heads up!! Samsung looking to sell storage line.

[Uranium-235]

Re: heads up!! Samsung looking to sell storage line.

probably not

sometimes people who start building get bad drives and let it ruin thier opinion on the whole brand. but yes some people notice patterns, and loose trust in a brand, for reason

[turbozutek]

Re: heads up!! Samsung looking to sell storage line.

Of course personal anecdotes about reliability and customer service aside, this is a bad thing from a general point of view in that fewer manufacturers = less choice and less competition.

I hope everyone's happy with a car from GM or Ford only, because the pool of HD manufacturers just shrunk to a two choice sale.

[PCBONEZ]

Re: heads up!! Samsung looking to sell storage line.

Aside from the '57 and '61 Pontiacs I once had, I would never take a car from GM.
OTOH Chrysler is fine by me.

[goodpsusearch]

Re: heads up!! Samsung looking to sell storage line.

3:
WD
Seagate
Toshiba

[PCBONEZ]

Re: heads up!! Samsung looking to sell storage line.

See, Metaphors do work....

[digge]

Re: heads up!! Samsung looking to sell storage line.

I think a lot of drive RMA has to do with how they are handled / packaged when shipped. Back when i bought my Samsung drives they used a plastic shell around each drive which gave better protection when ordering low volumes. At the same time WD were shipping in just an antistatic bag, and they had lots of 10 or 20 or something in a big foam holder. So if ordering low volumes you got a drive in just a antistatic bag and it was up to the person doing the packing to get it home safely.

I have no clue how any of them ship their bulk packs of drives nowadays but i do believe shipping and handling does most of the damage to drives. And also that might be one thing that ppls opinion on the different brands differ so much.

Most drives should be fairly ok if handled good during shipping and kept semi cooled during operation.

[c_hegge]

Re: heads up!! Samsung looking to sell storage line.

I'll write a hot letter to WD to take care on preserving Hitachi's design/quality/performance characteristics. Ditto to Seagate.
Cheers, Wizard

What quality? Hitachi never had any design quality. I found them downright unreliable, like samsung, some even failing within a few weeks after they were supplied.

[Scenic]

Re: heads up!! Samsung looking to sell storage line.

my Hitachis all still work perfectly fine.
Had a 320GB Hitachi Deskstar T7K500 (HDT725032VLA360) as my main system drive for years. reliable and pretty fast for the time. the only thing i didn't like is that it vibrated quite a bit.

http://bambooz.pytalhost.net/badcaps/T7K500.jpg
still works fine. warranty ran out in dec 2010 though..

another cool thing was how long hitachi kept the additional molex 5.25" power socket on their SATA drives. no need for adapter crap.

[kc8adu]

Re: heads up!! Samsung looking to sell storage line.

+1000!
i am looking at you newegg!
drives in the bottom of the box protected by 1 turn of bubblewrap.
just got a wd 500gb blue at the shop with click of death.yes the shippers probably wound the early fail drives and the mfr's get the blame.

I think a lot of drive RMA has to do with how they are handled / packaged when shipped. Back when i bought my Samsung drives they used a plastic shell around each drive which gave better protection when ordering low volumes. At the same time WD were shipping in just an antistatic bag, and they had lots of 10 or 20 or something in a big foam holder. So if ordering low volumes you got a drive in just a antistatic bag and it was up to the person doing the packing to get it home safely.

I have no clue how any of them ship their bulk packs of drives nowadays but i do believe shipping and handling does most of the damage to drives. And also that might be one thing that ppls opinion on the different brands differ so much.

Most drives should be fairly ok if handled good during shipping and kept semi cooled during operation.

[Per Hansson]

Re: heads up!! Samsung looking to sell storage line.

Yea, I also think it has allot more to do with how drives are handeled in shipping after they leave the manufacturer.
Sure there are some exceptions like the recent Seagate 7200.11 firmware bug, or the much older IBM 75GPX series, but other than such issues, which are generally resolved either with a new series or simply during production I don't see much differences in the various brands...

