I want to see which SATA harddisk brand is more reliable in handling data, longer life and fastest access time.

Since you did not specify IDE, ATA, SATA or SCSI. No comparison on speed. 3200, 3500, 3600, 3700, 4200, 4500, 5400, 7200, or 10k rpm etc. I picked the maxtor since I'm using one in my system. The Maxtor's Atlas 10K IV has an incredible read write speed.

Nils

for a longer life i choose seagate, my 5 year old 1.9 gig reformated hundred times and been burnt one time, is still alive and kicking

I voted for Maxtor. I had a six year old 6 gig drive, and its been reformatted lots of times, since I tried lots of linux distros and reformatted Win98 almost every 6 months. It was reliable enough for me, I can't recall any major loss. As for access time, I think that all depends on the type and speed of the drive itself.

Hope that helped!

I have used Western Digital and haven't had any problems. I think you'll find that people stick with what they know and trust. As well there are things like the age of the drive and what it going to be used for to take into consideration.

I used to use Maxtors all the time, but they seem to go bad after 5 years in my experience. Western Digital is normally what I use. All but one of my Western Digital drives I've ever owned still works. I've heard great things about IBM Deskstar drives, and I'll be giving one a try in my Macintosh when I get a bigger hard drive for it.

Only harddisk that has broken in my use was Seagate.

Currently I have three samsung drives in use and have had no problems. When I bought my first Samsung I had consern it to be noisy, they were generally concerned that, but in practise I did not notice any difference to other drives.

I've had a very same drive in active use for several years now and it's working like charm. Because of the good experience and Samsung's rather customer friendly pricing policy, my next drive and drive after that was Samsung too.

Yep, the Koreans definately know what they are doing.

I dont know about all of the cryterea together because I have had either a fast hard drive with short life or a slow one with long life. I have an old seagate that is horibly slow and noisy but it has been steadily pumping out reliable data for about 7 years. on the other hand I have had Maxtors with blazing speed and had to return sevral of them under warinty for replacement. My last one died about 2 months out of warinty. I have now switched to Hitache/IBM. I havn't had it long enough to say anything about durability, but it is defanatly fast and quiet.

I got one Seagate which has lasted for over an year and has some bad sectors i guess.. The performance has dropped pretty much.

Recently, a month back I purchased Samsung because they are giving 5 Years Warranty. Now who the hell would ignore that

Actually i'm joining the topic to see waht's the best.. cause my maxtor failed badly...

and i have read in other topics in this forums that maxtor is not so good as u might think