Need a good SATA laptop drive

RJM62

RJM62

Touchdown! Greaser!
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Geek on the Hill
I've moved all my business and Web design stuff to a laptop that has an extra hard drive bay, and I'm ready to install a second hard drive to use as a clone of the primary drive so I can get up and running quickly if I have a HD failure while on the road.

Any suggestions? I'm looking for something in the 340 - 500GB range, and I want reliability first and foremost. I don't care about the cost in this case.

Years ago, I would have just bought Seagate's top-of-the-line model, but recent history with Seagate has tarnished their reputation a bit in my view...

Thanks,

Rich
 
Thanks. I'd kinda like a bit more cache than 8MB because I'm virtualizing XP on top of 7; but like I said, reliability is my primary concern.

It's pretty sad about Seagate. I used to consider them the gold standard, but my recent experiences with their products and support have been less-than-wonderful. I'm also getting a lot of them coming in for data recovery. None of my friends or colleagues in the business are recommending them anymore, either. WD, Hitachi, and Toshiba are the names I hear recommended most often these days. That's all well and good, but I still feel like I've been betrayed by an old friend.

-Rich
 
RJM62 said:
...It's pretty sad about Seagate. I used to consider them the gold standard, but my recent experiences with their products and support have been less-than-wonderful. I'm also getting a lot of them coming in for data recovery. None of my friends or colleagues in the business are recommending them anymore, either. WD, Hitachi, and Toshiba are the names I hear recommended most often these days. That's all well and good, but I still feel like I've been betrayed by an old friend.

-Rich
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I'm with ya.

I've been wondering if the current owners of Seagate have any plans to try to get the reputation back and how they could do it. Note that they had already gone to a 5 year warranty.

It doesn't help when you read reviews that customers who have had 3-6 month old drives die call for a replacement and get treated rudely and wait forever. It's like the company has a death wish.

My dead Apple Time Capsule has a Hitachi drive in it, when every Mac I've ever seen has a Seagate.
 
RJM62 said:
Thanks. I'd kinda like a bit more cache than 8MB because I'm virtualizing XP on top of 7; but like I said, reliability is my primary concern.

It's pretty sad about Seagate. I used to consider them the gold standard, but my recent experiences with their products and support have been less-than-wonderful. I'm also getting a lot of them coming in for data recovery. None of my friends or colleagues in the business are recommending them anymore, either. WD, Hitachi, and Toshiba are the names I hear recommended most often these days. That's all well and good, but I still feel like I've been betrayed by an old friend.

-Rich
Click to expand...

+1. I used Seagate for years. I really got screwed over by their 7200.11 series. Still have a lot of those drives in production and they enjoy failing. That said, I've yet to have a 12 series fail.

When the 11 series die I send them back to Seagate and get a refurbished 11 series back. I don't even know what the hell to do with them most of the time because there is no way in hell I'd put one back in a production storage system.
 
The Lenova I have has two Hitachis. Still going strong after 2 1/2 years.
The 4 lan drives are all WDs. The issue I have is the lan tech not the drives. Them are solid.
 
jesse said:
+1. I used Seagate for years. I really got screwed over by their 7200.11 series. Still have a lot of those drives in production and they enjoy failing. That said, I've yet to have a 12 series fail.

When the 11 series die I send them back to Seagate and get a refurbished 11 series back. I don't even know what the hell to do with them most of the time because there is no way in hell I'd put one back in a production storage system.
Click to expand...

I have the same problem. I sometimes think about using them in the machines I refurbish and give away, but that doesn't seem very fair, either, unless the machine is going to be used purely as a toy.

I've used a few of them in machines that went to local nursery schools, for example. They get Ubuntu along with all the games and educational apps for kids that age. (The Ubuntu educational stuff is excellent, by the way, and very intuitive.) If the drives were to fail, it would be no big deal. I could reinstall onto another drive in less than an hour, and the kids have no precious data to worry about.

