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| Electrical Appliance Brands You Would Never Buy Again |
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| MyHeadHz:
--- Quote from: james_s on January 08, 2020, 09:41:18 pm ---The concept of a brand is all but irrelevant these days, they are just a name slapped on something built by whatever company owns the IP or was contracted by the company that does. The item you buy today may have no relation to the one someone buys next year beyond having the same name on it. It's not really useful to think in terms of brand anymore. --- End quote --- Schrödinger's appliance: one cannot both be able to purchase a product, and know if its quality will last. To be fair, there is the odd product that actually improves over time. But more often than not the quality goes down. I stopped recommending appliances years ago for that reason. Even if I recommended one to avoid, it would imply that other brands would be better, which is not necessarily the case. |
| Veteran68:
--- Quote from: Electro Detective on January 12, 2020, 02:56:52 am --- I've seen a lot less Seagate hard drives die, versus WD, Hitachi, IBM offerings, and the WORST of the lot have been Toshiba hard drives, always an early/earlier/earliest demise, beginning with accumulating mystery bad sectors and delays, coupled to the tune 'knock knock knocking on hard drive hell's door..' --- End quote --- Once again, opposite experience for me! :) The most reliable drives, by far, have been Hitachi/HGST and Toshiba for me. Hitachi sold the rights to manufacture to Toshiba. Once IBM spun off the "Deathstar" line to Hitachi, quality went way up. And Toshiba has maintained it. I ran a 16x500GB NAS for years without a failure running Hitachi drives. Later I upgraded to 1TB drives. I'm now looking across the office at my 8-bay QNAP NAS running 3TB Toshibas. And they're not even NAS drives, they're 7200 RPM desktop drives. 24/7 operation and that NAS gets beat to hell every day. It streams media throughout my house and backs up all the computers. According to the QNAP stats I just pulled, they're up to 4.5 years of power on hours now. Rock solid all the way. As I mentioned before, I've bought, installed, and run well into the hundreds of hard drives. Seagate by far the worst, Hitachi/Toshiba the best, and WD a good second place. The company BackBlaze, a cloud-based backup service similar (but better IMO) to Carbonite, today has well over 100K drives in their datacenter. At that volume they can no longer source consumer drives in the quantities and capacities they need, but just a few years ago they bought off-shelf consumer drives, even resorting to shucking external USB drives when drive shortages hit. On their blog they post drive stats/reliability studies they've done. Here's a graph from 2015 showing their failure rates: My experience mirrors theirs exactly. |
| bob91343:
I bought a brand new Eureka vacuum cleaner and it didn't do much. I returned it for warranty service and the guy said it was fine. I took it home and it still didn't do much. So I bought a different brand. The Eureka sits in my garage, still practically brand new. I will never see that $100 again. The Hoover brand seems to work a lot better. I have a Kenmore that works okay too. I don't buy new stuff unless there is a good reason. |
| AndyC_772:
A couple of months ago our washing machine died. (Miele, 13 years old). I did a lot of research into which make and/or model might be the best replacement in terms of reliability and serviceability, and the conclusion was that *every* brand, with one exception, was now making crap machines with sealed drums that mean the bearings cannot be replaced and something as simple as a trapped sock can leave the machine uneconomical to repair. That exception was Miele, who apparently do still buid machines to last even though spares are expensive and difficult to come by unless you pay to have the machine repaired by one of their own authorised technicians. That's still a really disappointing state of affairs, but they're by no means unique in this. In the end I narrowed down the choice of new machine by simply dividing the cost of each candidate by the length of its warranty, to give a figure for the cost/year of being guaranteed a working machine. I ended up with a new Miele, £900 with a 10 year warranty = £90/yr and a fair chance that it won't break in that time and have to be scrapped. |
| Black Phoenix:
--- Quote from: Veteran68 on January 12, 2020, 06:29:19 am --- My experience mirrors theirs exactly. --- End quote --- Same were on my side: I've been had most failures with Samsung and Seagate drives, some with Western Digital and basically none with Hitachi/Toshiba. Regarding laptops - Acer and HP was the brands were I saw more failures and problems with construction, but probably because their price at least in Portugal was very competitive, so it was basically the ones that I had to fix most of the times. Toshiba not so much, and they were the easiest to access something inside. Just pop the screws on the bottom a full access to the motherboard, same as the Sony Vaio. I use Asus since I started to own laptops myself. From my Asus M51TR with 4GB (2x2GB) and a RM-70 that I later upgrade to a ZM-82 and 8GB (2x4GB) and a SSD+HDD in the CD-RW bay until it died from a unknown problem with 9 years to the current Zenbook UX303UA I only have good stuff to say about them. Although I still want to one day have the chance to use a Lenovo ThinkPad (In Portugal they are extremely expensive, here in China not really and the one that I see more around). |
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