Who would you trust your data to?

which hard drive manufacturer do you feel your data is most secure with?

recently i have been looking into getting several high capacity drives. seagate's 1.5TB sata drives are nice, and the price is right; but after some reasearch you'll find that they seem to have been having problems with several firmware versions and hardware issues (now i beleive they have a new version out). has anyone purchased any of these, or any terrabyte drives? any experiences? iv read good things about western digital's caviar black serires though. if i dont end up with a seagate it'll be one of those.

 

From my experience, I like WD's (Western Digital). Most of them run very cool and almost silent. This is a sign of a good product. Heat is a big killer for electronics like hard drives. Also, WD uses dual bearings in their drives. They may actually be the only manufacturer that uses dual bearings for smoothed operation. There are different models available but I can deffinately vouche for the SE models.

*edit*
I also wanted to say that data security is best achieve using RAID arrays. A RAID setup will copy your data across multiple hard disks and if a disk fails, you can replace it without loosing ANY data. This is true for RAID 1, RAID 3, and RAID 5. This does NOT hold true for RAID 0 (striped without parity).

RAID 5 is the slowest average read/write but offers the best data security. I would recommend RAID 1 for performance or RAID 3 for a balanced setup.

The only catch is that all of the hard disks must be identical. Ideally, identical in model #, but there has been success with mismatched hard disks. All disks must be the same size. Exceptions being if you use Linux and software RAID, aka LVM, which can mix-match any types of disks.