I have two 1 TB WD drives and one green 2 TB WD drive in my 1st generation Drobo. I will add 1 more 2 TB drive soon.

I did have 1 WD drive crap out on me and there was a wrestling match as to who was responsible for the replacement between Drobo and WD but, they agreed and replaced it for free.

You can't win.

They all have problems but some have more then others.

Buy enterprise rated hdd's from Western Digital. These have RE in their model number.

The Seagate .11 series sucked but they have fixed things with the new .12 series. The WD green series are the least expensive and least reliable of the WD drives. If purchasing WD, purchase the black series.

I should not have read this thread!
Within an hour of reading this my
Seagate DIAMONDMAX died!

While anecdotal information can be useful, you might want to visit a website devoted to reviewing hard drives. These folks love to talk gear, almost as much as photographers...

http://www.storagereview.com/

In my country, the Samsung drives gives the best value. Currently I use 6 (out of 8) Samsung drives.

My drobo has 4 WD 1tb Black Cavalier, no problems at all!!!

I have 5 1TB seagate server hard drives in my raid5 server. Absolutely no problems or failures and three more seagate drives in my desktop. I will be buying 3 more 1TB Seagates and and a new raid controller in this year's server upgrade. Link @ Newegg As many others have said, both WD and Seagate are subject to failure but with proper back up and redundancy your data should be safe.

Our youngest daughter had her relatively new Compaq laptop's harddrive fail...Seagate (made in Singapore).

I have a Western Digital 500GB MyBook, which is seldom powered on as it serves only as a data backup device...with under 1000 hours of powered on time, it suddenly decided to power up eratically and will not even spin up sometimes without dozens of power on/off cycles. Pick your poison.

With almost 25 years of history in computing, they are the only two harddrives I ever had fail.

Our company has been using Western Digital Enterprise class drives for a number of years. Not sure they were the best choice. With 30 computers running 3-4 drives each, we replaced 6 last month alone. Not sure what is happening with them. Some were under warranty still but, doesn't help recovering lost data. I think Seagate will be next at bat.

Paul

I've been working with high end consumer-class data storage for a number of years, and have to say that the Hitachi 1TB (and now the 2TB) hard drives are the most reliable of any brand. This is is because they used to be IBM.

Western Digital is probably #2 in that list, with their 2TB Green drives being decent, and Seagate/Maxtor a far 3rd.

I would highly recommend Hitachi if you're looking for a solid, reliable series of drives.

I use either WD or Seagate depending on which is cheaper I gave up long ago wondering which manufacturer was better than the other. You'll always find people with horror stories about a particular type of drive so I concluded they're all as good (or bad) as each other.

I also generally use 7200rpm drives, but I've read that for some bigger RAID arrays slower spinning drives are preferable because they generate less heat, and long-term exposure to excessive heat will kill any drive.

In theory, the enterprise versions of drives are supposed to be the most reliable, which is why they generally have a longer warranty (often five years) and cost slightly more. You might ask "what good is a warranty if it can't bring back lost data?" but that's not an issue if the dead drive is part of a mirrored RAID array.

Actually, hard drives come down to the quality of the manufacturer.

I purchased about 20 Hitachi 1TB drives over the last 2-3 years, and none of them have failed. They all work perfectly, with zero link failures in any of my arrays.

I purchased 7 Western Digital 2TB (Green) drives, which are significantly cooler, and 2 of them arrived DOA. The remaining 5 also generate numerous link failures, and randomly drop out of RAID arrays. I scrapped them. Same story with Seagate and their 1/1.5 TB drives.

I've been dealing with high end storage for years. If you want a reliable, fast drive, buy a couple of Hitachis, put it in a RAID 5 and don't look back.

My advice it to vary the types of drives you add to your storage array, at least slightly. If one drive has a defect that causes it to fail after a certain amount of time, you run the risk of others failing around the same time. Most storage arrays can only tolerate a single drive failing without data loss.

WD!

Samsung Spinpoint F3 1TB, they are showing great performance.

bit-tech.net review

Had three WDs all fail in a row. Have five Maxtors, one is 4+ years old...never a problem from Maxtor, will never buy a WD again. Sure it is small sample size, but hey, it is MY sample...and that shows that WDs fail 100% of the time.

+1 for Samsung drives.

Got 4 internal and have had various Samsungs running for the last few years with zero trouble. Newegg.com often has great Samsung 1TB deals. $69 a drive or less.

Best of luck!

I have had excellent results with Western Digital, but do not buy the "green" drives. I buy the "black" - they have much larger cache, and a 5-year warranty.

Funnny the amount of seagate failures listed.
Every WD drive I have ever bought save a pair of Raptors failed in less than a month.
I have multiple arrays of Seagates (SATA and SCSI) that have been performing flawlessly and never a single hiccup from seagate. Seagate buyung Maxtor hs nothing to do with them wanting to use maxtor technology, usually a move like this has the inverse effect The move is more about eliminating competition.

I just got done doing research and purchasing a Seagate 2T external HD. My final choice between Seagate and WD models with similar specs and prices turned on the length of the warranty.