I’ve long used nothing but HGST drives for my customers. Confirms my own personal experience that Seagates are THE worst drives. WDs hit or miss, with enough misses I gave up on them too. Not happy WD bought HGST, either.
Also, I NEVER buy so-called bare-bones OEM drives, only drives in retail packaging, even though they’re more expensive and harder to find. I had so many failures no matter who I bought them from that I figured warehouse pickers everywhere just dumped them in bins like kindling chips and if a few dropped on the floor here and there during order fulfillment, oh well.
Now, though, I’m just bailing on HDs all together and going for Samsung 850 EVO SSDs.
I just got unbelievably lucky with an HGST laptop drive that failed. The computer crashed and would not restart. It gave me an unreadable drive error, but I was able to put it in an external enclosure and use recovery software to save an image. I then wrote the image to a new identical drive that I purchased through Amazon Prime. I had to use a Windows 7 system repair disc to get Windows 7 to start. After that I ran standard and a few other 3rd party diagnostics for error checking and repairs. I have been able to start all of the programs that I normally use without any difficulty and have not been able to find any bad data files.
I ran diagnostics on the failing drive, but it could not pass the SMART tests. I actually tried to reinstall an operating system from factory install DVDs just to see if it would do it, but it failed after a few minutes. Then I realized that the drive still had about a month left on its warranty. I have now received a replacement hard drive. it is the first hard drive that I have ever had which failed before the warranty had expired. In the past it has always been slightly after the warranty ran out.
I have a 500gn Samsung eco-green HD that is still going strong after 8 years. The eco-green drives spun at 5400 so I figured would last longer. So I like and trust Samsung engineering. I also like and trust Sandisk and recently installed a 256gb SSD from them that I am very happy with. So now that Sammy 500gb is a secondary drive with the OS etc on the SSD.
The old line of Samsung eco-green 5400rpm hard drives http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822152173
Single platter!!!! Samsung eco-green 5400rpm hard drive 500GB
http://www.silentpcreview.com/Silent_Samsung_F2_EcoGreen_HD502HI
(long gone discontinues)
This.
SSDs provide a HUGE boost in performance, even much more than maxing out your RAM.