I'm going to assume you're talking about 3.5" hard disks and not 2.5".
My opinions/sentiments mirror psafux
. There is no particular brand that is more or less reliable than another (well, aside from the ongoing firmware nonsense in some brands -- so maybe I should say "mechanically reliable"
).
The only drives I tend to recommend people stay away from, brand-wise, are Fujitsu drives. But that's based on my experience professionally with those disks; for all I know there's some other person who has had total success with them.
Drive models I tend to recommend folks steer clear of right now:
- WD Green drives or any WD drives with a -GP suffix. These drives repeatedly part their heads which can cause all sorts of wonderful complexities/issues. Internet nerds call this the "LCC issue" (LCC = Load Cycle Count). There are ways to work around this problem on WD Green drives, assuming APM can be disabled. Details: »
koitsu.wordpress.com/201 ··· parking/- Seagate's ST1000DM001, ST2000DM001, and ST3000DM001. These drives also excessively park their heads, and emit an audible clunk noise when either parking or unparking. Seagate users have complained about this on their forum for quite some time and Seagate asked silly questions when it was obviously a firmware design choice. Worse, on these drives (at least with the firmware versions I tested), parking was not counted in SMART attribute 193 (LCC). As I understand it, Seagate now has the same drives out but end in -DM003, and those have the same behaviour but the head parking is counted in attribute 193 (but so what, the drives shouldn't be doing this). Oh, apparently all of these drives also have a firmware update (hmmmm!): »
knowledge.seagate.com/ar ··· 223651en- I am not impressed by the Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 drives either, due to the infamous BSY firmware bug that turns these drives catatonic: »
hackaday.com/2012/07/30/ ··· are-bug/ -- heck, I don't particularly like any of these models for similar reasons: »
knowledge.seagate.com/ar ··· 207931en- I do not think fondly of Samsung's F4 EcoGreen drives either, due to firmware bugs that can result in data loss: »
sourceforge.net/apps/tra ··· adBlocksIf you want my personal recommendation for a reliable 1TB drive that doesn't have weird firmware design issues (as of this writing), go with the WD Red drives. However you won't find WD Reds for US$68, that's for sure. You might be able to find some WD Black drives for that price, but they'd probably be used drives, in which case you should make sure wherever you get them from has a good return policy and test the drive fully first (read all LBAs, erase drive (every LBA), then read all LBAs again, as well as look at SMART attributes).
P.S. -- Deskstar (not "Deckstar") is a model/series, not a brand/company. The original company to make the Deskstar series was IBM, who sold their hard disk division to Hitachi Global Storage Technologies in 2003. However, in 2011, Hitachi effectively sold itself to Western Digital. »
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hi ··· nologies