Well, the improvements at Hitachi and Maxtor are interesting. Who would know from the numbers, since hardly any computer manufacturer would use either.
Now that Seagate has Maxtor under their wing, the quality control has improved. Hitachi is a more interesting story. They have hard drive plants in Singapore, Thailand, Hungary, and Mexico. Hitachi had made great improvements in the SATA desktop and laptop drives. But their problems with the Travelstar, Deskstar, and Ultrastar started as soon as they bought the hard drive division from IBM. Hitachi has had amazing high speed drives... their 15,000 rpm and 10,000 rpm drives with SAS interface and SCSI interface have been magnificent. However, the Jury is still out on their consumer level desktop and laptop PATA (EIDE, IDE) drives since way back in 2000 with the Deskstars were renamed the Deathstars by the public. Hitachi continued to have major hard drive problems on any desktop drive larger than 13 GB, and that continued through 2006 when Hitachi went on the auction block. They were up for sale for nearly three years, and are probably still for sale. One of many reason is that no manufacturer will buy their consumer hard drives... even though the SATA drives have not been a problem. It was rumored that the Hitachi acquisition of a number of other companies and plants also bought then a lot of disgruntled employees and Unions, and major malicious damage was done... Of course, no company will ever admit to that issue. Their PATA drives were a disaster... 15 GB, 20 GB, 40 GB, 60GB, 80GB, and on up into the 2006 releases of their 160GB, 250GB, and 500GB. All of those are bad or mostly bad. Beginning with April, 2008, (with great investment in their plants, and changes of plant managers, and quality control officers,) there have been few failures reported. But who would know? They haven't sold enough to count. If they are failing, the industry is no longer seeing them... Hitach survived only because a large part of their busines is in industrial grade products and their consumer market other than hard drives is getting better. HP has certainly had major difficulties with their Hitachi laptops in 2008. If you trust Hitachi laptop or desktop drives now, you can certainly get substantial deals in volume. We now get failed Hitachi drives replaced with a phone call... then receive the replacement drive while the bad one is still in the mail back to them. Customer service has improved dramatically. Western Digital had much serious trouble with 60GB, 80GB, and 120GB desktop hard drives in 2003 and 2004. Once they had the problems corrected, they issued their new drives in black so as to not be confused with the high failure silver colored drives. Most everybody had trouble with drives larger than 40 GB for two years. And the industry still has high failure rates with 7200 rpm drives for laptops. They fail three times as frequently as the 5400 rpm drives... though some will argue this point. We assume that the era of bad Hitachi drives is behind us, as it is with Maxtor. But our best luck is with laptop hard drives is in this order: Fujitsu Toshiba Seagate Western Digital much improved Samsung good and getting better. Hitachi which we still do not buy, but see a lot for replacement in our four shops. 7200 rpm drives have a much greater rate than 5400 rpm drives. Some large online vendors will not even stock 7200 rpm drives. Maxtor and Tri-Gem no longer make laptop hard drives as far as I know. For Desktop drives other than SCSI and SAS, IDE/PATA and SATA: Seagate Samsung Western Digital Maxtor but we do not buy them because the customer nose is turned up to high. Hitachi There is no reason to buy Hitachi with Seagate and Western Digital so reliable and so low priced. Toshiba doesn't make consumer desktop drives Tri-Gem... We do not recommend these Korean drives at all... but you will see them in eMachines because they share the same parent country. The next generation of SSD drives will change the industry... in time for the Christmas market, and by Christmas, 2010, there will be SSD in all new computers. 7200 rpm and 5400 rpm drives will only be made for the replacement market. rb ----- This suspense is terrible. I hope it will last. ... .... ..... ...... ....... Oscar Wilde On Tue, Jul 28, 2009 at 5:29 AM, Donald MacQueen <[email protected]> wrote: > I remember Ray, among others, has expressed doubt about using Hitachi > laptop drives, but does that reluctance extend to their desktop drives too? > > Here is a 1 Tb Hitachi for $65: > http://dealnews.com/Hitachi-1-TB-SATA-3-Gbps-Internal-Hard-Drive-for-65-after-rebate-free-shipping/310406.html?ref=alert > > Thoughts? > _______________________________________________ > Thinkpad mailing list > [email protected] > http://stderr.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/thinkpad > _______________________________________________ Thinkpad mailing list [email protected] http://stderr.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/thinkpad