Case in point hardware.fr just updated their reliability survey of different computer components, here is a graph done by the data by a Swedish site showing the RMA rate for harddrives

[larrymoencurly]

Re: heads up!! Samsung looking to sell storage line.

Does this mean when we ask tech support about partition alignment issues with 4KB physical sectors, they won't ask us if the drive is an optical one and then lecture us that they have excellent training?

[PCBONEZ]

Re: heads up!! Samsung looking to sell storage line.

Yea, I also think it has allot more to do with how drives are handeled in shipping after they leave the manufacturer.
Sure there are some exceptions like the recent Seagate 7200.11 firmware bug, or the much older IBM 75GPX series, but other than such issues, which are generally resolved either with a new series or simply during production I don't see much differences in the various brands...

Case in point hardware.fr just updated their reliability survey of different computer components, here is a graph done by the data by a Swedish site showing the RMA rate for harddrives

Handling in shipping is not subject to differences according to who made the drive.
As such all brands of drives would have a similar % damaged in shipping.
-
That means the differences reflected in that chart are due to differences in the drives themselves.
.

[PCBONEZ]

Re: heads up!! Samsung looking to sell storage line.

Does this mean when we ask tech support about partition alignment issues with 4KB physical sectors, they won't ask us if the drive is an optical one and then lecture us that they have excellent training?

No.

[ratdude747]

Re: heads up!! Samsung looking to sell storage line.

Handling in shipping is not subject to differences according to who made the drive.
As such all brands of drives would have a similar % damaged in shipping.
-
That means the differences reflected in that chart are due to differences in the drives themselves.
.

shipping could still be it. what about differences in packaging? i remember Seagate used to tout about how good their packaging was and how much damage it prevented.

[Scenic]

Re: heads up!! Samsung looking to sell storage line.

they did?
my last seagate arrived with a headcrash..
got a new one though..

[PCBONEZ]

Re: heads up!! Samsung looking to sell storage line.

shipping could still be it. what about differences in packaging? i remember Seagate used to tout about how good their packaging was and how much damage it prevented.

I don't buy that.

New drives leave the factory either on pallets of retail boxes or bulk packed in lot-cases and neither one is much different between brands.
You are looking at what happens after the distributors get a hold of them and split them for individual sale.
As most distributors handle multiple brands the odds of damage there are the same for any brand just as it is for damage by the final shipper.
.

[dood]

Re: heads up!! Samsung looking to sell storage line.

All Seagates (even OEMs) used to ship in the SeaShell, which afforded a lot more protection from impact than a anti-static bag. Not sure if they still do, though, as I haven't bought one in years. Retail drives are usually packed better, too, with an actual box and foam packing, etc.

OEM drives that we all know and love are not really meant to be sold by the piece. They ship large quantities in specialised foam shipping materials to keep the drives safe, where they are then to be installed in machines. Instead, we're buying them from Newegg, who pulls them out of the foam, throws a wrap of bubble wrap around them, and sends them on their bouncy way. The only exception to this is if you buy a larger quantity from Newegg... then they might cut off a section of the OEM foam and ship them in that. I've seen either... probably depending on who packed the box.

[PCBONEZ]

Re: heads up!! Samsung looking to sell storage line.

Exactly.

[Agent24]

Re: heads up!! Samsung looking to sell storage line.

Like dood said with the packaging for OEM drives it's the reason I don't get any drives shipped to me anymore, I pick them up personally and take them home with utmost care...

So far none that I purchased in that way have had issues (Two 1TB Seagates, a 500GB Seagate and a 500GB Hitachi)

However the last one I had couriered to me was a WD 250GB and it's got a couple reallocated sectors now - coincidence?

Then again on another forum I visit a certain computer technician is saying they've been seeing a lot of WD failures recently...

I've got only two Samsung drives, a 3GB and an 80GB - both work just fine, the 80GB I had to replace a couple SMD capacitors as someone knocked them off - strangely enough the drive was working fine even without them! - I scavenged some off a dead (click of death) 40GB Samsung that was almost identical

[pentium]

Re: heads up!! Samsung looking to sell storage line.

I never liked Samsung drives. There was always something wrong with them.