Quote:
Originally Posted by Phoenix32
The whole hard disk question is one of concern to me as well, and I am sure others.
All in all, IMO, the HD market sucks VERY BAD right now, has for a while, and does not appear to have any light at the end of the tunnel. I am VERY negative towards the hard drive market these days. It is all bad, to even worse... So bad, I have considered giving the Hitachi drives a try out of desperation as the least of evils.
I would welcome as many opinions as possible to this topic on current hard drives.
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The hard drive manufacturers simply don't care about end user customers who only buy a few drives. They sell the vast majority of their drives to OEM customers, who get the customizations and warranty periods they ask for.
I used to be one of those customers - I'd get a monthly visit from my Seagate rep who would give us the firmware updates we'd asked for, talk about future products to gauge our interest, and swap any defective drives for us.
As an end user or reseller of smaller quantities of drives, I can't get that level of support from any drive manufacturer these days. I eventually managed to get a communication channel going with WD, but it took many months of effort and a statement that I was going to publish my unsatisfactory experience on a major tech site. That finally got someone's attention and they had the right person in WD contact me. After shipping about 200 drives back and forth, I finally got drives that worked reliably.
But that isn't something the average user should have to do, in order to get a working drive. Part of the problem is the brief life cycle of a given product these days - the drive is usually obsolete before the warranty period ends. Normally, very little is changed in the design between the first revenue shipment and the last drive produced. In past times, you might see a change to better bearings and use of higher-density platters during a particular model's lifetime.
We'll have to see how WD reacts to Seagate's position that "green" drives are not worthwhile. I've posted here earlier that I'd like to see a single drive family with a utility that lets the user select economy / standard / RAID profiles, as well as allowing the user to order the drive with whatever warranty they want (1 / 3/ 5 years).