Replacing hard drives...suggestions

My experience is that any name-brand drive will generally work as advertised. People tend to be down on a brand that has failed them, but almost never have the statistics to prove their preferred brand is superior.
 
I porbably would avoid "re-certified" drives if reliability was critical. That term can mean a new drive that was returned for no good reason, a drive with a few bad sectors that were marked as bad by software, and then released back into the market or a re-manufactured drive that was put together from old (and possibly some new) parts in a SE Asian sweat shop. "Re-furbished" should indicate that the drive was remanufactured, but may be used as a synonym for re-certified.
 
That said, I would not be replacing all my drives at this point in the price cycle. Many of the drives selling at a reasonable price these days are re-furbs, due to the Thai flooding. The shortage/price increase in the re-furb market is apparently causing some manufacturer's to shorten the warranty on their new drives since they typically ship you a re-certified drive to replace your failed drive.
 
New drives at reasonable prices are still probably six months or more in the future. There is little reason to think you will lose a drive to failure in that time. Samples can all be reloaded from distribution media or backups, but if you are out of space then buying a new drive may be the best solution.

 Thanks guys, it's a tough call, I am in a position to go ahead with a few hard drive changes. I'm, not sure what the future will hold.

 wogg- Does your company change hard drives as regular maintanence? Since these are mechanical devices,the obvious is bound to happen sooner or later.

 Thanks for your comments.

 

 Thanks slartabartfast, that info you posted confirms my concerns. I actually went looking at purchase info on my HDDs and discovered that more time has gone by than I realized. I bought two Samsung Spinpoint 7200rpm 250gb drives back in 2/07 and I paid 78.00 each for em' back then lol.. These drives are much older than I thought they were. There may still be a few good years on these but they are getting a little long in the tooth and after year 5 it would seem that I might be on borrowed time.

 FWIW, I have not had any trouble with these on a machine that I boot at least once a day and run for 2 to 4 hours and then turn off. I guess I could continue to image and then wait till I get the bullet or I can replace em' now.

 

Good choice.

I've been using WD Caviar blacks for a number of years without issue

Right now, the newest Seagate 1TB (64MB cache) drives (ST1000DM003) are pretty nice.
They sustain ~135-140MB/Sec
 
The Western Digital "Black" and Hitachi units also work well...
Western Digital units are the slowest of the bunch... although all the drives mentioned sustain over 100MB/Sec.

Hopefully in my case, a rate of 100mb/sec. will suffice. Thanks for your help. I think it was mostly the 5 yr. warranty and the great customer satisfaction that persuaded me in that direction.

 
100MB/Sec isn't slow...  
It's just not the fastest drive available.
 
FWIW, Seagate is particularly good at handling warranty replacements.
Super easy... and you can get an advanced replacement if desired

Drives tend to fill up pretty quick. We deal with some big files in music. I was amazed to see that several of my projects that are not really that big, actually exceeded 1GB in size. 

I've had a failure of drives here and there, and have lost some data on earlier machines due to it.  Replacing a drive that gets full is probably a good idea, and I have successfully cloned a C drive to get a computer working again.  One of those cases where sometimes it would boot and sometimes not..... I got it booted and cloned it..... the machine ran well on the new drive. 

My plan is to add a new drive probably some time this year to my DAW to serve as more backup..... I'll image my C drive to it and take the backups off the current storage/sample drive. I'll likely also image my sample drives to is as well. 

Jim Roseberry

FWIW, Seagate is particularly good at handling warranty replacements.
Super easy... and you can get an advanced replacement if desired

+1 to that.

It's true also this side of the pond.

It takes a couple of minutes to ID the drive verify the remaining warranty period and raise an RMA on-line.

Finding a suitable box to ship the faulty one back in was the part that took me the longest.

A really simple, painless, process throughout.  I bought a spare 1Tb refurb from them for £35 (before the shortage) on the strength of that service and can swap out anyone of my three in-service drives and have it back in action with the latest image whatever was on it within 10 minutes, pending the couple of days it takes them to get a replacement here.