I am running two servers, a few NAS devices, and a few computer. Each running at 3 hard drives up to 18 hard drives. Between all these machine I have installed a lot of hard drives, and some are running 24/7 months on end and only a restart to refresh the machines but other then that they rarely receive a break from their duties.

My ranking for drives from experience are in this order:

• Western Digital
• Maxtor (Bought out by Seagate)
• Seagate

I have been reluctant to upgrade some of the drives to 1.5TB from Seagate due to technical issues that have been faced by these drives. They have even been bricked from recent firmware upgrades, I tried one 1.5TB drive and it kept locking up in the Windows Home Server, I unloaded it and tried it on another machine and I still faced problems with it, I returned to Hawalli for a refund and took the WD 1TB Green Drive, which works perfectly. I have had a few failures on the machines and the majority have been the Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 drives, luckily I keep the receipts and take them back to the Hawalli store and ask for an exchange for another brand. So after the last couple of years I am sticking to Western Digital drives when ever possible. Its not that drives don’t fail, they will eventually fail but the rate at which they fail is important. It seems Seagate’s track record isn’t looking too good for sometime now.