Im far from an expert but is seems to me that if you go back several years ago, seagate was very reliable, i have a good bunch of Seagates from the first half of the 2000s, all of em are still fine.
If you are looking in the 80gb range, i think its probably a good bet, but new ones will be hard to find.

For recent drives, Ive read some bad reviews of seagate reliability, and equally good reviews of WD concerning reliabillity. Recently I bought a 1TB WD RE4 for my main computer. Those are the Raid edition enterprise grade HD. About twice the price of a regular drive. So far no problems, very quiet drive. I value my data very highly, i even do backups on two external drives, just in case.

I used to swear by Seagate back in the day although these days I use Samsung. Never had a problem with Seagate.
At one of my previous jobs years ago we had a couple of thousand Compaq PC's and we were replacing Maxtor hard drives every week. Definitely give Maxtor a wide berth.

If its for an old PC or laptop a CF card with a CF-IDE adapter is another option. Maybe not 80GB but 16GB and lower aren't that expensive if you look around a bit.

CF-IDE adapter is not an option for me.. Because if you write flash cells, they have a sort of time they will get damaged.. So flash drive wont last long in old computer devices.. Best bet for reliability are magnetic storage as harddisks..

Flash is only handy if you want to make an image or backup from you harddisk and put it away for long time.. Then it would last very long..

Modern NAND flash cells have something like a million write cycles, and modern cards include wear levelling to spread the write cycles across the drive. If its just in an old DOS games box the only times its really going to be written to is installing a game or saving. Its probably going to be less prone to failure than a 15 year old hard drive due to no moving parts.

Windows is a bit different but even so, move your temp and swap file off the CF card and you'll still get a reasonable lifetime out of it.

Of course if its any sort of important data you should be keeping backups regardless of whether its on a traditional hard disk or flash memory...

I recently bought a *used* IDE 160GB WD Caviar Blue drive. Partitioned out to the 132GB barrier on Win98SE and runs great. Picked it up for around 20-25 shipped. Pretty speedy drive if I don't say so. Didn't bench it but seems faster than my WD 120GB SE (8MB cache) which runs around 45MB/s.

You can always get a bootable IDE add-in card which should break the 132GB limit anyways and use 500GB+ drives if needed. Sata Add-in cards seem to be more bag of worms on W9X rigs. My Silicon Image 3512 Sata-Raid card has to be flashed to Sata-Non-Raid to probably use W9X rig. Otherwise I get MS-DOS compatibility mode issues and performance dives!

If I remember right CF-IDE is only good for DOS and not W9X environment. A small SSD would be be awesome and probably saturate a Sata 150 card easily. Dunno when your gonna write to the SSD's enough to kill-em. Also remember something about even when a cell goes back you can still read from it and it won't let you write to it again and skip that cell.

A Intel SSD had tested something like estimated 5yr continuous business use before the drive would start write issues.

This is a can of worms, but I guess not as inflammable as talking about the Pentium 4 hehe 😜

Anyway, it more depends on the harddrive then the maker. Every maker had a couple bad batches.
Also one person values other properties then another person.
Myself I prefer a drive that's silent more then a drive that is faster (so that excludes most older SCSI drives but includes most laptop drives).

For new drives I like the Samsung Spinpoints the most 😁

I ordered another ST340016A (used) for $28 😁

Maxtor Diamondmax 40GB and Seagate 7200.11 all of them

The last time I got a maxtor it died in a few months. The replacement they sent died in a few months. I got a second replacement but never used it - by that time I said forget it.

Just had an old 20gb WD drive die on me this night. I knew the disk was dodgy but still, i low level formatted it, installed win 95 on fat 16 partition , create fat 32 partition ,made window do a thorough checkdisk with surface scan, left it overnight, this morning had rebooted to a No system disk screen. Bios wont see HD anymore.

