Hard drives: Are they all ass now?

Pocket

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Nov 14, 2009
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With all the games I've collected from Steam, I'm pretty much out of room on my hard drive at home. Unfortunately, I'm having a much harder time finding good hard drives online now than I was a few years ago. Everyone I've talked to says either "Western Digital sucks; get a Seagate" or "Seagate sucks; go with Western Digital". Which I'm taking to mean they both suck.

I don't know if they're still trying to make back the loss from when that tsunami took out most of their factories, or what, but pretty much every hard drive I find that isn't meant for server farms and priced accordingly has an upwards of 25% failure rate according to the reviews. Should I just take my chances and hope that if it does fail, it'll fail early on before I start putting stuff on it that I don't have room to back up? Or do I need to accept that hard drives have essentially doubled in price since the last time I bought one and that the cheap "hard drives" out there might as well be a lottery ticket?
 

Micnax

Back from the dead (again)
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Apr 25, 2009
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I don't know what hard drives you're looking at, cause the ones I see keep getting lower in price for the amount of space they offer. At the current rate you can get 3TB drives for just under £100, compared to 2 years ago where that would get you about 1TB or 1.5TB.
 

Burnout6010

L5: Dapper Member
Oct 14, 2012
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I just pick the old models, because last time I bought a new Seagate model it died under 1 day
 

Baraleth

L4: Comfortable Member
Aug 8, 2008
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I've got a 500 gb Western Digital external hard drive that I threw steam on for my laptop. It sometimes is a bit laggy when steam first starts up and when starting a game and loading into a match. Other than that it works fine. Had it for over a year now
 

Arne

L3: Member
Nov 22, 2012
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I have a 2TB Barracuda Seagate and it's working fine for me. I have it for almost 1 year.
However it was ready-assembled computer I bought. So I don't know what's the price of the harddrive. But it's a gamer desktop.
I had a external hdd with 300 GB space I think. I used it because the .avis began dominate my old laptop's hdd of 500 GB. I no longer use it because I have transfered all of my games(including Steam) from the laptop to the external hdd and then the desktop's hdd.
 

PHISH

L1: Registered
Sep 14, 2012
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if you're talking about a hard drive to run your games or applications off of...get a SSD (solid state drive). There really is no comparison now and they have come down quite a bit in price.
 

Sel

Banned
Feb 18, 2009
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With all the games I've collected from Steam, I'm pretty much out of room on my hard drive at home. Unfortunately, I'm having a much harder time finding good hard drives online now than I was a few years ago. Everyone I've talked to says either "Western Digital sucks; get a Seagate" or "Seagate sucks; go with Western Digital". Which I'm taking to mean they both suck.

Except everyone in the history of hardware discussion on the internet has always done this?

Look at actual reviews instead of listening to what the hardware elitists who hate anything but the brand they use.

(though obviously they are all kinda bad because capitalism, but they're almost all equally bad!)
 
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Pocket

Half a Lambert is better than one.
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Nov 14, 2009
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Look at actual reviews instead of listening to what the hardware elitists who hate anything but the brand they use.
Judging from context, it seems to be coming more from people who love (or more accurately, assume they would love) anything but the brand they use.
 

PHISH

L1: Registered
Sep 14, 2012
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I use my SSD for my OS and a few limited games (TF2 and a couple others) but unless you get a huge expensive SSD, it's really not worth it to make it your primary game drive yet. Soon, though.

I guess I don't have too many games installed at once but a separate 128gb ssd for steam is more than enough for all of my games. Easily worth it for ~100 bucks.
 

Sel

Banned
Feb 18, 2009
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Judging from context, it seems to be coming more from people who love (or more accurately, assume they would love) anything but the brand they use.

idk then, but just taking a quick look at the hdd section on newegg most of them are in the 4-5/5 group, with a small handful of ones that are poorly rated, so I have no idea what you're reading to get the impression that they're all just really awful.
 

Pocket

Half a Lambert is better than one.
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Nov 14, 2009
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I'd consider having a 25% chance of dying on you within the time people write reviews to be "awful".

But those do seem to be nearly all cases of dead-on-arrival, which, given NewEgg's 30-day return policy, would be little more than an inconvenient delay if I got one of the bad ones. After that, I'll definitely be storing all of my important files on my current drive and using the new one for just backups, Linux, and /steamapps/ (as per the recent update), so barring a worst-case scenario of both drives dying at the same time, I should be fine.

Actually... does anyone know if it's possible to partition part of a large (1.5TB) secondary disk as a ghost copy of my main disk (500GB) and set up a RAID-style redundancy between them? By "RAID-style" I mean the OS automatically writes everything to both disks, all the time, without being asked; it doesn't need to be literally RAID.
 

GPuzzle

L9: Fashionable Member
Feb 27, 2012
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Steve, the opinion between hard-drives is like the relationship between the media and objects that cause cancer: they are going to try to separate them between the good ones and the bad ones.
 

Idolon

they/them
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Feb 7, 2008
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I'd consider having a 25% chance of dying on you within the time people write reviews to be "awful".
Consumers are more likely to leave feedback if their drive fails, than if it works as advertised.
 

Seba

DR. BIG FUCKER, PHD
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Jun 9, 2009
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Steve, the opinion between hard-drives is like the relationship between the media and objects that cause cancer: they are going to try to separate them between the good ones and the bad ones.

How is anything that causes cancer good?
 

GPuzzle

L9: Fashionable Member
Feb 27, 2012
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How is anything that causes cancer good?

The ones that prevent cancer are the good ones and the ones that CAUSE cancer are the bad ones.

According to different media, red wine causes and prevent cancer AT THE SAME TIME.
 

GPuzzle

L9: Fashionable Member
Feb 27, 2012
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Even in one newspaper, it is shown that babies both cause and prevent cancer.

Edit: Looking in another newspaper (from Brazil), apparently, if something causes cancer, it has starch. If it doesn't, it still causes cancer.