Done with Western Digital

I have no doubt that you will discover Western Digitals are trouble if you have, indeed, installed 80 of them. Prepare for the future because it is coming.
We suffered through the failure of Connor, Quantum, Maxtor and others. Maxtor, Quantum, and Connor were all terrific at one time, but were driven out of business by engineering failures. Maxtor bought Quantum, then got bought by by Seagate. Now Hitachi, which bought IBM Deskstar and Travelstar, is in serious trouble, already dropping some of its small drive and laptop drive entries. Hitachi is looking for a buyer of their hard drive business. Anybody interested?
Western Digital nearly failed when their drives started failing in massive numbers in Dell, Gateway, and HP machines. Fortunately they seem to have been able to correct their engineering mistakes.
Now that Hitachi is in very serious trouble, they are regrouping.
This is a tough business.
We all benefit if Western Digital becomes a builder of better quality of hard drives. But they will have to offer a longer warranty, just as Samsung and Fujitsu are planning to do.
We will see the market turn topsy-turvey as these new flash drives get a toe-hold. Hitachi has announced they cannot compete in the world of small drives and laptop drives because of the development of flash drive technology.
Western Digital will be as good as their innovation and engineering, but they better be ready for the Flash Drive technology that is putting an end to rotational drives. Western Digital simply was not ready for the large drives from 40, 60, 80, and 100 GB drives. Now they are playing catchup with the Toshiba 160 gb laptop drives... and the Seagate 750 GB drives.
The enemy of "good" is always "better."
The future is in flash drives, made well, that last a long time.

...But What About Performance?

No other drive manufactures can touch the WD Raptor's performance. Does Seagate make a drive that can compete with the Raptor? I haven't heard of these failing. Please post if you know differently.

In line with RayBay's sentiments, my next build will most likely have a SSD drive for the OS/boot drive.

Of course - that component that kills a drive is almost always one of the moving parts. Solid start tech is the way forward, and it will not be long before solid state drives (quicker, quieter, reliable, cheaper per Gb) will be available. I wonder what will happen to other media such as DVD once we reach this state - will everything have a USB or similar interface?

Aren't all computer hard drives built in the Pacific rim countries? Here in the Northwestern United States, Seagate is King. Western Digital is very common, but I have seen Seagate drives appearing in the newer HP, Dell and even eMachines computers lately... If I saw a Western Digital drive in a failed computer, it was the first thing I pulled. The Seagates get a format and OS reinstall first.

In my experience, it's the electronics that fails more often than the mechanical assemblies in hard drives

Seagate is just down the street from us in Scotts Valley, California. They are also in Singapore, China, and Hungary. They remain in every location once owned by Maxtor and Quantum. They are the only company still building drives in the United States.
We don't confirm your history on Electronics failures. With Quantum, the plates cracks. Maxtor drives had magnetic media peeling off the edge of the plates, and the bearings froze up. Western Digital chips failed on the 60 and 80 GB 3.5 inch hard drives. They also had reader head problems. WD also had a lot of magnetic media peeling up. Hitachi has bearings problems in both their 3.5" and 2.5" drives. The Dell failures were chips and circuit boards on their 80 GB models. Connor drive plates warped. Fujitsu and Samsung drives overheat. Seagate has suffered magnetic media and chip problems on both their 3.5" and 2.5" drives.
Lots of failure are in model runs, that the correct in the next manufacturing cycle. When you have a drive Squawk, it is usually a bearing.

Dont forget the.....

"Death Star", or was that "Desk Star". At the end of the day, it seems backing up frequently and well is the best drive that money can buy.

I've personally never had any luck with Maxtor or Western Digital Drives either, I just recently replaced a failed western digital 40gb drive with a new 80gb seagate drive and it works like a charm.

2 silver 80 gigs

1 black 120

my rant continues!

holy cow my wd320 gig that is less than 6 months is already giving me boot disk errors!


ahh

and it does it at the worst possible times too. I took the tower into school so we could export and swap files for our video competition (which was due that day).