The only WD drives I have ever had died within a year - that was enough for me,
And yet last year I salvaged a computer off a garbage pile - that turned out to an old 11-gig WD drive that was still running. I gave it to a friend to use in and old 233 MHz computer.

I have had good luck with Western Digital, and pretty good luck with Seagate. I still have a 540 meg WD still running that I originally bought for my 486 in 1995. It's running in an old Pentium 1 100 that I occasionally use for retro gaming. That drive was carried to Thailand in my carry on in 1995, bounced around on the return trip in 1996 mounted inside a PC - my P1 100 was bounced so hard by United that the processor popped out of the socket, and the drive is still running. I have had a couple WD fail over the years, but usually after several years, only one within the 3 year warranty.

I have also had several Seagate drives. I have had more of those fail before the warranty was up, but there for a while they had a shorter warranty than WD. I think they are back up to equal now. Back in 1991 the company I was working for kept having a lot of Seagates fail. It seemed like they failed during startup, when they are spinning up. We started leaving the computers on all the time and the failure rate went way down. I currently have one old PC from 2004 that my daughter is using with a Seagate drive in it, so that one has been reliable at least.

Probably the worst I had was the Connor that I had with my Amiga - I think I went through 3 warranty replacements in a period of 2 years.

The only way you'll get an idea of product reliability is with a huge sample size. Google released a HDD study years ago. They don't name vendors but do give their experience on what does and doesn't cause failure.

http://storagemojo.com/2007/02/19/googles-dis … ure-experience/

Although there have been some obvious exceptions where a product was junk. The Seagate 1.5TB drives that died in droves come to mind. But this can be hard to judge, for example with the IBM 75GXP. I had two of those supposedly terrible drives for about 6 years.

swaaye wrote:

The only way you'll get an idea of product reliability is with a huge sample size. Google released a HDD study years ago. They don't name vendors but do give their experience on what does and doesn't cause failure.

http://storagemojo.com/2007/02/19/googles-dis … ure-experience/

Although there have been some obvious exceptions where a product was junk. The Seagate 1.5TB drives that died in droves come to mind. But this can be hard to judge, for example with the IBM 75GXP. I had two of those supposedly terrible drives for about 6 years.

You got lucky with the IBMs, or it they were newer drives after they fixed the problems 😜 After Hitachi bought the hard drive division from IBM they were fantastic drives.

These days I would trust Hitachi and Samsung over WD and Seagate. Up to 1TB in size, WD and Seagate are okay. From 1.5TB and beyond, the Hitachi and Samsung have proven to be far more reliable, based on a variety of PC hardware forums I frequent.

I personally owned a 2TB Seagate Green drive which failed in a few months. My Hitachi 2TB replacement is running strong.

Has anyone come across Simmtronics drives - I see these on sale - or MDT. MDT seem to be refurbished WDs.

Just for the record I have tons of Maxtor drives of all vintages- all perform very reliably- I have yet to have a single drive failure from them 😲.

Samsung drives are damn reliable too, and the F3s are fast!!!

I had an old Conner drive - 1275 MB - that I used first in a 486 DX4/100 and later in a pentium 166 MMX. That drive had some sentimental value - I was sorry to see it go. It got to where it would take longer and longer to spin up, and eventually died.

Have only had my first Seagate drive for a couple months now, but we'll see how it turns out (but my friends have had pretty good experiences with these).
The only hard drives that have failed on me in the past are WDs (a total of 4 of them so far, usually around the 3.5-year mark, after the friggin' warranty expires), though they seem to have gotten a bit better in reliability. My 80 GB Maxtor SATA is going on 6 years now (of almost continuous usage) without any problem, and I also have a 16-year old 1 GB Quantum Fireball EIDE drive that still runs.

I also have an 80 GB Hitachi Deskstar but we'll see how long that holds up for.
So from my experience, WD = suck. I think I'll stick with the Maxtor and Seagate camps for now. Regardless, hard drive failure is all up to chance - some manufacturers just seem to have more lemons.