[cwb27]

3 rules of computing.
Backup
Backup
Backup


If a drive fails and you lose your data and have no backup. Nobody is going to pity you.

[Silver Bullet]

3 rules of computing.
Backup
Backup
Backup


If a drive fails and you lose your data and have no backup. Nobody is going to pity you.

That or run RAID 1 :)

[Max_Dealing]

I have played with computers for many a year and only had one drive die on me out of at least 100. All brands aside, I find HDD failures rare.

Data corruption is another story but you can always format.

[G.H.]

Any brand can have defected hard drive, so it comes to how good the warranty is. Get the brand that will honor its warranty.

[Nubee]

As far as I know, both drives that die on me ( fujitsu and maxtor both several years old ) gave an indication that they're about to give up by that unmistakeable noise. But that isn't a comfort when you're about to loose your precious porn errr important data. So I burned them to a rewriteable dvd and the not so important but want to keep data I store them on an external hard drive.