Are Western bad drives?

[Liam]

Somewhere, recently, there was a poll taken and it said that Western were the most returned hdrives. Years ago western was considered the best drive around, now are they the crappiest?
I'm looking to get a propably a 15 gigger, 7200 rpm, what do you think?
Is now quantum really good?
Fujitsu has very little returns but, their slow.......

any Pointers Thank you kindly Liam

[techs]

i have more western returns, because i sell more. give the people what they want?
actually, western has made a decision to concentrate on the low end. the fastest drive i have seen(ide) was a 15gb maxtor ata66 at ata33 7200. it was faster than my personal ibm 7200 ata66 12.8 gb!
truthfully most drives by major manufacturers will work for at least 3 usually 5 years at over 99percent. go with the best performance, price,size in that order

[falcompsx]

maxtor all the way, unless you want to dish out the cash for a IBM. Seagate Barracuda ATA II drives arent bad either, but Medalist drives suck, stick with maxtor and IBM for now.

[daveleau]

I have had 3 maxtors and had to return 2 of them. The 40GB Maxtor is great but the smaller sizes are more apt to die. Had several WD's recently of the 15, 18 and 20GB size and they all worked great. IBM is still tops but WD is second. Also in my experience, Maxtor gets huge data corruptions frequently when you overclock as well. I;d say go WD or IBM.
Dave

[NDC]

Yeah, I've been reading the same bad things about Western Digital drives also.

I've been using Western Digital for quite some time now, but haven't had a single problem using that brand. I have a few 7,200rpm drives and found them to be very fast and reliable compared to other drives.

[This message has been edited by NDC (edited 09-07-2000).]

[linux_guru]

Currently, I have a mixture of Maxtor & Seagate drives, No problems with these. I've have W.D. drives in the past. Never a problem with the; just out-grown them.

[LED]

Are Western bad drives?

No!!!

[mad hampster]

all the hd's I have ever had are WD's, the current is a 15gb 7200 rpm hd, runs great

[Brangwen]

As the adage goes, everyone has a "cpu" and an opinion. Some are better than others. Bottom line: Like in the NFL, on any given Sunday any team can beat another. It may be fashionable to rant about WDC HDs this week, Maxtor next, Seagate in three weeks and IBMs in a month. Look for what you want spec wise at a good price. It's a toss of the dice.

PS: I've owned 4 or 5 HDs made by different manufacturers and they've pretty much been the same. Presently I'm running a Maxtor 20 GIG ATA/66 7200 RPM on an OC'd system. No problems.

Brangwen http://sysopt.earthweb.com/forum/wink.gif

[Speed]

I have 3 western digital drives in my case,
WDC AC31 0200R: C: 9.5GB
WDC WD30 7AA: D: 28.6GB
WDC WD45 0AA-00BAA0: E: 41.9GB
My board is Oced at 133Mhz from 100Mhz, I havent had a single problem with them. WD is the way to go as far as price and disk size.

[BrianR]

IBM makes WD Enterprise drives.

[MadMatt]

Brian stole my thunder - IBM makes WD drives and Big Blue is *THE* name in HDD technology!

I've had at least 6 WD drives and never had a problem.

However, I'm about to buy 2 30gb Quantum LM Plus drives for the RAID in my next box. Those are nice speedy units!

[JimG]

Never had a problem with WD hard drives. I've got one in a 386 machine (yeah, it's old) that runs fine. It's the original HD for that computer.
My personal computer has a 20 Gig 7400 rpm WD hard drive. No problem there either.
Several people I know have Maxtor HDs, no problems with them either.
I'd recommend Maxtor or WD.

[bhess]

What are the warrenties on the different brands? I have a maxtor that went bad. It has a 3yr warrenty. I ran the diagnostic program that came with it, called them and they're shipping me a new one. Very handy. It is only 3 months old though, But it would be great if it hapened in 2.5 yrs.
I heard IBM is only 1 yr. true?

[voogru]

Heck no!

I have a 6.4 GB 5400 RPm had it for 3 years not one problems whatsoever

[Vampiel]

I have a 40gig wd, and after formatting it only get 32gigs. I will never buy a wd again.

[Dputiger]

Vampiel: This is likely due to a BIOS error, not your WD.