Having said that, I haven't had any of the factory-refurbished Series 11s fail. It's more of a conscience thing for me. They lost my confidence with that whole 7200.11 fiasco, not merely because of the defect, but because of how horribly Seagate handled the aftermath. That destroyed my confidence in the company and its products, and I can't in good conscience use a drive in which I lack confidence on a system where actual, important data is going to reside -- even if I'm giving it away for free.

Preschooler's games, fine. Nothing irreplaceable there. Or maybe a dumb terminal or something like that. But not a system where valuable information will be stored.

-Rich
 
Western Digital? Really? I once installed a batch of ~125 computers with them and had roughly a 25% DOA rate. My other experiences with Western Digital have likewise been terrible - I'll never buy one.

As far as laptop drives go, after being really impressed with an IBM laptop drive well over decade ago, I've stuck with them for myself and clients ever since and had great luck, both before and after IBM sold out to Hitachi. Were it my money, I'd buy the Hitachi Travelstar 7K500 (500GB, 7200 RPM, 16GB cache) which is available for under $100 from several well-known sources.
 
flyingcheesehead said:
Western Digital? Really? I once installed a batch of ~125 computers with them and had roughly a 25% DOA rate. My other experiences with Western Digital have likewise been terrible - I'll never buy one.

As far as laptop drives go, after being really impressed with an IBM laptop drive well over decade ago, I've stuck with them for myself and clients ever since and had great luck, both before and after IBM sold out to Hitachi. Were it my money, I'd buy the Hitachi Travelstar 7K500 (500GB, 7200 RPM, 16GB cache) which is available for under $100 from several well-known sources.
Click to expand...

Guess it depends on your personal anecdotal experience and the business cycle. In the late 80's, I had a PC-builder friend who called Seagate "Sleazegate" because their quality was so bad. Every drive maker goes through it.

Lately, I have heard the WD blue notebook drives are quite good. I've also put Hitachi Travelstars in a few Macbooks and a Mac Mini over the past 3 years and have had good success with them. However, I was never able to convince Mike they were any good because he had many Deskstars fail on him.

YMMV.
 
Any drive that is NOT the same manufacture as the one in the laptop. At one time I would not touch a WD and would only use Segate. But then saw several Segates die in one year. Recently I had good luck with WD.

They are cranking drives out so fast and doing so little testing it is easy to get a bad unit.

I've taken the approach of using a backup drive of different make then the primary drive. For example I recently set up a RAID connected to my Airport bast station for backup. One WD drive and one Hatachi. I figure that way I can not get two bad drives from the same batch.
 
The new Hitachi is nothing like any history. The current conventional wisdom is they make the drives with the same kind of Japanese quality that a Honda or Acura is known for..while the other guys went to China or even elsewhere when China was too expensive.

Rich P., The one Hitachi drive that was DOA was replaced and has been running 7x24 fine. I've had a WD also be DOA due to NewEgg's crappy handling, which BTW, is much improved. They're also saying the Hitachis run hot and use more power so they don't meet my usual mission for home use.

As I understood it, Maxtor was about to go under due to their consistently bad quality so Seagate bought them and slapped the Seagate label on the the 7200.11 drives made the same way in the same place. You know. Quality problem solved. For the 5400 RPM drive I just bought they were saying if you had the China code on the label - and I do - on it just send it back as DOA. Very reassuring. I plan to mirror any data mine holds. Hey, look who bought Conner, too:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seagate_Technology

Western Digital is still a US company that is currently being lauded for innovation and quality. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Digital#2000s
 
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mikea said:
Rich P., The one Hitachi drive that was DOA was replaced and has been running 7x24 fine. I've had a WD also be DOA due to NewEgg's crappy handling, which BTW, is much improved. They're also saying the Hitachis run hot and use more power so they don't meet my usual mission for home use.
Click to expand...

Mike,

Saw a guy over on the macresource forums mention WD offers AV-rated green drives, designed for DVR applications. Some price premium. Had never heard this before.

http://www.amazon.com/Western-Digit...r_1_1?s=gateway&ie=UTF8&qid=1285191142&sr=8-1
 
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