Hard drives are a cut throat business these days and have been for quite
some time with some players being absorbed and some bowing out. A slip
in quality is not out of the question but I have no knowledge that such
has actually occurred.
What I suggest you do is call upon the thousands of reviewers at Newegg
where you'll also find pretty good prices for what you ultimately want
to buy.
This is a link to Newegg's 17 top selling drives
<http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=100007603%204802&IsNodeId=1&name=Top%20Sellers>
If you sort the list by best customer review results you'll see that the
Western Digital Caviar WD6401AALS 640GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" drive
floats to the top of the pack with the highest possible rating which is
made up of votes from 1,670 customers. But despite the good ratings
you'll see in the detail that 9% of the customers are not happy, rating
it poor (2%) or very poor (7%). Most of the complaints look like it
died in days, weeks or months. But I don't think you're likely to do
better than this. The next drive in the list (the Samsung) has very
similar ratings as does the next on the list (the Seagate). Looking
farther down the list I see that the first Hitachi listed has exactly
the same kind of numbers but the next Hitachi has 18% rating very poor
instead of the more normal 7%.
I suspect we the customers are now doing the burn-in testing that used
to be done at the factory. Well, I know IBM did burn-in testing but I
don't know about anyone else. Bite the bullet and buy what you have to
but be sure to buy two so you have a backup. :-)
Chuck Norcutt
Jim Nichols wrote:
> I need to add an additional hard drive to my Dell Dimension 4700. I
> am seeking advice on the reliability of available SATA drives in the
> range of 250 to 640GB. I have used WD and Seagate Barracuda drives
> in the past, but find disturbing comments on the web on the
> reliability of their present products.
>
> I'm not out for blazing speed or a giant size drive. But,
> reliability is uppermost in my mind. Cool operation and low noise
> would follow.
>
> Jim Nichols Tullahoma, TN USA
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