I'm in the market for a bigger SATA hard drive for my laptop. I've been trying to find a combination of good deals vs reliable brands. It seems like Seagate is at the top, but there are few good deals to be found. How's the rest of the list look in order? WD seems to be all over the place. I've seen reviews that think Hitachi is near the top or near the bottom. Google leads me to lots of outdated articles. Specifically, there's a 250gb Hitachi at TigerDirect, $80 after rebate. I've got my finger on the trigger, but I'm still debating.
Try Maxtor, they are part of Seagate. Many of the hard drives they sells are the exact same models that Seagate sells, but just under a different brand. But most of the time they are cheaper than Seagate. I got a 72000rpm 320gb from them in December for 50 bucks. edit: btw, $80 after rebate for a 250gb is not that good of a deal, unless it's faster than 7200rpm. Fry's have this 320gb on sell today for 70 with no rebate.
Seagate, hands-down. They aquired Maxtor in the past few years. Maxtor's drives may still be slightly different (different plants).
I had a Maxtar crap out on me. Not a fan. I also had a IBM DeskStar crap out on me. Replaced both with Western Digital HDDs. Considered Seagate, but they were a bit pricey.
I'm looking for a 2.5" notebook replacement. Anyone have experiences w/ Hitachi's? My Macbook comes w/ one, so far so good although it's only been 8 months. BTW, all the hard drives that have died on me were WD's so I'm skeptical about them.
I think it's sort of a crap-shoot, honestly. . . . most of the reliability claims people can make for hard drives are anecdotal. I don't know what drive is the most reliable, but my experience is Seagate. BUT, I've had bad drives from all manufacturers. I had an IBM Deskstar (now Hitachi) that went bad. The old Maxtors were a bit disappointing. I've had both great and bad experiences with WD -- I had about 8 die on me back when I used to do desktop builds/support at SJ. I had one or two Seagates die, but a bad Seagate has always been rare for me. Now, I work in computer forensics, which is VERY drive-intensive. We image computers all the time, and go through hard drives like water. We use Seagate/Maxtor pretty much exclusively. This is a YMMV-type thing. You'll probably be just fine with the Hitachi.
western digital is what i use. as for maxtor, i guess they got bought out a couple of yrs ago so they may have improved since the earlier suck years of 2000s.
