Top Of The Line Hard Drive

So in your opinion which company produces the highest quality hard drive and why?

more details. Are we talking spindle drives?

Spindle, I say Western digital. I have had the best luck with them an no issues at all. At some point in time everyone makes the best drive, depends on your needs.

I have owned WD, seagate, and Hitachi drives with no issues. I will not buy seagate again cause of ther drive bricking, even if they have fixed the issue. Maybe after I know for sure that they aren't having problems and i am secure with it.

WD also has the vraptors which can't be beat in a spindle drive unless you go scsi, possibly sas.

Currently I think the WD 640gb drives are the ones of my choice atm. I do not need a lot of storage space, but 2x 320gb platters is top notch in my book.

It all boils down to what your needs are. There are great drives from the 3 big names and deals come everyday which could potentially make the choice different if cost is an issue.

I think it's really one of those Your Mileage May Vary situations. I've got 3 Seagates, one's failed, 2 Hitachi's, one's failed, and, as of right now, 5 WD's, one of which has failed, and two of which are making scratching noises on power up/power down.

Sorry I was so vague, what I meant to say was if there are any normal hard drives under 2TB that may cost more than average but are built to a higher standard, ie noise, reliability, etc.

Sounds so far that good hds are more of an art then a science lol. Is there any quasi new technology to look out to now, like green hds or new 500gig platters etc?

WD Caviar Black for software and WD Caviar Green for general storage. Western Digital should be releasing both a Black and Green 1.5TB and 2TB with 500GB platters and 64MB of cache.

Surprising, because my two Blacks are the ones that are scratching. Think it might be normal?

When it comes to mechanical HDDs, their are going to be duds no matter the manufacture. It's just a byproduct of the complex and fragile design. If you're having problems with your WD drives, I suggest you RMA. They have an option where they send you a new drive first, and once you get it, you send the bad one back to them. That way, there's no real downtime other than having to transfer your data.

Their RMA process blows. Probably the one thing I don't like about WD, their drives have always been rock solid otherwise. I probably just got two pairs from bad batches. I had to RMA one Caviar Blue already because it's write speed was crippled to 5 Mb/s, and now the two Blacks are making the noise. I've got 4 Greens and a Raptor on the way, so hope I have better luck with those.

I've always been fond of Seagate. Back in the day when everyone was offering 3 years max warranty Seagate stepped up and offered 5 years. That's putting your money where your mouth is.

Drives have come a long way. 1998-2004 I used to lose drives all the time. Yet the last 5 years i've not lost one.....

WD Caviar Black, had some back luck with Maxtor/Seagate. I'm sure it's just luck of the draw, but I'm really happy with my WD, for now.

I currently own 3 WD drives. One is an 80gb pata drive that is probably 6 years old, and it is just finally starting to die. It still runs, but very very slowly. Other than that i have a 160gb caviar and a 750 green both of which perform excelently. I plan on WD on my next build.