Can't really blame either of them. From what I heard the HDD industry is centralized on very high operating cost with expected low margins, during the early Pentium days there used to be like a dozens different manufacturer (Quantum, Maxtor, IBM, etc) which have either been bought out, merged or ceased to exist altogether. It doesn't come as a surprise that these former players want to exit the market.

This post has been edited by Axalter: Mar 2 2012, 02:42 PM

Where did you bought from? Im very certain almost any store bough retailer will RMA it for you as long as your warranty is still valid and proof of purchase, no?

You may get a "full replacement", since Samsung HDD product and manufacturing division have already been sold to Seagate so you have to RMA through Seagate.

They might return you a Seagate drive once completed the RMA process.

This post has been edited by Axalter: Mar 21 2012, 12:18 AM

Most notebooks including netbooks utilize a standard form factor of 2.5" format though there are other more unusual dimensions they are still extremely rare and most likely need to be special ordered. There are no special HDD for Acer notebooks, it uses the same 2.5" same goes with SSD.

This post has been edited by Axalter: May 13 2012, 08:14 PM

Most external tend to go with 5400RPM due relatively to heat another reason is that higher RPM speed are very negligible simply because the USB interface latency mostly renders the drive speed redundant.

Depending on the form factor they still use either the common 2.5" or 3.5" form factor depending on the size and power requirements.

This post has been edited by Axalter: Jun 2 2012, 06:42 AM

Best bet is that you look around price lists in places like Lowyat Plaza. It's pretty much either Seagate, WD or Hitachi these days, HDD market profitability isn't that big of a margin for most manufacturers.

Price differential are not much probably by a few dollars at most and most of them covers a 3 years standard warranty period. Unless you are referring to performance drives than the only no brainer is WD Black series with 5 years warranty.

They are great as far as their specs spreadsheet goes. They were formally marketed towards surveillance recording systems requiring to operate 24/7 now towards the NAS market with a better than average operating reliability.

If you want pure performance just go with the Black which comes with 5 years warranty instead of the usual three.

From experience pretty decent if not the same with Seagate or WD. Bear in mind for Toshiba their primary focus is the OEM market not personnel end-user so they might not entertain you if you go directly to them but rather direct you back to their retail channel and they only very recently entered into the 3.5" HDD market.

HDD lifespan is practically all the luck of the draw, even brand new HDD used for less than a week might fail indefinitely without notice, HDD manufacturing isn't a perfect process. Lower RPM doesn't realistically equal better life span. If you only using the drive for storage then the WD Green is more than capable, not really much economical gain for using higher RPM drive for data storage only purposes.

Last time one of the most reliable HDD drive was the Hitachi 2TB with 4 platters, it was voted for it's reliability due to it's high manufacturing QC.

Overall never had much of a bad experience with their drives compared with other brands though Hitachi HDD are kinda harder to find in some stores compared to other brands.

I'm with you there. To be frank I don't think there even such thing as guaranteed reliability when it comes to HDD, it's mostly the luck of the draw. I have a 8 years old Maxtor serving on my old rig till today while some of my barely 1 year old Seagate and WD failed.

Generally I would point consumers to rather look at warranty and other RMA factors rather than model or brand name alone if any technical issues arise with the drive it's self.

If you bought it from 2012 it's pretty safe to say the warranty have expired. You can try extracting the HDD out from the external hard disk enclosure shell and use the HDD as a usual HDD by plugging it into your SATA slot or cable.

If the HDD still fail to show up then it's your external HDD enclosure controller circuit that is the culprit. Frankly nothing much you can do with this other than getting a new portable external HDD.