New HDD

[[TC]»Elmo«]

My 1.5TB WD had an error as well It was probably there from new as it was about 1.3TB in. Got it replaced on warranty though (they sent me a replacement before I had to send them the broken one, so I could back up what I could). That's the only modern (<10 years) HDD I've had that's failed.

Seagate have owned Maxtor for several years now and have recently bought Samsung's HDD company.
Nowadays, the best quality ones from the company get branded Seagate. There are still a few models with a 5 year warranty.

I have a couple of Seagate/Maxtor drives from '05,'06 that are still going strong.

(2012-04-25 23:16)Tommer Wrote:  ~£80-90 for a 2TB Hard Drive with a 600 mb/s write speed? I swear a year ago you were lucky to get a 1TB with a 300mb/s for £90

Don't be fooled by those speeds. That's the speed of the SATA data link (and should be what the 32/64MB cache can do), not the mechanical hard drive itself. 7200rpm Seagate/Maxtor 1TB drives can sustain more than 130MB/s read/write. Larger capacities are generally even faster (but I haven't seen any faster than 160MB/s) due to the data density of the platters.

Good brands: Seagate/Maxtor are basically the same, Samsung F3 and up are good from what I've heard (never had one though). On the whole, I haven't heard much bad about WD, but the others may be marginally better.
Don't get an Hitachi. They're nicknamed "Deathstar" for a reason.