So the Seagate HD 160GB, I put in my Macbook for expansion sounds like it's about to take a huge dump. I can here it mechanically making clicks about twice a second or so (not reading/seeking), it sounds like something is mechanically failing. I'm going to run it till it breaks but I think on monday I'm going to order a replacement just to have on hand when it fails, any recommendations for a portable HD replacement?

 

Are you out of warranty?

 

Every Seagate I've owned has taken a giant shit on me. Avoid them at all costs.

 

Weird. I've had more luck with Seagate. Seems like every western digital i've owned has taken a dump!

Alot of the 3.5 SATA seagates have 5 year warranties which you can't beat not sure about the laptop drives though. Hit up newegg and find one with a good warranty Dougler.

 

If you want a portable HD, this is one is not bad
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applicati...EM1694-_-compo

I bought for office back up, and so far it is pretty good and quiet. Plus you can't go wrong for that price.

 

Since we are the topic, anyone has experience solid state HDs yet? Are they worth the extra $$$? Or are the processors/bus are still to slow to fully utilize this efficiently?

 

Depends on what you want to use them for...

 

Mostly photoshop, I work with large tiffs... But then again, the whole experience of loading hd content and OS should be much quicker...

PS Plus it would make the laptop nice and quiet

 

A buddy of mine just tried to use a solid state drive in a laptop last week. He bought the $250 64gb solid state drive from newegg. The OS install was full of bluescreens, and the OS was never stable. Switch to a traditional drive; no problems. And there was no proprietary low level software to test the drive.

 

They are still very expensive per gigabyte and tiny (largest I've seen is 60 GB, which is way too small these days). They run fine with the current batch of CPUs, but their prices have to come down and their capacities have to go up before they'll be competitive. They are extremely reliable (MTBF is in the millions of hours), but the other issues have to be solved.

 

Damn, same thing happened to the laptop Seagate HD I have (external, not the one in my laptop).

I need to get it replaced (it's under warranty)

 

If money is no object and you have a high end laptop and a real need for it then, yes, SSD's are pretty good. But that is the expensive SLC based drives.

Anything "inexpensive" on the market today is based on MLC flash and they are mediocre at best and not worth the price premium over a good 7200rpm laptop drive.

My advice is to take that money you'd spend on an SLC drive (>$700) and put it toward a large internal 2.5" 7200rpm laptop drive and a very large external drive to do your backups on. It still would be cheaper, because even with an SSD you STILL have to do backups.

As far as drive reliability goes, all the manufacturers are about the same these days. I've been a customer of Western Digital for many years now and I just had to send back a 1 year old 500gb SE16 for replacement AND I bought a 640gb drive from Newegg that was DOA. Am I going to stop buying WD? No, because this kind of stuff happens and WD's RMA service is excellent (as is Newegg's.)

Back in the day the only manufacturer I absolutely swore off was Quantum. I had a LOT of problems with those drives, however I have a 4.3gb Quantum Fireball sitting in a box somewhere right now that I know I could hook up and it would work just fine. It's well over 10 years old and it was the main drive for my Linux box until two years ago, so even bad manufacturers make a good drive once in a while. That machine ran 24/7 for many years.

 

^ makes sense.

I remember those Quantum Fireball, I have a 30GB like that, and yep, WD quality you can't mess with.

 

hmmm tat is werid... nuttin but seagates and they are all still up and running

 

My Graids that just shat the bed are hitachi deskstars...

+1 on seagates crapping out as well.

 

Well, pretty much everyone here knows I am a fan of Seagate, as I have had way to many WD,and Hitachi Deathstar go south on me.

Dougler your experience is very different from any I have had, although I use MANY more 3.5" drives than 2.5"...

Generally for me, If a Seagate is going to fail, it fails right away, as in "no worky out of the boxy", whereas all the others wait until I have filled them and used them for a month before crapping out. I will say, though, that I put significant stress on every drive I buy, as soon as it comes out of the box. That may account for me finding out if it will fail or live a long happy life.

One other consideration, depending on how you use your drives, is how well the drive stands up to long periods of non-use. Seagates seem to be the only drives I can pull out of a machine, place on a shelf for three-five years with no spin-ups, and when I put it into a machine, it spins like it did the day I received it. All other I have tried are problematic with this.

Also, FYI, if you need to replace a Seagate HDD under warranty, they send you a refurb (label border is green, not black). I am not happy with this, but what can you do....

 

Seagate is all I've ever bought. With the exception of a WD Raptor 36GB drive I tried which I think is a great drive as well. The only other drive I've ever tried was a Hitachi/IBM drive that crapped out in my Dad's computer.

My Infrant ReadyNAS is running 4 500GB Seagate SATA drives for well over 2 years now (i think) and haven't had any issues with them.

Ever since I got into computers I've probably bought at least 12 or more and each of them are still running to this day. Some are more than 5 years old too.

 

All manufacturers do this, and have done it from time immemorial. Refurbished drives are not necessarily a bad thing, I have three that are well out of warranty and still going strong. The 500gb SE16 that replaced my defective unit is a refurb. The nice thing about refurbs is that, typically, a technician has had his hands on it and gave it more testing than when the drive was manufactured.

This is not, however, always the case. Hence why I tend to stay with manufacturers that I know and trust.

I have used Seagate drives in several builds and found them to be excellent. My wife's machine has two of them in it right now. Both are 120gb drives and about 4 years old, quiet, cool and rock solid. I would buy them again, however I've learned over the years not to mix and match HDD manufacturers in the same machine. Usually it works just fine, but sometimes very strange things happen, so that is a rule of mine when building a box.

I tend to be a creature of habit, but my habits can change and very quickly.

As a case in point, I used to use Antec power supplies exclusively, that is until I had a run of 5 die prematurely, including two in the same system (the one I'm typing on at the moment.) All were properly sized and they were not the cheap "Truepower" line either. So I got fed up and I bought a PC Power and Cooling 750w single 12v rail supply and it cleared up absolutely every problem I was having with this system. When the supply in my media server died, I bought an OCZ (made by PC Power and Cooling) 600w supply for it. I doubt seriously that I will every buy an Antec power supply ever again. I do still love their cases though.

 

Going by reviews off of storagereview.com (wonderful site), I bought a Hitachi TravelStar 7K100 for my Dell D610. And it feels like a totally new machine now, speedwise.

- Frank

 

^ those Hitachi are fast! I got one in my notebook.

 

Far beyond it.

 

Newegg does not ship here, I think I'm just going to buy a WD, I've had nothing but success with their 3.5' drives.

 

+1. WD has worked well for me in every machine I have built.