Comments on: Game Over, Western Digital buys Hitachi GST

By: AaronD12

AaronD12 — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 23:03:00 +0000

I have very good luck with Hitachi’s hard drives. Originally purchased from IBM, their GMR perpendicular head recording technology is rock-solid and fast. I certainly hope Western Digital adopts this technology in their own drives. Then again, how much longer are we going to use rotating storage? SSDs FTW!

By: hakashi

hakashi — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 04:30:00 +0000

Wrong, we have a HUGE advantage of running a SSD drive. That leaves Intel and OCZ.

I wished there was a way in the future to tell a Hatachi drive from a WD one.

By: fh

fh — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 03:47:00 +0000

Just wondering how you consider Hitachi GST to be unreliable. The lifespan of any single drive is unpredictable, regardless of brand. Some lucky people have no problems with any kind of drive they buy; other people just have bad luck and their drives fail no matter what brand.

That said, Seagate and Samsung have some fundamental flaws to their drives: Seagate has had trouble with power management, causing their motors to burn or wear out prematurely; and Samsung is comparatively inexperienced when it comes to building mature firmware. Compared to those problems, Western Digital and Hitachi are actually pretty reliable (but again some people just have bad luck). I’ve had my share of failed drives from ALL brands; but Seagate and Samsung are by far the worst offenders (many other users report similarly high failure rates).

In any case, considering how cheap magnetic storage is, there’s no reason for anyone not to have redundancy or backup (using something like Drobo, or even a basic RAID system).