Seagate or WD for standard HDDs?

[cdr_74_premium]

I've always purchased Seagate drives, because that's what I can find easily around here. Never had an issue, until I got a 2TB unit that started to behave oddly. SeaTools found lots of errors, but fixed them. Since then I didn't have any issues, but it's odd having my biggest drive used only for stuff I can afford losing.

I'm going overseas and I can choose between Seagate and Western Digital hard drives. Was it bad luck or is WD better concerning durability?

 

[drescherjm]

Was it bad luck

I say yes. I mean greater than 90% of all drives expected to last a year. And you had 1 fail..

or is WD better concerning durability?

Possibly ( the only scientific study I have seen said so), However remember that any drive can die at any time regardless of how much you use or abuse it, who manufactured it or even if it is an enterprise drive.

I expect a 2% to 10% Annual failure rate during the 5 year lifetime of a hard drive.

 

[dragonstongue]

Well I know folks that use both, and they (my friends and acquaintances) seem to have their WD last longer if they do not die in the first year or so.

Historically speaking even though the makers of the drives don't really disclose this info (cant blame them though they should) WD has much less failures during warranty period, and somewhat less for older drives. WD seems to have the mechanical side have failure where Seagate seems to have issues with the media itself going corrupt.

I use WD myself, have owned brand new and use old drives from them all the way back to 40mb drives, Somewhere in the 30+ drive range of various capacities, I have only ever had 1 die on me.

2-10% per year sounds about right, somewhat less for the higher spec drives 2% or so in the warranty period (caviar black, red, purple etc) and somewhat more for the run of the mill drives 7% or so after warranty out (caviar blue) most drives seem to go out in 3 years, go figure that is/was warranty for many drives for many years before they chopped it down.

 

[Abula]

get what ever drive that you can exhange in case it fails, the savings of buying oversea might disspear if one or more drives arrive doa or fail quickly.

 

[phis6]

I expect a 2% to 10% Annual failure rate during the 5 year lifetime of a hard drive.

Yes, any mechanical drive has the same chances of failing. Even if you're just using it in normal conditions, you can't just simply point out how long it will last and when it will fail.

 

[evilsofa]

I'm going overseas and I can choose between Seagate and Western Digital hard drives. Was it bad luck or is WD better concerning durability?

Can you choose HGST instead?

 

[qbanb8582]

I personally prefer western digital. I've had a couple seagate drives and they've done ok. One of them died but I've had western digital drives die as well.

But I would say if you have data you can't afford loosing it doesn't matter really which drive you get because any drive can fail and die. You should be doing things like backing up your data offsite or to a cloud service. I would recommend getting atleast a 2nd drive and having maybe a RAID1 (Mirror), atleast in that circumstance if one drive dies your data isn't toast.

 

[cdr_74_premium]

get what ever drive that you can exhange in case it fails, the savings of buying oversea might disspear if one or more drives arrive doa or fail quickly.

Warranties are usually nonexistant in Brazil. I'm as SOL overseas as I'm here. Also, I can get many models and features overseas, while we have to get whatever is available around here.

I have lots of drives that are 5+ years and work flawlessly, even on computers that spend most of the day being actively used. Most are Samsung, which is the brand that used to be strong here. After the Samsung HDD division buyout, Seagate became the biggest HDD supplier around.

I bought a pair of 2TB Seagate drives. One went to my family's file server, the other to mine. Both are very tiny cases. In fact, I bought them as 5400rpm drives, and only later discovered they were 7200rpm drives, which was a bummer considering they were supposed to run cool, and they didn't really have to be fast. Still, their drive is working flawlessly on a computer that's running 24 hours per day for two years. My file server is turned on when I need it, and the drive failed after approximately 1,5 year of sporadic use. I guess I wasn't lucky this time. I only had one failed drive before, back in the P2 days - and it was a WD drive.

Can you choose HGST instead?

Is this a brand?

 

[Abula]

Is this a brand?

Its WD naming of Hitachi.

 

[justinjja]

From my experience Samsung was the best,
I actually have had slightly better experience with WD than Seagate.

 

[evilsofa]

Is this a brand?

When WD purchased Hitachi Storage Division, as part of the deal Toshiba got HGST's Chinese factory, and in return WD got the flooded Toshiba HDD plant in Thailand and had to refit it to get it up and running again. All HGST drives are built there in Thailand now, and what comes out of there is turning out to be very good and reliable, while Toshiba is turning out some of the cheapest and least reliable HDDs from their Chinese plant.

For example, the 7200RPM HGST Deskstar NAS 4TB is faster than a WD Black, and very nearly as fast as a WD RE while costing US$60 less (prices may vary depending on where you buy it). The retail packaging on HGST drives is excellent and probably saves the drives from a lot of DOA.

