WD vs. Deskstar HD comparisons

[NJC]

I think all of the last four Western Digital drives were made in Thailand.

 

[JustinH]

For the last few years, Samsung drives have been very fast, and very quiet.

Now WD has some "green" offerings that are very quiet, but a little more slow. They spin at a lower RPM but have more onboard cache.

I don't think that you can buy a bad hard drive right now, they are very much a commodity unless you are buying based on a certain drive for performance applications.

I have experience with returning Maxtor and Western Digital drives that were defective, both companies are very good about replacing the drive with a refurbished unit promptly.

 

[Colt45ws]

The one brand I would avoid is Seagate. I have 5 7200.11 500GB drives. All of them now have the green "Certified Repaired" label. Thats right, I had to RMA every one of them.

I saw a drive on newegg recently I hadnt seen before. A Samsung F3R 1TB for $100. Significantly cheaper than the WD RE3 drives I was looking at, and comes with TLER, hence the "R" suffix. I think I will probably go that route.

 

[NJC]

I recently bought a WD 1TB Blue Caviar for $60 Canadian. It was $25 cheaper than the 5yr warrantly Black Caviar drives, and I think inexpensive because the Black series are popular.

 

[kc8adu]

all brands have good and bad models.
what is most important is backups and awareness.
watch the smart status with speedfan.you can often see trouble coming early and replace before failure.reallocated sector count,current pending count seem to be the most telling.
if last week there was nothing in those 2 and today there are a bunch then you know its going to die soon.
i love the seagate 7200.11 series.lots of firmware repairs and occasional headstack swaps for me to do. #1 drive i get in for recovery.

 

[tmorris1]

Originally Posted By: NJC
I recently bought a WD 1TB Blue Caviar for $60 Canadian. It was $25 cheaper than the 5yr warrantly Black Caviar drives, and I think inexpensive because the Black series are popular.

I have a 500GB Black and they are great. Quiet and fast. The Black have 2 processors on them and a little more cache. If you get them on sale they aren't much more. The Blue should be a good drive though.