I’m looking for the best 1TB HDD for my friend’s HP 17-an179wm Omen 17.3" laptop.
Going by the Amazon reviews, there looks to be a 10-15% failure rate, either immediately or a
few months to a year down the line when accumulated data is lost. What is the best bet 1TB HDD to
go with? As with everything technical, I rely on the opinion of professionals & the kindness of strangers.
Thanks!
I always stick to name brands with good warranties. If you are really worried, I would recommend you buy from a brand name store (like Best Buy) and check you get the warranty in writing.
I have no real basis for saying the following. It is just my nervous gut feel. But I get very nervous buying things like that from Amazon. What with all the news about their problems with staff, I don’t know how much I would trust them to honor warranties.
AAMOF, I’m very happy I have a good relationship with a local Computer store. The owner has always treated me really well and I trust when he gives me a warranty, he will take care of any problems on the spot. I don’t have to worry about shipping the defective drive to some far away depot and then worry about getting it back and installing it. Good Old Joe (the owner of the local Computer Shope) just takes care of everything for me and almost always on the same day or on the next day.
I hope that may be of help to you.
2.5" I assume? What’s your budget? Is this going to be the system drive or just storage? Have you considered an SSD?
This is exactly what I think. My friend wants to find a bargain, and I totally understand that, but there is a lot of safety in what you say.
I will have to ask her.
Once you use a system that boots from an SSD, you wonder how you ever got by in the dark ages of hard drives. It’s like night and day. A few years ago I replaced the HDD with an SSD in my wife’s elderly Macbook Pro (which, luckily, predates Apple’s obnoxious decision to make storage devices impossible to replace in such devices) and it was like a totally new machine. We still use it today, although Apple has stopped supplying it with macOS updates.
For a general purpose 2.5" SATA drive–which is the correct form factor to replace a laptop HDD–the prices are almost stupidly cheap now. You can get a well-regarded terabyte-sized drive from a big brand–the Crucial MX500–for a hundred bucks. That’s my recommendation. It’s a solid drive that’s been out for a while with no reported problems and it’s still a solid performer, and at a good price.
Wow. I didn’t realize SSDs had gotten that cheap, that a one-terabyte one could be had for a hundred bucks.
There are only a handful of HD manufacturers, many sold are rebranded. Western Digital/HGST and Toshiba are generally more reliable than Seagate, YMMV for individual model drives.
It’s not clear whether she is replacing the existing HD or trying to add a new one? Laptops typically don’t have much room for expansion.
With SSD, you need to make sure you have the right connector type. I’m reading the specs, but it’s not clear what’s inside, if she pulls the existing drive you can see what kind of connector it has.
According to the specs, it shipped with a 1TB spinning disk. Any laptop in the last decade with a spinning disk has a 2.5" SATA drive, likely 9.5mm. SSDs for a laptop will come in 1 of 2 formats: 2.5" or M.2. M.2 looks like a memory SODIMM module, but with the connector on the narrow end. This can then be either a SATA with a “B” key, or NVMe with an “M” key.
In this case, any 2.5" SATA SSD will work as a drop in replacement. I’ve been buying Crucial MX500 drives of late (off of Amazon for what it’s worth). If you add a SATA->USB3.0 adapter, Crucial has a free download that lets you easily clone your drive and then you just swap them and are good to go.
If you have Bitlocker or drive encryption enabled, you need to unencrypt the drive before cloning!
+1 to an SSD. Unless price is a major factor, there’s no reason not to get one. Next in line would be WD Black, but only because it’s 7200RPM versus 5400RPM of most other 2.5" drives, but looking at the specs of the laptop, it already has a 7200RPM drive, so an SSD is the only upgrade path.
With the exception of some Macs, all Windows based laptops with the possible exception of some very high end exotic models use standard 2.5" SATA drives. This video shows that it is a SATA drive. Also take not that accessing the drive in this model is relatively easy. On some laptops, especially slim models, getting to the hard drive may require taking the laptop halfway apart, often requiring removing the keyboard bezel and keyboard. Watch out of the tiny and thin ribbons connecting to the motherboard!
While it’s true that Western Digital has taken over HGST (Hitachi), the product lines and manufacturing specs are completely different. And for every person that says <insert band name> sucks and <insert other brand name>rocks! You’ll find someone saying the exact opposite based on their very, very limited experience compared to the millions of identical drives in use worldwide. I’ve gone through hundreds of hard drives over the past 30+ years I’ve been using PCs and have now become brand name blind.
Which leads to reliability. Keep in mind that any user reviews are highly skewed by those having a bad experience with a product and thus more likely to give a bad review. AFAIK, there are only two truly badly manufactured hard drives that had were extremely likely to fail under normal use. The Quantum Bigfoot series in the late 90’s and theIBM Deskstar series, nicknamed “Deathstar” because of the high number of failures.
As was recommended above, I buy on price and warranty, accepting that any drive, even an SSD could fail at any time, especially in a laptop where the two main causes of drive failure, heat and shock are far more pronounced than in a desktop. An SSD eliminates the shock factor (other than the data cable being knocked look and shorting the drive), but the heat factor is still there. I made the mistake of grabbing an SSD immediately after I turned off the PC and it was HOT!, way hotter than any hard dive I’ve ever touched. Makes sense since it’s RAM inside a case. And yes, I’ve touched RAM immediately after turning off a PC, DON’T do that either!
Which brings us to backup, backup, backup. It doesn’t matter if it’s 1GB, 1TB or 10TB. Reliability means nothing if the drive dies, no matter when! The reason I now buy on price and warranty is because I know that even my SSDs can fail unexpectedly, possibly at the worst possible time. But not only do I regular backups to a separate drive, but I have a spare SSD with my tweaked original install to swap out in minutes.
Having lost multiple terabytes of data in an instant, the last one being 9TB I just transferred to a new drive a couple of months ago. What would have have been weeks, probably months or work restore the files, all videos, it took less than a day to completely restore everything I less because I had a backup (actually two).
The failure rate in one year is going to be very, very much less than 1% for any well regarded brand SSD you buy. A lot less. Doing statistics via Amazon reviews is not a good idea.
The one potentially major con to an SSD or any flash RAM device, e.g. flash drive or SD card is that then they fail, they usually fail without notice and it’s extremely hard and extremely expensive to even try recovery of the data.
I agree that the failure rate is very low, but even the very small risk of failure doesn’t negate the absolute need to backup often.
Another major brain fart moment. I had the side of my PC case open while it was running my SSD was laying a the bottom because I was doing some troubleshooting. Knocked my soda off the desk it landed where the connected was attached to the drive. Worked for a few days, then then I had issues with Windows. Yep, the drive was fried and dying. But, I had a backup!!!
Thanks, everyone- I think my friend is settling on it herself.