Is Western Digital no longer the class act?

[TimtheEnchanter]

I've experienced two of their internal SATA hard drives in the past 2 years suddenly become very sluggish and randomly unresponsive. One did it within just months of buying it, and now my main system drive, which is still relatively new, has been giving me lots of trouble in the past week and is threatening to follow down the same path of doom.

My older WD's are still alive and kicking though and have had plenty of use.

Has anyone else been having similar experiences? Is it time to go looking to a different brand?

[JetFlash]

If you think you have a drive going bad you can go and download the Data Lifeguard Tools from Western Digital to see if you are having hardware issues with the drive.

http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?groupid=612&sid=3&lang=en

(You may not have a Velociraptor drive, but it is the same software).

[MaidMercury]

I only buy Western Digital and Seagate drives. They still work diligently for me. Yes, Lifeguard data tools is nice. I used it when I ran win2000 <---it defaulted to a smaller capacity....and a LOT of space was not recognized until I ran  Lifeguard data tools.
I also use System Mechanic and it keeps tabs on my hard Drives, checking it's performance, health, optimizing automatically in the background.

[houtex]

I'm using WD drives in my office computers... not a problem.  But they're only 500G because I simply don't need or want more in them, they're work computers.  These are the Blue ones, Sata 6Gs.

It *used* to be that I would avoid them like the plague, and run only Seagates.  But a while back I had a bunch of Seagates give me enough pause that I went WD and really haven't had any reason to go back.

[0nehanklap]

I'm using WD Black Caviar drives,
very fast (for platters) and extremely reliable.
running almost continually for 3-4 years, no complaints.

[downix]

I've used Samsung drives for over a decade without an issue.

[dwturducken]

People have said bad things about Hitachi/IBM drives, but, except for when my son accidentally pulled my laptop off the table when he tripped over the power cord, I've never had a problem with them. That one took almost a month to die, and I have Thinkpads that are older than him that still are spinning their original Travelstars.

I couldn't afford one, tho, so I went with a WD Black at 7200RPM and 6Gb/s. The trade off, though, is that I had to settle for 320GB (still twice the stock capacity my Thinkpad originally had) to keep it under $100. I upgraded to Windows 7 at the same time, so all of the initial speed and latency issues I was having were due to fine-tuning the power and performance settings.

My prior Thinkpad had a 40GB Travelstar, but I wanted more, even with XP, so I cheaped out and got a WD Blue. The graphics processor flaked on me before the drive did, but it always had a ticking sound that I was never comfortable with. Also, I haven't completely trusted Seagates since they bought out Maxtor. After that, we had about a 25% failure rate on new ones. (I was working for the ISP/office network support/computer repair place at the time) That said, I have a couple of Seagates in the 40GB and 80GB flavors that are still chugging away.

[houtex]

The Deathstars (75GXP) drives that IBM put out is the reason the Hitatch (nee IBM) drives are not well regarded these days.  The bitterness burns deep when you have that kind of thing happen.  I used to swear by them Deskstars until those drives came out. 

It is the same thing that to this day I will never, ever, buy Sony, Acer or eMachine knowingly.  For ANYTHING.  Also, MSI motherboards, and anything ATI.  Burned too many times, I'm totally out.  Can't run a business when you replace 10 out of 10 motherboards, or have to continuously try to keep the ATI drivers functioning.  Gigabyte, and now Intel, mobos rule my world, as do NVIDIA graphics if it's not the onboard Intel graphics (which is usually sufficient at work)

/So... I guess I just turned this into the "what hardware do you wanna bash today" thread.  Awesome. :p
//I'm positive there are others who would barf on Intel, Gigabyte, and NVIDIA, and swear up and down on all that is Sony.  Good on you, I'm glad you have better luck than I did!

[Kistulot]

Unfortunately until every drive is motionless, harddrives will be the biggest source of mechanical failure inside of a computer. It's just an unfortunate engineering truth.

When I worked support, I got as many calls that resulted in a bad Seagate/WD drive as I did Hitachi or other brands. Sometimes it felt like it was a loooot of Seagate, but most of my calls dealing with Seagate were in their really really dumb software they keep putting on external drives that you need to remove with their own special software. The rest was within normal variances, esp. considering the limiting factors of which company's drives were in which models of our machines 9/10 times.

So I can't site any studies, but I can say WD has remained VERY good about honoring RMAs, so even if they have problems (innate to the industry) they take efforts to solve them.

[dwturducken]

I have no love for Sony. They're fine until they stop working. Then, they're a roil PITA to work on.

As for the *star drives, I have never bought one on its own, but I've never had a problem with one that came with a Thinkpad, and I'm on my sixth one. My first one is still running with its original drive, and it's a 120Mhz Pentium 365CD (which, ironically, did not have an optical drive). Now, I have had them just up and die in other machines, but I haven't seen that many of those. Everyone is gonna have their preferences based on what they've had fail on them. I have one friend who works in a shop that will only buy Dell Inspirons, because they've never had one die in the field.

