Seagate Sucks. Can you recommend a good hard drive?

[PhotoJunkieJen]

So, recently my second gently-used Seagate hard drive busted, which means, for the second time, I'm losing a good chunk of my pictures.
Anyway, two strikes and they're out. I'm swearing them off and need a good hard drive alternative. What do you use?
Yes, I back up my hard drive to CD as often as I can, but there will always be pictures that fall through the cracks.

[thatBilly]

I've used Seagate, Maxtor and Hitachi for years with varying reliability. You do get some good ones!

Never had a problem with Western Digital though.

Seagate makes a good product. Perhaps it's user error.

Otherwise WD makes good stuff.

[Jim Bryant]

I have two 1.5 TB drives and a 500 gigger (my oldest) and haven't had a problem at all (knock, knock on wood). Did you not eject the drive before unplugging it once too many times? Only takes once to screw one up.

[dlambert]

I've had trouble with Seagate, WD, and Maxtor over the course of around 15 years and probably upwards of 20 drives. My conclusion: any single hard drive is guaranteed to fail at some point. I've had marginally better luck with drives carrying a 5yr warranty (vs. the std 3yr warranty), but you really want to avoid getting caught with all your eggs in one basket, because all hard drives will fail at some point, no matter which brand you get.

[dakwegmo]

There are only two kinds of hard drives those that have failed, and those that will fail. The key is redundancy. I have my stuff backed up on at least two external hard drives, and each of those is a different model or brand, to minimize the possibility of simultaneous drive failures. If you're only backing up to one hard drive, you're going to lose data.

I've had good results with Seagate and Western Digital, Hitachi, and Maxtor, though I do plenty of research to make sure the particular batch I'm buying isn't prone to failure. Seagate and WD had some issues with the 2TB+ models when the first came out, but they seem to have worked those issues out.

[SwissJon]

I've just found this..

MB662US-2S_3.5" SATA - eSATA_EXTERNAL MULTI-BAY_ICY DOCK

Allows you to have an external drive in RAID1 mirrored config. Ok, so it's not particularly portable, but for having the luxury of using your own disks in a RAID config, and being able to easily swap them out whenever something goes kaput, seems like a good investment.

Then there's this

Patriot Memory

To add them, and your printer, to your network.

[BuddhaPi]

Originally Posted by dakwegmo

There are only two kinds of hard drives those that have failed, and those that will fail. The key is redundancy. .

Couldn't agree more, back -up all your data, then back it up again! I personally keep 3 back-ups of everything. 1 server side ( with its own redundancy) 1 external on -site, 1 external off site in a fire-prrof safe, which I swap out every 2 weeks with the onsite backup..

[fire-eyes]

I've also had serious problems with seagate, particularly the externals. I've since switched to Western Digital for both internal and external.

I have six WD internals, 5 x 2TB Greens in a Drobo and 1 x 1TB Black inside one of my systems. I have had no issues whatsoever with any of them, and I have had the 5 x 2TB Greens running essentially continuously with fairly heavy use 24/7 for nearly a year.

I have a 750GB WD external which only occasionally sees use but it it has been solid. It has a lot of vented surface area.

The seagate externals particularly have issues because of almost airtight cases. The drives simply overheat. WD Externals have a lot of vented surface areas.

[fire-eyes]

Also, I strongly agree with back up and then back up again.

What I'm doing is using the drobo with 5 x 2TB in it in a configuration where I can lose 2 drives and still be fine. This garners 5.4TB of usable space. It's where I store my pictures when I work on them, and where incremental backups of those and all of my other systems go.

Once a week, I connect the 750GB WD external and back the drobo up to that. Once I'm done, the 750GB is given to a trusted friend which means my place can get hit by a tornado and because of geographical separation, I'm still going to have my data.

Some people will balk at this type of approach, however, it only took losing everything once to cause me to decide that it was NOT going to happen again. I'm aware of people that go far, far beyond this.