 

[dragonstongue]

Yes, any mechanical drive has the same chances of failing. Even if you're just using it in normal conditions, you can't just simply point out how long it will last and when it will fail.

who makes the most reliable hard drives?
Any mechanical anything has a chance of failing for sure, but, it truly depends on the quality of product being produced, and in the case of mechanical hard drives and the sheer amount of parts and possible fail points, there are defiantly brands to avoid or at least better choices without settling. So yes to a point you can point to a historical table to say that overall brand X has a higher then average failure rate then brand Y, though one has to be aware of the specific models in question for this to factor in.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HGST
On March 8, 2012, Western Digital (WD) acquired Hitachi Global Storage Technologies. It was agreed that WD would operate with WD Technologies and HGST as wholly owned subsidiaries and they would compete in the marketplace with separate brands and product lines.[4][5][6] (however they also share information and parts of designs as well for example helium filled drives, and various HAMR/TAMR conceptual designs)

To address the requirements of regulatory agencies, in May 2012 WD divested to Toshiba assets that enabled Toshiba to manufacture and sell 3.5-inch hard drives for the desktop and consumer electronics markets.[7][8] (Hitachi and LG used to work hand in hand as well)

Toshiba now owns OCZ (they used to work with Samsung for specific drives and such)
Seagate owns Samsung and Maxtor hard drive lines among other portions of its lines
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seagate_Technology

HGST was not named by WD they were known by this name before that time
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HGST_Deskstar in 2003 they changed name to HGST after IBM drive line purchase, WD purchased HGST in 2012.

It is equivalent speed, not faster cause that is a blanket statement which is not quite factual. As far I recall reading numerous reviews and such over the years, any drive will work for sure, but some drives of course are much better designed for specific functions, i.e for NAS environment and so forth.
http://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/6267/hgst-deskstar-nas-4tb-3-5-inch-consumer-hdd-review/index6.html
http://www.storagereview.com/hgst_4tb_deskstar_nas_hdd_review

 

[TGK]

You may want to read through the Backblaze blog about drive reliability, they had a statistically significant number of drives used in their metrics:

http://blog.backblaze.com/2014/01/21/what-hard-drive-should-i-buy/

Also, Seagate had a really bad run of 1.5TB Barracuda green type drives. The Western Digital greens are also pretty shady in my experience when used in a server scenario (RAID-1, always on).

WD Reds have been the sweetest spot due to a three year warranty and reasonable cost.

 

[Abula]

That study might be real.... but persnally i dont believe it.

I had very bad luck with Hitachi on 3.5 hdds, i bought 8x Hitachi 5k3000 four years ago, none came DOA, none had any problems for 3 years, then all of sudden 6 of 8 are had bad sectors, 4 of 6 were not recoginized by OS.

Given that my sample is small, and its not an indicative of the brand itself, i had 6 samsung 1.5tb on the same sever for the same time, with the same hardware running them, none of them are bad after the same time frame.

So im trying my luck with the blog's so called higher failure rate Segates, no issues for a couple of months with the 4tb =), will see in time.

 

[dragonstongue]

the link I posted for who makes most reliable is sourced from same TGK, also it points out 2tb-3tb and 4tb variants, so take that into account.

Well myself I have 2 caviar black 640 and 1 cav blue 1tb EALX, the blacks are 5 years and 4.5 years and the blue 2 years old now, nothing wrong with them at all, the blacks I use constantly 1 of which is almost full, the blue is ~2/3 full.

 

[JoeComp]

That study might be real.... but persnally i dont believe it.

I had very bad luck with Hitachi on 3.5 hdds, i bought 8x Hitachi 5k3000 four years ago, none came DOA, none had any problems for 3 years, then all of sudden 6 of 8 are had bad sectors, 4 of 6 were not recoginized by OS.

This demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of probability and statistics -- NOT any problem with the Backblaze study.

 

[cdr_74_premium]

What's up with all the WD colors? Blue, Black, Green... what's the difference?

I guess I'll give WD a shot. I'm just spoiled by Samsung and its drives that are still running 7+ years being used daily.

 

[sinisterDei]

Having installed thousands of hard drives from different manufacturers, it's my opinion that they're all the same. Each of the vendors have good batches of drives, and bad batches of drives. Barring specific issues, like IBM's old Deathstar line of drives, the lifespan of a drive typically comes down to luck, not cost or brand. Also, they all seem much more prone to death within their first few months of life; once they've been spinning for 6 months they seem to keep doing so for quite a while.
Much like cars, many folks have anecdotes and preferred brands because "every Ford I ever drove fell apart within two years" or "every WD drive dies inside of a year!", but for every guy that swears by Samsung because WD fails all the time for him, there's a guy that swears by WD because Samsungs fail all the time when he uses them.

 

[Dangman]

What's up with all the WD colors? Blue, Black, Green... what's the difference?

Just read this:
http://www.wdc.com/en/products/internal/desktop/

 

[rpjkw11]

I have bought only WD since the mid-90s and have never had any issues. Corfrection: I think I bought a Seagate about 13 years ago and had nothing but trouble. That's ancient history and isn't valid for today, but it made me a died-in-the-wool WD user. My single HDD is a WD 1TB Black 7200 RPM I bought a little over a year ago.