The machine turned on, then when i looked at it later (after xp loaded the first time) it had restarted and was on a boot disk error.

i restarted it 15 or 20 times until i was sooo pissed i punched it.

Guess what... it turned on and worked perfectly the rest of the day.... until we moved it to another class (the judgeing was done in that room) we had to leave or else we were disqualified.

then it did the same thing, 20 restarts later i punched the top... then it worked perfectly.

I know this probably isnt good on my componets, but thats the only way it will work after you move it.

keep in mind im not dragging, sliding, or dropping it at any point.

next time I take it in to renew my 3d license from the server, im going to take the hdd out and ride with it between my legs or something.... this is rediculous

i carry a wd passport 120 gigger with me everyday for 2 years, it has had a rough life and works perfectly (until i unplugged it "unsafely" from a windows 2000 machine.... woah)


this is about the 10th time the 320 has done this, at first i thought i was transporting it too "rough"... so i took an old luggage case, wrapped it in a blanket with pillows and put it in my trunk.

still does it.

This is an hdd issue right? i listened to the drive thru a screwdriver and didnt hear any repetitive clicking....


i wonder how SDD drives are coming along, seems like a good investment at this point...

I am still looking into a raid (copy) set of seagate 500's... maybe ill make them esata so i can take them off for a car trip....

i thought the same.

but both the power and ide was solid. in both the wd and dvd burner.

and in the bios, it didn't even see the first master port

Bios below

IDE MASTER 1 <blank>
IDE SLAVE 1 BENQsomethinsomethin

it seemed to have the same symptoms of the other wd's that my computers wouldnt recognize.


it was funny because some geek in my class was acting hard "give me a screwdriver, ill do a hard reset" and he was b.s'in what he was really doing... at which point i punched the crap out of it... and it worked lol

The SDD driver are horribly expensive, and not yet for prime time... relatively untested.
Consider the Seagate 250, 500, and 750 drives with the five year warranty.

Have you run any of the makers diagnostics on the drive? Don't be too quick to condemn them!
It is not unusual for a drive to have some bad sectors and if these are stable this is OK. I have seen drives last for years like this.
Thumping the case to get it to is as Mailpup said likely to be a connection issue - I recommend taking it all to bits and putting it back together again. 10:1 that will sort it out.

yeah i ran a wd diag disc that i downloaded a few months ago. When the computer reconized the drive, wd diag found nothing wrong with it.

the other 5 times i started it up, the software said a drive couldnt be located.

ive tried a new ide cable also, they arent coming loose. the drive just goes invisible to the system after transport.

the bios can halfway see the drive, because it dosent say not connected or anything. It tries to load info from the hdd and cant get any.

Before throwing the thing away, just see if it works on another machine, perhaps?

i think its just about luck i mean i have had the wd raptor for well 4 yrs and have had the 150gb hd which both had not have any issues at all. but seagate is very cool and work well with no fuss at all as i have had one fore 9 years now and i used it to install xp...

woah slow your roll, i never throw technology away.

especailly something that still halfway works lol. i just dont understand how 3.5inch drives seem to not like travel, but notebook 2.5 drives work fine after being tossed around in a bag..

should i start buying 2.5 inchers for my pc's ? lol

they rarely move, but ill do anything to prepare for it (whn the budget is there)

People starting buying Western Digital drives because they were cheaper than other brands. Seagate holds the top desktop brand, and their laptop drives are not bad either. I have an external 100GB Seagate laptop drive Velcroed to my full tower computer case as a backup device

Yes SNGX1275,
Maxtor has a 2-year warranty, Seagate has a 5-year warranty. I just RMA'd a SATA 320GB Maxtor that crapped out after only 2 months. Seagate is sending me a new one. I didn't buy the Maxtor. I removed it from a system I was repairing. I replaced it with a Seagate drive. I will put the replacement Maxtor in my system as extra storage