Big Col

It's new HDD time for me. Looking for a 160Gb IDE drive.

My previous 2 drives (20Gb and 60Gb) have been Western Digital and they've been 100% reliable. The 20Gb is nearly 4 years old and the 60Gb is about 3.

So i was gonna buy another WD but I can get Samsung drives at cost price. The drive I'm looking at is the SP1614N (160Gb, 8Mb cache).

Any good or bad stories about Samsung HDD's?

BTW drive is just gonna be used as a storage drive for music, video's, pics, etc.

Finally, am I pushing my luck by still using the WD drives at over 4 years old? Am I looking at a failure soon?

Cheers for any advice
Colin

R1916v

supposed to be good, quick and quiet according to all the mags and online places.

ALi-B

iTrader: (1)

For what it's worth, I stand by Maxtor

Still have drives that a 4 years+ old in regular service (admitedly not as primary drives).

BuRR

I had 3 Samsung 160GB drives that died (the last 2 were warranty replacements of their respective predecessor) on the trot within 3 weeks taking all data with them.

Replaced the last one with a WD Caviar, and no problems at all.

merlin

No problems here with Samsungs - had 2 160GB running continuous for over a year - very quiet too with Nidec motors. The latest ones have JVC motors IIRC which apparenntly aren't so quiet. IMHO how suppliers handle drives has a significant impact on reliability. If they are not handled with care then you will see failures which ever drive you go for

DrEvil

got four Samsung Spinpoint drives, been ok for the last six months, all nidec motor.

Apparently Seagate are one of the best for reliability reading some of the forums.

class_A

You will hear good and bad reliability reports about all drives Just one of those things. As long as the warranty is good and you have reliable backups (you do backup don't you? !) then that's all you can ask. This is the budget end of the storage market unfortunately.

Cast your eye over http://www.storagereview.com FWIW, I've got a couple of Seagates at the moment which are quiet, if not the fastest. No problems reported by SMART and they seem to chug along happily.

Cheers,
Alex

Big Col

just to let you know I got a 160Gb Seagate Barracuda today. The Samsung was unavailable.

Had a small issue with windows 2000 and a 137Gb drive limit but a quick visit to the seagate website provided an easy fix for that.

Only thing to report is that the new seagate is definately a lot quieter than the WD drive it replaced.

Cheers to those who replied

subaru swift

WD all the way dude!... .

got 3 in my pc & we use maxtor and samsung for work because they are cheap !.