Really, all you can do is take the advice as best you can and go with what you feel you can trust. mine comes from working on a lot of computers, but the place I was doing it already had established brand preferences. I got pretty good at command-line configuration of old Cisco routers, for instance. :)

[houtex]

Unfortunately until every drive is motionless, harddrives will be the biggest source of mechanical failure inside of a computer. It's just an unfortunate engineering truth.

So... can you explain why I have replaced more 80mm fans than hard drives over the years? :)

Kidding... for data purposes, indeed, this is the truth.  But those fans...

/hate the sleeve bearing ones.  Their lubrication gumms up when it gets cold after a couple whiles (like when the computer is off) probably due to dust after that couple whiles, so they just freeze up and they're done.
//Bad design.  Cheap design, sure, but bad design on bearings, ya ask me.
///Really sucks when its the power supply fan, and guess how the machines were made to exhaust heat... 

[Kistulot]

So... can you explain why I have replaced more 80mm fans than hard drives over the years? :)

Hee, you have me there :)

Fans... fans are a thing. Esp when it turns out the pc you custom ordered because bleh boxpcs but you were working overtime with a five hour daily commute actually has a processor fan attached directly to the heatsink that dies unexpectedly. That was annoying to reapply thermal paste for a bloody fan.

The replacement fan is however far stronger, and manages to quite skillfully affect the temperature of my room.

Fans definitely have a high failure rate too, and I've had more fail than drives for sure, but I've replaced fewer fans for other people. The duality of life!

[GuyPerfect]

Unfortunately until every drive is motionless, harddrives will be the biggest source of mechanical failure inside of a computer. It's just an unfortunate engineering truth.

Fans definitely have a high failure rate too, and I've had more fail than drives for sure, but I've replaced fewer fans for other people.

... Short term memory loss?

[Kistulot]

... Short term memory loss?

I was responding to being corrected :)

Also the sheer amount of people I've fixed stuff for compared to my 1 time fixing my own fan and maybe fixing them for... three others tops.. and the amount of times I've had to tell people "Please backup your harddrive.. ;-;" it only makes sense I might not consider fans since they're hardware that is important, but the effect of one going off is "gonna need to replace a 10$ part" as opposed to "err... yeeah your data is goooone..."

[Taceus Jiwede]

"err... yeeah your data is goooone..."

Sorry a little off topic here but I couldn't agree more.  I run my private studio off my computer and have failed to backup the hard-drive.  And lost probably over 300+ hours of work on the songs I was working on.  Real bummer, luckily any time I have a client I do it at the studio I work at, so I haven't ever lost anyone else's work.  But still, bad news bears if you don't back up your hard drive there are songs that I will never release or finish now because of failing to back up a hard drive :(

[MaidMercury]

Seeing we're talking tech.
I purchased a HP CP1025nw, I am very happy with it so far. 8)

..Are there any special things you need to be aware of for Laser printers? I never owned one before.
I know Deskjets, the ink would dry out, some folks would keep cartridges in a plastic bag when not in use.
Some used ink refill kits.

[Blondeshell]

I've used HP laser printers for years with no problems. Toner is a powder, so you don't have to worry about it drying out during long periods of inactivity. I've never messed with refilled/remanufactured cartridges, though, because of performance worries. I do, however, send my used cartridges to HP for recycling.

[Hyperstrike]

Okay,
I've had good luck with WD over the years.  I've had a couple critical failures.  But in the last...god...20+ years, I've had more good drives than bad.
And I've usually had full backups.

If you're doing ANY business on your computer, always, always ALWAYS have backups.

And do NOT simply "assume" that because you have stuff copied to another drive, or a backup service, etc, etc, that you have a valid backup!
Always test your backups periodically.  Otherwise, all you have is a bunch of junk bits stored someplace.

Additionally, if you're appropriately paranoid (translation: thinking straight), you get LAYERS of backups.  I have clients who have onsite backups, offsite backups, AND online backups.  Not to mention data synchronization.  A client of mine, a couple years back, was able to restore their ENTIRE client database, with all history and everything else because one of their salesguys had synced in less than three hours before their data center went up in flames.  Needless to say, the guy got a MONSTER X-mas bonus.

I just restored a client this week who had an entire server LITERALLY go up in a puff of smoke.
They got a new machine, configured, and then I was able to get their business back up and running in about 2 hours.
Why?  Good backups.

As for toner.  You don't have to worry about it drying out.  You actually have the opposite problem.  Clumping.

[houtex]

Shake it... shake it... shake it like a polaroid picturrree....

/Which begs the question... Whassa polaroid?
//No, no, I know what it is.  Bein' silly. :)

[Blondeshell]

Shake it... shake it... shake it like a polaroid picturrree....

/Which begs the question... Whassa polaroid?
//No, no, I know what it is.  Bein' silly. :)

Fun fact: Shaking a Polaroid picture didn't actually make it develop faster.