So whats the manufacturer of choice these days? I have to say I've never had a drive fail on me ever but I don't want to lose data.

I like Western Digital. It will be my primary driive so it must be fast with a decent buffer, fast seek times etc etc and at least 200gb. Preferably at a good price

So... hit me

My recommendation? Buy two drives and set up a backup.

Drives will fail. Period. And usually at the least convenient time, too.

-jk

Seagate Barracuda. Fast, quiet, and I've never had one go wrong on me.

Touch wood.

Hmmmm what about this one?

And yes a backup is a good idea!

I've had a few. A couple of things to note:

• Seagate Barracuda V - Had one fail because it was in a place where its heat collected during a RAID sync. Seagate support is absolutely excellent, I shipped the drive to them, and they sent me a new one under warranty. The drives in my case now have a super quiet 120mm fan on 7v rigged up to them with cable ties. Have to say they have been very reliable since. Verdict: Heat sensitive, but recommended.
• Samsung Spinpoint - This one is really really quiet. I like it for that. Price is very average.
• Maxtor Diamondmax - On idle this drive is quiet, but when it is seeking it does make rather annoying rumbling noises. You get NCQ on most of them as a speed-bonus (does this make much difference?), and I find they are consistantly the cheapest per GB. I bought a 300GB SATA one last night on Komplett for 80 quid (+6 P&P) inc VAT. Can't argue with that.

7V? Eww. You're not doing that nasty hack of connecting a fan between the 5V and 12V lines are you? If that fan dies and goes shortcircuit then wave the entire contents of your PC goodbye.

I've had loads of issues with Maxtor drives. I've personally had about 5 drives fail and similar numbers for people I know.

What about the Seagate one I listed. Any good?

I've had 2 Seagates fail on me so avoid them myself now.

I have WD drives in my PC. Also don't Samsung (or someone) now own IBM's drive business - they are supposed to be pretty good.

At the end of the day, all brands are going to have horror stories so I guess you should just pick one that you like the look of and cross your fingers!

Hitachi bought out the IBM storage division. I think IBM might still have a small share in it.

It's really hard to ask a community like this which HDD brand they like. We've had a few discussions on this before, and each one had somebody posting something along the lines of:

"I've used ten hard drives from [company name], and they all failed on me, so I never buy from that company again."

I started out with Western Digital and I like them. I messed up one drive myself and found their warranty return process to be excellent. I now have two Western Digital drives in my machine, and two Seagates. All of them are SATA drives, and they all work fine so far (knocking my desk).

When it comes down to it, I don't worry about this stuff too much. Yes, it would supremely suck if I lost my drives, and I had to lose all my movies and music, but in the end it's just data and it's really just for fun for me. As long as I've backed up my important files (documents, pictures/photos, web site work, Quicken data, emails, etc), then I don't lose any sleep over it.

So get whatever drive you want. Go for the good performers with the big capacities. I picked the Seagates because I wanted quiet drives. They're very quiet (although they seem to have a veeery high-pitched whine to them, but I usually don't notice that).

Good luck to you! I love adding hard disk space!

I use Maxtor Drives. Never had one fail yet. I've had IBM, Seagate and WD drives fail on me in the past.

They are cheap, quiet and run at an ok temp. But I would go with RAID also, I have that on my main server. You can't go without backup these days!

Cheers

Cris.

I've had most makes fail on me, there's nothing like having an on site AND off site backup. I use an HD in an internal IDE case thing to as my on site backup, I back up from that to a HD in my PC at work.

<shameless threadjack>
Let me see if I've got this straight-
It's no good to trust any particular brand of drive because drive failure is just a part of life and the best solution is to be prepared for it.
The best preparation is some sort of backup plan- either synced mirrors or RAID5 boxes.
Data storage has two basic 'constraints'- getting enough space and making it reliable/robust.
I'm trying to get an outline in my head of the specific 'robustness' strategy involved, so pardon my mental gear grinding. Please feel free to clarify or correct me (it's a forum, and that's the whole point).
Data is best to store on RAID - either internal (card) or external (NAS). I suspect that internal has faster access and is less obtrusive- what other advantages does it have?
OS and programs are best placed on individual drives (and/or separate partitions of an internal RAID).
OS and programs shouldn't (or can't?) be run from RAID and therefore should be backed up (or at least the personal configuration files) to some safe data storage configuration (again, either RAID or a mirrored drive).
If not backed up, OS and programs could just be rebuilt from the original source (which is just data). Hmm- if your OS is corrupt then you won't have access to the source data except via CD, so RAID storage of the source seems silly (but that's just the sort of thing I'm trying to figure out here, so go with me on this).
It seems from other threads that RAID card selection is deathly important, although (from this thread) drive brand is not.
I don't see the value in assembling arrays of small drives. Too much hassle for too little gain?

...and then there's the concept of data protection from threats external to the computer- ie: fire, flood, etc.
For this, some syncing of data to a remote RAID/server seems the proper way to go. Sort of out of the range of my concerns on this day, but probably an important consideration for the next few years.

My usage is simply personal/home use- I'm not thinking in terms of business operation, just music/photos/entertainment/personal records/etc storage and manipulation.
I'm running an old HP Pavilion with two large (40GB+) drives in it (no mirror) and a homebrew NAS (Debian/RAID5).
I'm sort of lazy about the whole back-up thing, so I haven't tried many things to ensure I can recover the HP (stuff on the Debian box should survive a drive death). I tried to set up an automatic backup via the tools Bill Gates provided me in the WinME on the HP, but that software only wants to store the recovery data on a 'removable' device, so I couldn't create the backup on the second drive or the NAS. Could I mount a directory on the NAS as such a device?
Or would that defeat the whole purpose? (ie: recovering the HP would then require the NAS to be reinstated as such a device before the HP could be rebuilt)
Then there's the technology-timeline to consider... new drives and storage solutions might make some of these concerns (above) moot. Like the Hitachi vertical bit drives. No worries with storage space, there!
If data storage solutions of the near future solve issues of space and reliability, then it doesn't seem like investing loadsof time, effort, and money into backup solutions for personal use is warranted. Obviously, some effort/time/money should be invested, but it's just a balance thing, I guess.

Hmm- lots to think about for my backup/recovery-newbie brain.
If you've stuck with me this far, I thank you for your time.
If you're inclined to respond, I'm interested and appreciate hearing your thoughts.
I should just dump $200 on an external USB drive to make my backups to, eh?
</shameless threadjack>