Anyone know if Hitachi Travelstar laptop hard drives are any good?

[Jack T. Chance]

Quick question for those that know more about computers than I do: Have you heard if Hitachi's Travelstar laptop hard drives are any good?

I'm rocking a 17" gaming laptop with 2 hard drive bays, but it only came with 1 200 GB hard drive. I'm ready to put a second hard drive in it to expand my storage, and I want a 500 GB model that runs at 7,200 RPM. Right now, the local Micro Center location has a Hitachi Travelstar one on sale, but I've never heard anything about them, either good or bad. Any feedback on their drives would be helpful.

And if you happen to think they aren't a good choice, alternate recommendations would be greatly appreciated.

[Eric the Grey]

Best I can tell you is that my old windows laptop came with a travelstar, and I never once had a problem with it. It's currently being used by my wife and running fine, although there was 2 years where it was supplanted by a 120 gig (can't remember the model) before she took it over.



Eric the Grey

[HYHYBT]

I've had at least two of them, and both outlasted their usefulness...

[Midorikawa]

My recommendation is to read reviews on sites like newegg.com before you buy. I have had hitachi drives in the past that have ran great. In fact, I think they're now more reliable than my old favorite, Seagate. Generally when you have a large batch of failures, it'll show on Newegg quickly.

[Chromatix]

Hitachi and Seagate tend to be reliable and good performance.

Samsung is usually also reliable, but I wouldn't buy one myself because they aren't so hot in performance. You often get them as OEM installs.

Fujitsu is on my "not sure" list. I haven't seen massive problems with them recently, but I wouldn't buy one, and would consider replacing one if it was doing something important.

Western Digital and Maxtor are on my "40-foot bargepole" list. These get replaced ASAP if they show up as OEM in my machines. I will only subsequently use them for very unimportant things. I've seen too many of them fail for no reason.

[Midorikawa]

Western Digital and Maxtor are on my "40-foot bargepole" list. These get replaced ASAP if they show up as OEM in my machines. I will only subsequently use them for very unimportant things. I've seen too many of them fail for no reason.

Haven't had a problem with Maxtor, but last time I bought one of their drives was when 20GB was big. :-P

We use both Seagate and WD drives at work, and although our cooling systems are beyond useless, I replace anywhere from 10-15 WD drives a day, and the Seagates, MAYBE 1 a week. The ones that die all the time are the Velociraptor and Raptor drives. Our inventory says it all. We are supposed to keep 20 Seagate drives on hand, but 40 or 60 WD drives, when WD drives are OS drives only, and Seagates make the majority of our drive use. For each 2u server, we have 3 WD drives (1 RAID1, and 1 spare), and 5 Seagates (2 RAID1s + spare).

Although, recently, we've been testing Hitachi 2TB drives, and they seem to be pretty reliable too.

[HYHYBT]

Wonderful. Juuusst wonderful. Wish I'd thought to check before, instead of buying whatever was on the shelf... I have one of each. The Maxtor is my "TV drive," a repository for anything I record and wish to keep including transfers from VHS. The Western Digital is my Time Machine disk, which happened to die suddenly the other day. Turns out it wasn't the disk itself, but the innards that convert SATA to USB, fortunately, so I was able to get around it by using that from the Maxtor. I left the housing off so as to be able to switch back and forth as needed, but now you've got me worried.

And while typing this, I noticed that the actual drive that came branded as Maxtor says "Seagate" on the internal label. So that helps, I guess. I do, however, wish one of them had been parallel ATA; I have an extra housing for that, and it even has both firewire and USB, which is getting hard to find.

[Chromatix]

Seagate bought Maxtor a while ago, so what you got was probably one of Maxtor's last real lines that was still being sold until it went obsolete. If I came across a Maxtor now, I would still assume that it's designed and made by the same design team as before.

Maxtor isn't as bad as WD - they have a better chance of losing sectors rather than failing catastrophically, and their average lifetime before failure is measured in years rather than months. But once it starts losing sectors, you'd better replace it rather than reformatting it, because the fault will grow.

Also, if you do have a WD, there's about a 50% chance that it's a "good model" which will probably last a fairly long time. The problem I have with them is the 50% that are "bad models".

Why does WD even still exist? Because they push the envelope with performance and capacity pretty hard, and reliability stats don't make it into the average PC-magazine review.

[HYHYBT]

Thanks. Throw in the fact that I usually only plug in the Maxtor/Seagate drive a couple times a month and it should last pretty well.

The Western Digital I'll have to keep using for now... but hopefully if it goes it makes the fault obvious; it's a backup, so as long as the original is good it doesn't matter so much and vice versa.