I had 2 Western Digital HDD's that crashed on me about 7-8 years ago. I've also learned my lesson the hard way and I've only been using Seagate since. No issues, no hassle.
No, don't bother with maxtor hard drives I bought a 250gb maxtor, 2 months later, it messed up and started making a clicking noise then I bought a 360gb maxtor hard drive, thought it was fine, but no a couple of months into using it it buggered up too. I lost thousands of pictures, hundreds of documents for school and about 20gb of music I was so pissed, it was all irreplaceable I also bought a friend a maxtor hard drive (well, he bought it, I just gave him the money for it because he helped me out) 500gb and guess what? a month in, it messed up! I recommend buying an Hitachi harddrive. everyone I know with them have had no cockups iwth them. Hitachi or samsung (my current hard drive is a samsung and I've had it 2 years)
My personal opinion -> Buy the western digital as the hard disk is proven to be the best among the best
That's the worst. I lost my life twice. Now I have an external (PHILLIPS) HDD, and I keep backups of all my stuff on there. (Using SyncToy, pretty cool app).
Yes, Seagate bought over Maxtor for US$1.9bil so technically speaking all Maxtor external harddisk being used now are probably Seagate. See http://www.byteandswitch.com/document.asp?doc_id=86012 .
That means they have quite a monopoly, from what I know IBM no longer produces hard disks. The rest seemed to be too small to be a threat to Maxtor/Seagate.
Well, Seagate bought Maxtor in 2005, but it does not mean that Maxtor quality is now equal to Seagate quality. Are you saying that Maxtor is now built on Seagate lines?
I think the quality depends on the batches produced and not really on the brand, sometimes Maxtor is better and sometimes Seagate, for some batches every disk lasted a long long time, for others, my most recent batch of 12 hard disk 250 GB, 4 crashed in less than a year.
I really don't think it makes a difference, though I had a maxtor HD fail on me years ago. Choosing between companies like maxtor and western digital is like deciding between burger king and wendys.
As a company which assembles PC's I must say we had some bad experience with Maxtor hard disks, especially the time before they got bought by Seagate. At the time when 40GB-80GB were a standard, they were a real piece of garbage. Especially the flat 40GB model (I don't remember its exact model name). Anyway, after maxtor got bought, it seems that their quality got better, but I suppose thats because they use Seagate's technology now. In fact, the whole hard disk looks like an exact copy of the Seagate models, with the only difference being the logo, which is Maxtor instead of Seagate. But since we started buying Western Digital for our PC's it looks like we have improved the overall quality of our PCs. No PC has been returned for a hdd related issue ever since. I'm very satisfied with their products up until now, but I guess time will tell. The average lifetime of a Maxtor HDD before they got bought by Seagate was like 3-3.5 years which was not that bad at the time, but the problem is that it started happening too often. Now we are selling WD for a over 3 years and no serious complaints yet, and I hope it will stay this way for more than 5 years Even though the core technology in hard disks haven't changed much(excluding hybrids and NAND which is not yet widely used), it is sure much improved in the last couple of years. Many hard disk companies offer warranty for over 3 years. Performance is also another quality in which manufacturers improved and seem pretty tied today. So I would say, go with your instincts You won't make a mistake if you choose a Seagate, Western Digital or Hitachi. Seagate do not have monopoly as someone mentioned, many other brands manufacture hdds on the market. Western Digital, Hitachi, Excelstor, Samsung... Tried all of them for some time, had a little percentage of faulty hdds with Excelstor and Samsung, but nothing serious enough to proclaim them as low quality, they were all within warranty time and were successfully replaced. But due to the mechanical nature, as a rule of a thumb is that all hard disks are supposed to die after 3-5 years of active work for the average user that is. Again, maybe today this limit has increased by 1-2 years, but if your hdd lives up to 5 years, you should consider yourself lucky and start making backups more frequently. All in all it seems to me that hdds are still the least stable part of a pc. The percentage of faultiness doesn't really matter if you have bad karma Good Luck with your choice
Just bought my backup disk a Lasie 500gb hd quite good, and relative fast (USB) but i´d expect it to be more quite.