I think I will keep with Hitachi as long as these drives just work for me. And no, I think I wouldn’t buy the same drive again if it failed me before. Unless the manufacturer could convince me that it was just one from a defective batch of them.

And yea, I like think WD is good too, that’s why I went with it in the first place ;) Guess I was just unlucky this time. I used to have one of their raptor disks in my desktop when I still had it, and that was really nice and fast.

But yes, SSD is the future.

I think Western Digital is actually a relatively good manufacturer compared to some others, and I’ve had good luck with their products. Laptop hard drives in general just suck. For my last laptop purchase, I went with a smaller hard drive in the laptop and just used a portable external drive with it, and I’ve had far fewer problems.

I’ll again agree with the above poster in the recommendation of SSDs. I’ll probably need a new machine next year, and am REALLY looking forward to getting rid of moving hard drive parts.

Also if you get I/O error it’s a very bad idea to keep it running repeatedly, trying to boot a system on it an rescue data that way. Instead get a new disc with at least the same size, connect it to the system, boot the computer from a Live CD/USB stick (I always use Knoppix for that purpose even if it’s usually outdated) and run dd_rescue /dev/baddrive /dev/newdrive, this will try to make a perfect image while not stopping the progress during bad I/Os and corrupted entries. Completely recovered the data of several HDDs this way already.