Would you feel safe using these HD's?

Ill try to keep it short, but you have to know a little of the story. I purchased a WD 500gb Mybook and for unknown reasons it died 45 days later. WD shipped me out a replacement and the samething happened again. I was told by several people including the Apple forum that the internal board didnt like Mac's very much. WD refused to refund my money and instead sent me out their new "updated firmware" 1tb (2x500). The saga continues. The thing stopped working. WD eventually gave me a refund and I kept the 2 500gb drives. With nothing but nice things to be said from the Apple forum, I picked up a 500gb OWC firewire and love it. No problems at all. Its simple and just works as a "drag and drop" drive. It really is the best. My questions are:

1) What do I do with the 2 WD 500gb drives? I was told to drop them into an OWC enclosure as they will work just fine as it isnt hooked up to anything complicated.
2) I like the idea of having a mirrored drive, but was told that doing anything "extra" to a drive causes it to work more and will eventually fail MUCH quicker. Your thoughts...
3) Would you put confidence in these drives in your honest opinion/gut feelings. Im really 50/50.
4) Please express your views. Ive been thinking over this for like 6 weeks and simply cannot decide. Id hate to waste the drives, but I need to feel confident in these things if they are to be used.

Thank you very much for your time!

 

LOCOENG

in the last couple of months i had two new seagates go down,
i have wd that have never quit for years.,all my western are still kicking..
i quit buying seagate.

 

I have an external Maxtor 320GB HD and it's working great for me.. had it best part of a year I think.

 

LOCOENG

i got got this i have a maxtor external thats 2 years old and its been giving me problems..removed all data to another ex-hd..
reformatted the drive and added data to it..tried it on another computer,will work for a while,then quit

to be fair this drive was on 24-7 for 2-years
maxtor is now owned by sea-gate

 

Hard drives, from any manufacturer, can go bad. I prefer Seagate, but I also have a few old Maxtor drives (prior to merger of Maxtor and Seagate) and a Western Digital drive. None have gone belly up, so far.

 

Maybe Ill give it a chance. I pretty much knew it was a catch 22 deciding the fate of these things. On one hand I dont want to waste them and on the other hand I dont want to go through another recovery process.

 

My input on hard drives:

Maxtor: Cheaper than most, often noisier than most, no major issues with reliability in the latest revision, DM+9 models had a few fire problems if I recall. I've owned one Maxtor, a 40GB DM+8 IDE bought in 2005. Still works today, although hasn't been used in a while.
WD: Solid, reliable drives. The SE16 series is very fast and quiet, although there were some early QC issues (I had two faulty ones), most of the Caviars are strong performers though. I've owned 6 WDs, a 160GB IDE from 2004 (Still works), a 200GB IDE from 2004 (a cheap PSU killed that one, no fault of the drive), two 250GB S-ATAs from 2005 (still working, and in use), and two 500GB SE16s, both faulty, but the second one I didn't care enough to get rid of, the only problem with it is that you can't install an OS.
Seagate: Again, solid performers. The higher capacity models get quite hot, but no major problems. Noise on older models can be off-putting for the sensitive. I've owned two Seagates, a 13GB Medalist IDE from 1999 (still works), and a 250GB Barracuda S-ATA from 2006 (In use).
IBM/Hitachi: Can't say much, I've only had one drive, a 16GB IDE from 2000, it still works, but that's not exactly up to date info.
Samsung: Quiet drives if mounted properly. One of my two drives has gone bad, a 400GB S-ATA. I didn't keep the other 250GB one long enough to tell how good it was.

In truth, there's nobody I really avoid with regard to HDs, but my preferred choices are WD and Seagate.

 

Exactly, the other thing to watch for is shipping damage. If there's any evidence the drive might have been badly handled during shipping, don't use it, or don't rely on it. A batch of three drives that came very late once and the box looked mangled - one was DOA, the other failed after a week, the third after a month.

 

The choice of drives can be debated all day. My personal favorite is the Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 tossed in an OWC enclosure and packed with a 5 year warrenty.

The real question is weather or not you think the original drives are "ok". Recall that I have them removed from their original enclosres (the 1TB enclosure from WD). Whats your opinion on the fact that they went bad like all the others? I have conflicting advice. A friend is telling me that the drives are probably fine and it was just WD's enclosures that are giving me trouble...

 

WD's drives are good, I haven't owned a Mybook so I couldn't say, but from what I hear they're not as good as the drives themselves.

I've put 900GB of storage in one of these:
(A samsung 400 and WD 500, you could probably put two TB drives in)

http://www.aria.co.uk/Products/Comp...+External+Hard+Disk+Enclosure?productId=28593
twin hot-swappable drives on rails, all via one USB cable. Granted it's not fast, but hey it's cheap and easy.

 

Here is what you do with the dead drives. You go to Target or Best Buy and buy the EXACT same model. Then you return the bricked drives and keep the new ones, you get your money back and you get new working drives.

Might sound a little wrong but you need to stand up as a consumer. Big corporations will take them back, it's a "write off" for them. Just pay with cash when you get the new drives.

 

if there's *any* of my data on the drives, they never get returned. even if i'm eating money. i destroy them myself.

 

very interesting. i agree about the consumer standing up part. i went through hell with WD customer service and in the end I was out A LOT of time, trouble and money.

 

Actually, now that I think of it...I registered the original online with WD. What if Target sends the drives back and WD decides to open the drive and run the numbers or whatever? Is there anyway of it getting back to me even if I do pay cash?