I need to buy a small (ish) 2.5" IDE HDD for my sister's laptop.

The choice I have from ebuyer (seems to have the most choice) is...

80GB Seagate - £39.99
80GB Western Digital - £41.81
160GB Samsung - £43.99

They are all 5400RPM with 8MB cache.

Personally I would go for the 160GB if it was for me but my sister doesn't need storage space she needs reliability.

I'm guessing the Seagate or WD but which would you go for?

Thanks

I've had no problems with any Seagate or Samsung drives I've had... the [admittedly few] WD drives I've had have been noisy and [relatively] slow

TVM, Seagate it is

I've got four seagate's in my server, granted they are only four months old, but nothing untoward has happened yet...

I still have yet to have a HDD as quiet as my western digital drives.

So, I'd use them ... but ... more storage is more storage. So go for the overkill.

I thought the Samsung were supposed to be quiet and reliable? Plus, it's better value.

My most recent drive is 3.5" 1TB Samsung, and so far it's quiet, very cool, fast and reliable. I've only had it a few months, but it's still 100% healthy on the Smart.

My previous drives are a pair of 500GB Seagate which I only bought because the Samsung had sold out! They run much hotter, and I can hear them in the next room.

Before that I used Maxtor. I chose them because my previous favourite IBM turned out to be death stars. Bad choice. I had two Maxtors fail within 2 years.

i would go for the samsung one. WD are quite noisy and are generaly slower. not noticably slower but slower none the less

i just bought a seagate 1tb, and since then my DPCs (deferred procedure calls) have increased - read similar reports in tinernet of others experiencing this. no doubt its impacting performance, but it still trashes my 0.5tb samsung in sandra

Doesn't surprise me, I had a Maxtor die within a year. Cheap however, anything but cheerful.

The Seagate on the other hand has been great. Reasonably quiet (quieter than the Maxtor), fast and wasn't too expensive. It also hasn't died yet which is a bonus.

I've had my Maxtor since I built my first PC, about 2 years ago, haven't had a single problem, also got a WD, both good drives.

I always go for samsung if i can never had one fail so far.
A couple of the WD drives ive used have become corrupt, they were a few years old though.

Currently running one WD, one Maxtor, one samsung in my PC.

Running two Samsungs and a seagate on my server.

And I can honestly say in the real world i've not found any difference between them >.<

HOWEVER I can make the following observations:

- Loading stuff from the Maxtor takes an age - It's my games HDD and i'm often in-game 20-30 seconds after my friend who is on a LAPTOP.
- The WD is noisy as phuck. I've taken to streaming my media from the server instead of running it from my own hard drive just because it's that loud.
- I've never had a samsung fail, and thereby relying on two of them to back up 5 PCs every day.
- I've had two WD's fail, one Maxtor decided to hard-reset my PC every 25 minutes and one Maxtor fried and my information was irretrievable by amateur methods.
- All of my experience has been with 3.5", 7200RPM drives.

I've owned Samsung and WD drives, and never had a problem with either. (The only drives I've seen fail are Fujitsu).
Given that there are no reliability issues that I know of, spend £2 more and get a 160GB Samsung.

Get the WD drive.

I run a WD Caviar 640gb Black in this PC, and I can honestly say it gets drowned out by the CPU fan (which is a PWM controlled 120mm jobbie aka. quiet ), and a 40GB WD in my laptop, and I've never had problems.

Maxtors are the ones to avoid. I've killed multiple Maxtor drives over the years, and most of the time without actually doing anything.

Seagates are very good drives, but not as quiet as the WD drives. And I've never had a Samsung, so I have no idea what they're like.

Hope this helps!

Sumsang