back to article Hitachi launches little whoppers

Hitachi GST has launched the highest capacity small format drives in the business, at 375GB/platter, giving it a marginal advantage over 2.5-inch drives from competitors Seagate, Toshiba and WD. They'e bound to catch up. The Travelstar 5K750 and 7K750 hard drive families spin at 5400rpm and 7,200rpm respectively, and have a …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    well,

    I'll never allow another Hitachi drive into any of my systems again.

  2. mike2R
    Stop

    Re: well

    And some people will never touch a Western Digital drive, others a Seagate, etc. etc.

    You all have a couple of things in common, slightly worse than average luck with hard drives, and a misunderstanding of statistics.

    1. Steven Knox
      Boffin

      Agreed -- almost

      Disagreed, because sometimes it's more than "slightly worse than average luck with hard drives":

      A few years back, we had a need for about a dozen laptops all of roughly the same spec. We ended up buying some Dells which had Hitachi drives in them.

      Every hard drive failed within a year. Not most, not almost all of them. All of them. A significant number of the replacement hard drives (also Hitachi) also failed. When that happened we specifically requested non-Hitachi replacements. None of them failed.

      As I said, this was a few years back, and I'm sure that whatever issue caused this particular bad batch of drives has been resolved; it may have been an issue at Hitachi, or an issue at Dell, but we haven't seen it since.

      I have no preferences for or against Hitachi drives. I've been in this industry to see this type of thing happen at least once to pretty much every major drive manufacturer.

      I'm simply saying that sometimes there actually is a problem. Don't simply dismiss an aversion to a brand as "bad luck" or "misunderstanding". You can miss an opportunity to help a vendor find and solve a quality control issue, and to help a client/coworker maintain as many storage options as possible.

      Agreed, because the worst thing to do when you have a bad experience with someone is to simply write them off forever.

    2. sgb

      On the other hand...

      You do get to a stage where it makes sense to try to exercise some control over the failures by buying a different brand. Every new-ish hard disk that has failed on me in the last three years has been a seagate with the exception of two hard-living samsung drives in laptops. Any seagate older than that has just carried on working, and so have all the hitachi disks.

      I deliberately avoid seagate now 'just in case'. I've had no trouble with Hitachi.

      Simon

  3. Chris Mellor 1

    Toshiba has more than caught up

    Toshiba has more than caught up; it's been shipping a 375GB/platter product since July - that's what the company says.

    Chris

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