WD Black or Seagate Barracuda?

deano-5 said:
Gotta be honest Seagates haven't caused me any trouble. My 5+ year old external Seagate is still going strong. Have Seagate become worse over time?
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Take personal opinions on reliability with caution.

Including your own. You have a sample size of one.

It would be nice if the mega data storage companies spilled the beans on their HDDs although it would be biased according to how exactly their drives are used.
 
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Minstadave said:
Like this?:

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/best-hard-drive/
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At which point all the hard drive fanboys made the internet explode. I didn't even know there were fanbois for spinning rust...

As for Blue vs Black. SSDs took the premium market away from the Black and Velociraptor. The extra warranty and "performance features" aren't worth worth it to me - all they'll do is replace the drive for longer. You won't get your data back or access it notably faster.

Me? I'd buy a Toshiba drive. They're cheap, fast enough and reliable - they bought the HGST 3.5" business.
 
MagicBoy said:
At which point all the hard drive fanboys made the internet explode. I didn't even know there were fanbois for spinning rust...

As for Blue vs Black. SSDs took the premium market away from the Black and Velociraptor. The extra warranty and "performance features" aren't worth worth it to me - all they'll do is replace the drive for longer. You won't get your data back or access it notably faster.

Me? I'd buy a Toshiba drive. They're cheap, fast enough and reliable - they bought the HGST 3.5" business.
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so you would recommend a 4TB toshiba as being one of the most reliable then?
 
MagicBoy said:
At which point all the hard drive fanboys made the internet explode. I didn't even know there were fanbois for spinning rust...

As for Blue vs Black. SSDs took the premium market away from the Black and Velociraptor. The extra warranty and "performance features" aren't worth worth it to me - all they'll do is replace the drive for longer. You won't get your data back or access it notably faster.

Me? I'd buy a Toshiba drive. They're cheap, fast enough and reliable - they bought the HGST 3.5" business.
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It's the best data I've come across so far, and I own one of those barracudas :(
 
Psycho Sonny said:
so you would recommend a 4TB toshiba as being one of the most reliable then?
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They're a bit new, so there's no stats from Backblaze yet. Based on the last 4 years worth of drives it's a good bet.

I put my money where my mouth is for the 3TB drives. I had 4x1TB HGST's in my NAS, they got upgraded to 3TB Toshibas just over a year ago. The five year old 1TB drives are all still fine. Two went in a cheap Netgear NAS for Time Machine backups, the other two are RAID0'd in my PC and are full of steam games.

The last two drives I lost were both 1TB Seagate externals.
 
Speak of the devil... only just today I took out the WD Scorpio (2.5") Black from my dead laptop and tried it on a borrowed desktop (a terrible one which didn't even have an installed OS) where the other hard drive was... *ding ding* a Seagate Barracuda. According to the bios, the Seagate Barracuda was the only detected drive and the WD drive was never detected. The WD Scorpio Black never had issues and since my laptop died last Sunday (due to MB failure), I've only taken it out today as I lacked to correct screwdriver to do so sooner.

The WD Black didn't work with a budget HD enclosure, while my Intel SSD (from the same laptop) worked fine. My newly bought tablet's keyboard dock (came with 500GB HDD) didn't detect it either, but I never tested the SSD on it. Either the WD Black is very fussy and won't connect to certain inferior hardware or it somehow died within the past 7 days after just 2.5 years of use and no issues. Never even made clicking noises. This is just one experience though and I'm taking it to the shop tomorrow to confirm whether it really is dead. On the other hand my old Q6600 system had a Seagate Barracuda hard drive which lasted over 4 years. It never actually died, but was close since it made the tell-tale clicks and was very slow.

Should my experience put me off WD Black? Funnily enough I have some WD Passport external drives which have always worked perfectly. Otherwise so much for WD Black's good reputation. I was planning on getting a few Caviar Black for a summer gaming desktop build to replace my dead laptop.
 
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Well I hope both my Seagate 3TB Barracudas in my Hornettek Enterprise 4x lasts as I got one near full of my Photos as a Backup. The other I'm just about to start on.
Just had a Seagate Barracuda 1TB HD Fail on me that was only used for OS and Documents. Only used about 67 GB on it. Took a Maxtor 80Gb out of an older PC and put my OS on it. Now Perfect disc is telling me that I got " The number of metadata fragments (148) has exceeded the threshold of 49. Exactly the same as that 1TB Seagate. But it says Health & Performance EXCELLENT.. So I need another HD fast. Don't want an ssd as is too expensive and PC is an older Aldi pc anyway. So is a WD Blue of 500GB OK for OS.
 
Hmm I know its just a sample size of 1 but anecdotally I have had no problem with various Seagate drives. Touch wood I have never had one fail on me including several Barracudas. The bad failure rate that got reported recently was I think mostly around the Seagate Barracuda 7200.14 (ST3000DM001). I wouldnt tar all Seagate drives with the same brush.

On the other hand my experience of WD Black drives is that I got two of them. First one had the SATA power connector snap off so had to RMA it. Luckily WD were helpful and did swap it but as per their policy I got a recertified drive as a replacement for my 3 month old drive (retailer refused to replace as damage caused by user!). The second one failed after 10 days, my first full fail of a HDD ever, retailer replaced it for a new one and so far its been good.

Its not scientific but I actually have gone back to Seagates in preference over WD because my personal experiences have been poor with WD and fine with Seagate.
 
I would also take a WD drive over a Seagate one any day of the week. In fact, it's probably the only brand for computer parts that I will buy religiously and I don't see that changing any time soon.
 
FWIW, I now only use enterprise class disks. Their error recovery performance is magnitudes better than ordinary consumer class. I'm running 7 wd se disks in my nas and a 1tb se in my pc. (The 1tb se is faster than the 1tb black I also run)

Being honest, it doesn't matter what you have it can and will fail at some point.
Failures I've had:
Wd 640gb black - doa
Wd 250gb caviar se - died at 3 years
Wd 2tb RE - died at 3 years
Wd 500gb blue - died at 7 months
Wd 17gb caviar - died at 3 years
Seagate 250gb constellation - died at 6 years
Seagate 500gb barracuda - doa
Seagate 500mb medalist - died at 3 years

Doesn't mean much though. I retired an old 13gb ibm deskstar last year that was bought in 1999 which was still working perfectly. My original raptor 74gb is still going strong at 9 years old as is a Samsung 200gb at 8.
 
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