I've owned eight WD drives over 12 years. I've got one still running that's fifteen years old.

Go for it.

[Ed_S]

Had good luck with WD's...but I've still RMA'd more of them than some others, simply because I've HAD a lot more!

My experience has been:

Maxtor - 1 failure out of 6
WD - 3 out of about 15-20
Seagate - never yet had one make it out of warranty! Won't be any more bought here.

The best for me, though, is now out of business.
Connor - No failures. Ever. Still have an old 420mb in daily use for 9 years straight.
Guess it's just hard to stay in business if your product never needs replacement!

Ed

[This message has been edited by Ed_S (edited 09-09-2000).]

[shadow]

I've had my WD 8.4/5400 for several months and love it. I have my fsb overclocked to 75 and it follows right along happily, unlike other drives I've had. WD is good stuff. dont worry about opinions, they are a dime a dozen.

[Wormo]

Well, from my experiences, I had Western Digital drive that failed on me. I sent it back and got another on warranty, that one failed to. Ever since then I had my Maxtor which works great. Just the other day I did a drive install for a cousin of mine whos hard drive crashed. Guess what kinda drive it was....

[BrianR]

I don't know about the current situation, but for a long time Dell, Compaq, Gateway (and probably others) used WD SCSI HDs in all or most of their computers. I've dealt with hundreds of their older models and they are all WD if they're SCSI.

Your comment about WD being high on the return list is plausable. They may have sold more drives to CPQ than any other drive manufacturer. And that's alot of drives.

As for my opinion, IBM is the only drive I buy with my money, both IDE and SCSI. Not that their the best (they may be), but I've had quite a few and never had one fail. and they're quite fast.

[This message has been edited by BrianR (edited 09-10-2000).]

[wing7788]

To each his own.......

If you dont take care of anything, it will not last long.

[Tony-g]

I've used all these brands in the last 12 years of working on networks. They are all reputable brands and the main thing is to compare warranties. Most come with 3 years, I wouldn't go under that. Also make sure you don't buy a refurbished. Many auction sites sell them, I wouldn't even think of using one.

It's your system, but good parts, backup your hd(s) on a regular basis and you should be ok.

[tonym]

I personally use Seagate and Maxtor drives. I use two HDDs in all my computers -- a system/program/utility/comms drive partitioned to letter I (Seagate 4.3 or 5.6GB total) and a data/test/CAD drive partitioned to letter Q (Maxtor 10.2 to 15.6GB). The Seagate is mounted permanently and the Maxtor is in a removeable drive caddy.
I now have 12 systems like this and have never had a drive failure (and I presently use around 25 drives to swap customer data, etc.)!!
I highly recommend Seagate and Maxtor drives.

I've evaluated and used WD drives in the past, and the only negative thing I can remember is that they were LOUD (a loud whining noise accompanying platter spin)!!


Tony

[alpha]

I have a 2.1gb WD that I got from a skip and it works like a charm!!

[alamgirc]

Hi everyone, I am new to this forum and I have found it helpful. I wanted to give some advise to everyone using high density hard drives (greater than 2gb). The way the manufacturers get more data on a same size drive is by putting more data closer by using finer heads and more platters closer together. Here, heat becomes a bigger issue which can leads to real problems. Since the data is closer together and the read heads are finer, they are more critical on alignment to the data on the platters. The platters are almost always made of aluminum which expands quite a bit. So Western Digital drives seem to be having some problems as people have been saying but I havent had any problems because everytime I buy a Hard drive (mostly western digitals), I buy a small fan that I attach in the computer so that it is cooling the hard drive. Just the same as one does for the CPU. This way the hard drives run faster (no constant recalibration of drive head location) and more reliably (Probably the read heads smash into the spinning platter because of expansion). So my adivse is, spend an additional $10 for a good fan, make sure it points to the hard drive when you attach it and voila, probably no more faults. Also, it never hurts to put an additional exhaust fan in the case. I have never had equipment failure and I attribute it to keeping things cool. Take care.

[KAknight]

Western Digital makes wonderful drives

[thxmanu]

I believe most HD platters are now made of glass. I've used Quantum drives exclusively and only one crashed (power outage during write). Just my 2 cents.