WD or Seagate?

sybaris

sybaris

sybaris

Associate
Joined
21 Jun 2010
Posts
787
Location
infornt of my PC
Im looking for a new hard drive and years ago I stuck to Seagate. Then a few years back Seagate made some terrible drives that regularly failed and I bought WD. The cost between a 3GB Seagate Barracuda and a 2GB or 4GB WD Black is huge. What do you think? Is it worth going for a Seagate drive or sticking to WD?
 
I'm sure you can find both sides of the fence fighting their corner, but personally I've had perhaps 5 or 6 Seagate drives die on me, whilst ancient WD drives seem to just spin right back on up.
 
We get both failed in the shop, these days it's sadly down to luck if the drive will last or not.
 
Glanza said:
We get both failed in the shop, these days it's sadly down to luck if the drive will last or not.
Click to expand...

What's the ratio though? My (admittedly small sample) experience is about five to one against Seagate, but you you do a bit of a search and see Google's results on their failed drives, the Seagates are significantly worse than WD. Seagate seem to operate the "sell 'em cheap, pile 'em high" business model. Just looking at their reduced warranty period shows they are not building to last.
 
50 / 50 split from the sample size we deal with, what we find to fail more often currently are Toshiba 1TB drives, Some are failing within 12 months.
 
I've always mixed the manufacturers I pick in my home NAS, and have found no difference. Its only a small sample size, maybe 15 drives over 3 or 4 years but I've had failures from all sides, even the WD reds that seem to have an almost fanatical following. Most important thing in my book is to test the new drive properly when you get it, smart short, convenance then long tests. Then bad blocks, then another long smart test. It takes a few days but if the data is valuable enough, it's worth doing to root out those early to die drives, normally from rough treatment in transit.
 
More important than the drive manufacturer is choosing a drive that is right for your purposes. Here is a video on choosing the right drive for the right job if you'd like more details.

If you're looking for performance, longevity, and a long warranty, then you may want to take a look at our FireCuda, which is an SSHD (Solid-State Hybrid Drive). These drives combine an SSD cache with a larger conventional spinning storage capacity, so that as you use the drive, the files you access most frequently get intuitively placed in the SSD cache portion for faster load-time and performance. They also have a 5 year warranty, which in many other drive lineups you have to go to the "Pro" grade of drives to get.

We always advocate two big rules-of-thumb:

1. Use the right drive for your use-case
2. Always, always, always back up your data.
 
I'd much rather have the cheaper drive plus a secure backup than the expensive drive and a false sense of security.
 
My Samsung spinpoint F3 1 Tb Hd has just failed with what i would say is very little use. I have had the drive for 6-7 year but pc might be on for a couple of hours a week at most Other than the 1st year of usage maybe more
Its something i didn't used to worry about until now. Luckily all my important photos vids etc are stored on a toshiba external drive. I have started backing up pics and vids to google photos but takes a long time?
What do other people do here for a safe backup?
 
ScBHavoK said:
My Samsung spinpoint F3 1 Tb Hd has just failed with what i would say is very little use. I have had the drive for 6-7 year but pc might be on for a couple of hours a week at most Other than the 1st year of usage maybe more
Its something i didn't used to worry about until now. Luckily all my important photos vids etc are stored on a toshiba external drive. I have started backing up pics and vids to google photos but takes a long time?
What do other people do here for a safe backup?
Click to expand...

Sorry to hear about your Spinpoint. The most widely recommended backup strategy you will probably see is known as the 3-2-1 method:

Keep 3 copies of your data, on 2 different mediums, with 1 offsite in case of disaster. You can use a combination of solutions including internal drives, external USB drives, a NAS, and cloud storage (which can be either a cloud service you set up yourself, or a subscription cloud storage service) as you see fit.
 
I have been building PCs since the days of the 386 and 486. Back then Seagate was rock solid. Even up to about 2005, I had a load of Seagates and never had one fail and they do a good 35000 hours of use.
I kept using them until about 2014 when on arrived dead from off the shelf. The publicity was bad and I switched to WD HDD and Samsung SSDs. I want something reliable and I get it that WD may be less prone to failure but may be £80 or so more.
The integrity of my data is key. No point on continually replacing and trusting a drive manufacturer that will let you down.
 
Anything can fail, however I use Western Digital Blacks for anything important.

The Western Digital Blacks are really workstation drives, contain dual processors for high IO requests, there also physically build better than typical consumer HDD's.
 
From my experince when I worked in the industry Seagate failed allot but we did sell more of them than wd, so was hard to get an exact ratio.

That being said wb black and blue drives we never really got them back. Wd red on the other hand did nothing but see them come back.

My favourite is wd black out of all hdd, use one in my nas
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom