My question is I want to get a big drive to go in my server, as i am undergoing mega expansion, preferably a 1.5 or 2TB and i wondered what drive manufacturer you guys recommend as a kid i cannot afford to replace the drive if it fails, from what iv seen you should say away from Samsung drives, but what do you think, and do these modern drives fail more than old ones, i seem to see allot of 1 and 2tb drives failing out of the box or after a week or two, should i hold off till i can buy a pair so i can back up?

I recommend Western Digital. I use one of their 2TB desktop backup drives, and it hasn't failed since I bought it (over a year ago).

Western Digital. I've bought SEVERAL of their drives, from 1GB to 1TB, and not had one to fail yet. They're fairly inexpensive. I've had 3 Samsung drives and only one flaked out, the other two are still going. Rotary drives only have two states: Failing or Failed. It's best to go with SSD, but in the matter of mass storage it's best to stick with the platter/rotary drives.

I just purchased a 1tb Hard drive (I know you need more but they go up to 2Tb)

SEAGATE - Barracuda Green ST1000DL002 Internal 3.5" SATA Hard Drive 1TB

This was from Pc World in the UK and was 32.00 online.... I believe Seagate to be reliable, However Western Digital are good too. I will agree with the other posts from my personal experience, I had a Samsung 1TB drive which failed and is now dieing (Age of 5 months but as I moved from Australia to the UK they will not replace it)

Hope It helps x

i was thinking of maybe using this: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Western-Digital ... rs_title_2

or possibly this
http://www.ebuyer.com/product/259467
(but what do you think on a rectified drive ?)

Edit; thanks for the pcworld tip
what about this: http://www.pcworld.co.uk/gbuk/hitachi-c ... 5-pdt.html

I am usually weary of re-certified drives, as they usually just replace the platters and not the motor. In case of storing valuable date, I wouldn't go refurbished anything.

yeah that's what i was worried about, for the moment i can't back it up, as i will be able to buy one drive only

Yeah, so definitely don't go re-certified, I've done many Windows Installs (Mac too!), and nothing stinks worse than a bum HD. The worst drives from my years of experience are (I'm not starting something, just sharing my opinion):
Maxtor/Seagate - ~6 Failed Drives
Fujitsu - 2 Failed Drives
IBM/Hitachi - ~5 Failed Drives

Go with WD drives, never had one fail yet and I have over a dozen around he house spread out between several rigs.

Seagate is crap, I would say that I have had a 10-25% failure rate on them. Be sure to make a full format first time, so it can't reallocate any bad sectors right away, if you do decide to get a Seagate drive.

Samsung is usually good, 7200-rpm is a good drive for 1-2tb, otherwise get a 512mb SSD (Which won't last very long, especially in a server where I would recommend a RAID setup with a bunch of 2TB 7200rpm drives.

ok, so im proabley looking at either :
http://www.pcworld.co.uk/gbuk/hitachi-c ... 5-pdt.html

or

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Western-Digital ... rs_title_2

Don't buy a green, if you can't get a Black then get a Blue. The best drives seem to be samsung because I've had bad experiences with Western Digital, AKA 15 failures with them, 1 failure with Samsung, 3 failures with Maxtor and 2 Seagate failures.

Seagate is the best!
I have been using 3 Seagate's HDDs - everything is OK.

what about HITACHI?

and anyone care to donate me a 1 or 2tb hdd

Go with Western Digital, never had a problem with them. I bought a Seagate drive and put it in one of my PC's and it died in about a year. There were bad sectors on the drive. Never was hard on the drive, just used it for normal operation.

Samsung F series. I'd avoid Seagate like the plague. I have multiple F series drives and never had a single one fail in over 3 years. Everyone I know who has owned Seagates has had multiple fail on them, myself included (6 in the space of 3 months!).

Samsung also offer the cheapest of all of the other brands because of their popularity.

this looks good then http://www.ebuyer.com/product/237908 , it is not too much, and come to think of it, the hdd i take to school is a samsung and that thing gets batterd around (and it is not in the case, just a bare drive) but has never skipped a beat

hitachi all the way, fastest and most reliable green drives around, cheap as well.
although you can get a 2TB WD green for $40 CAD.

I'd recommend the Samsung F series and the Western Digital Caviar series. Both have proven to be reliable in my case. Maxtor drives are risky; I had two out of five fail after something like five years.

I've actually never had a Seagate fail on me. I have this old seagate that is 7 years old, still functioning as a 3rd server.

I prefer Western Digital for desktops and Fujitsu for SAS.

I have 4 seagate hard drive and they have never failed

I have had a 1TB seagate and it failed about a month after I bought it, lucky I backed it up beforehand. I now have a western Digital 1TB and no problems. In fact I had a 100GB Western Digital drive (IDE) for over 10 years and it never once failed, until recently, but think it had a good run though, 10 years is a long time.

Thats how long i want mine to last (and expect it to last) as price is major constraint and replacing a drive that fails after a month is not a option, atm i am looking at either a Samsung F series, a Hitachi or a WD blue or black

Well, I have a Western Digital Caviar Blue 320GB HDD, brought one or two years ago, it corrupts any data written to it. However, I have too a Western Digital Caviar 80GB HDD (not sure of the type, it's an IDE drive), brought many many years ago, didn't gave me any trouble. Never had problems with Seagate and Quantum (too bad it doesn't exist anymore, Fireball HDDs were the best I ever used), Maxtor I already lost a lot of data because of their completely crappy HDDs (20 GB and 40 GB HDDs, now all of them are just useless bunch of electronics).

I'd stick with WD. Never had any problems with them...