In your opinion: Do NO NAME/Non Brand Hard-drives break faster than Big Bring names?
 

In your opinion: Do NO NAME/Non Brand Hard-drives break faster than Big Brand names?


All feedback is appreciated.



Sorry... Big "BRAND" names...that is.

IMO, even big brand name drives suck. I bought 2 WD drives that both crapped out in less than a year under normal/light use. I've had 4 Seagate drives doing well now, two of them are over a year and the others are just a few months with no problems.

Warranty is what I look for over anything else :2 cents:

Yup, warrant is def important. Doesn't matter what brand of harddrive you buy, anyone of them can fail at a moments notice.

I had returned a Samsung ext. hard drive last month with 20+ bad sectors.. (after 15 months). It was used only for backup...

The only drive I have ever had fail (I have had 20+ drives in my time) was a Lacie. The one time I tried an off brand due to the look of it (LED light). Since then I have gone strictly WD and never had issues.

The brand name and manufacturer have little to nothing to do with drive longevity. All five manufacturers have good and bad models. Some model numbers have a much better track record than others. Specifically, some need more cooling than others. Look at power usage tests. Power turns to heat. Heat kills drives unless it's removed. So a drive that uses more watts needs more cooling in order to not cook itself.

Notice I said all five manufacturers. Any other brand labeling, such as Dell, is just a sticker put on a drive made by Seagate, Hitachi, Western Digital, Maxtor, or Fujitsu.

Both are almost always made in the same factories in China. One just charges you more for the brand name than the other. There are exceptions. Do some research on the brand you are considering and look for reviews from people who seem to know what they are talking about. Sometimes even the same model can be made in different factories too and that can make a big difference in quality.

Not really.. maybe you heard about the recent flooding in Thailand.. so that thing caused a price raise of more then 100%+ on all hard drives (here in EU)..

for example check:
http://www.eweekeurope.co.uk/news/th...ly-chain-42760

So we can safely say that the most HDD's are made in Thailand :)

Very true, there are some excellent Seagate drives but there are also really shitty ones. Before buying I always check http://www.tomshardware.com/ and other reviews, however there is always a chance that you will receive a shitty one even from a good model :)

The only drive I will use is WD. They have a lower failure rate than any other brand.

quoted for truth, off brands are just white-labels. there aint many HDD factories in the world.

We have had a great run with samsung spinpoint drives. maxtor was the worst and western digital has been a lot worse in the last couple years.

So there is a Seagate industrial sata drive that we have in two servers that have not had any issues yet either.. but they are still pretty new.

TRUE THAT! :thumbsup I have used western digital since 1999 and knock on wood, has never failed!

hah! same here ...

there are only a few companies that make hd's so whatever your thinking about is wrong.

I should add WD and Seagate have fine well for us on RMAs. We haven't RMAed any of our 20 or so Hitachis yet. My comments about brands, but not models, comes from a Google study of thousands drives. Based on their experience, they select specific models from several manufacturers.

No-name drives are produced thousands of units at a time for manufacturers such as Dell and must meet specific tolerances of the order since they are paired with specific power supplies, or installed in specific cabinets (heat) so you could argue that "no-name" drives could be better than the brand name drives you pickup at the store.

who exactly is making these no name drives ?

every drive i have ever seen come out of a dell was a segate/wd/hitachi or whatever brand drive no difference then the drive you buy in the store.

in servers some companies make their own firmware but they still buy drives from one of the few companies that still make drives.

I have 1 & 2 tb seagates & WD, all of them work well.. I would only purchase seagate or wd, a harddrive has all your relevant information on it... It needs to last :thumbsup

Go to google and look up what's actually going on inside of a mechanical hard drive. You'll be surprised they work for more than 5 seconds.

I feel like I'm jinxing myself by even being in this thread. I'm going to go back up my shit now.

western digital are shit when something goes wrong with them you have to send them reg mail to Singapore which cost more than buying a new harddrive i would not use wd even if i was given one

WD Black series are good and cheap...

I have had WD and LaCie crap out on me if i looked at them funny. That is especially true for the LaCie ones.

Hitachi is one of the BEST internal drives you can buy ... a bit pricier than WD or SeaGate, but much more reliable, and yes many other big name drives have HITACHI heads and head stack assemblies ...

I use Hitachi drives only on all of my own builds, and try to talk most clients into Hitachi for the extra couple of dollars ...

To give you an example of the quality I strive for in my builds, I also use mostly all TYAN motherboards too!

So to answer your original question ... buying brand name drives will save you alot of headaches and future issues .. but keep in mind also that almost ALL HDD makes have a 1 in 30 (ish) DOA rate ... its one of them things you cannot predict or prevent ... so return the drive to your POS and try another.

Samsung? Toshiba? :)

Don't forget that Maxtor is just a brand name now (Seagate owns them), and I think it was Hitachi that was recently acquired by WD... or was it Samsung?

Speaking of brand names...

At a former webhost I found a very strange drive attached to my server, which turned out to be some cheap Indian brand I'd never heard of. This was the actual internal HD unit which was manufacturer by their factory; it wasn't just a pretty box with a "brand" name drive hiding inside (eg like Lacie). I had to look them up on google as I'd never heard of them.

It's the only time I can recall ever seeing a HD that wasn't a Seagate, WD, Hitachi etc.

i tried maxtor (now seagate) a few times and had issues with some of them, after these i'm only WD....

they are tough as shit too. I dropped one at the check out line from about a four foot height when I bought it. It wasn't even in the box, the store had it in an anti-shoplifting case with zero padding.

it's still rocking along just fine like two years later. lol

Great responses here..... Great info.

We spent really tons of drives...literally .... and WD and Seagate are the best.

If you are talking about network/usb drives make sure the drive is what crapped out before calling it dead!

Most often it is the box it came in that died (and its embedded controller)... So buy a new one on Amazon (box) and put the "dead" drive in it... More often then not it will work again for many years...

for desktop/laptop systems WD is the only way to go.