1 TB Seagate vs WD Black

M

McDork

Gawd
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Nov 13, 2007
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My Samsung HD103SJ F3 1 TB HD is dying (making a lot of noise on start and shutdown). I have been looking at a Seagate ST 1000DM003 and the 1TB WD black as a replacement. Is there any reason to go with the WD over the Seagate? Also, will I notice any performance gain with either of these drives over the Samsung? Also any other suggestions for a 1TB HD would be appreciated. Thanks
 
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Really it's just user preferences. I don't go Seagate, but the WD Black's have always kicked ass. They can get hot, loud, and use a bit of power, but for a desktop to me it's always worth it.

I imagine the performance will be roughly the same. HDD's haven't really stood out in differences especially if they're spinning at the same speed, same cache, same size, and the market they are sold to is equal. Nobody really cares about a few MB's read/write sequential anymore with SSD's running the market. In fact, it's very difficult to find HDD reviews anymore in general.
 
I'd also like to know this, I have had many 3tb and 4tb Seagate drives and recently bought 4 1tb WD Blacks for office computer use. But they sure are pricey compared to the Seagate's. I never had a problem with any of my seagate drives and will possibly pick up 2 of them because I ended up using 2 of my WD Blacks in a Synology Disk station and I am building 4 computers.
 
Newer drives and those with higher densities will likely perform better. I'm sure you can find reviews with specs and real world measurements that will allow for comparisons. If performance is much of an concern at all I would recommend considering a SSD over a mechanical hard drive.

Please keep in mind that you are likely to get a bunch of opinions when asking what brand you should consider. People are often very passionate about it. For every person who says that WD is crap, you will get another saying they are great, to infinity.
 
Ive had good luck with both and Ive had bad luck with both. I think its like Chevy vs Ford. Theyre both good, just depends on your run of luck. I personally prefer WD because Ive had really good luck out of them (got my first DOA drive from them a few weeks back for a friend's build) but Ive put Seagates in builds I do for people often and all are working fine. Id have no problem using one.

My suggestion would be to get whichever you can get the best price on. If theyre the same price, get the WD.
 
WD has Blue (stops at 1tb), and Black.
Seagate has the 7200.14 generation st*000*dm00* drives.

All perform relatively similar. And my guess would be that they have similar failure rates.
(Both companies probably cherry pick the best drive platters to sell in their enterprise drives)

The WD Black cost significantly more , but comes with a 5 year warranty. If you value a longer warranty then WD Black are the way to go.

(Some people I know refuse to warranty their hard drives because they think other people will get their used platters after the drive is refurbished and go to the trouble to recover the former data to steal their personal data.
Other people are worried that you get a refurb drive back as the replacement and don't want to waist their time giving a drive that's already failed once a second chance.)
 
Black, black, black! If reliability is of any importance to you, for the love of Jebus don't go Seagate. I've never had so much as a reallocated sector from any black or RE3/RE4 (blacks with TLER) in all the years I've had them powered on.
 
I've never had so much as a reallocated sector from any black or RE3/RE4 (blacks with TLER) in all the years I've had them powered on.
Click to expand...

I have had 10s of thousands of reallocated sectors on WDC black drives. Although I have dozens of black drives. Still no where near 1000s of drives so statistically my experience is insignificant.
 
WD Black also has 5 year warranty. I believe the seagate OP is looking at has 2 year warranty.
 
Both drives look pretty good to me. The Seagate is about $55 and the WD Black is about $30 more. I need to decide if the WD Black is worth the extra cost.
 
Performance wise I would expect the Seagate to have a slightly faster sequential transfer rate. Reliability wise I expect there to be a lower chance of failure with the WDC drive based on the only data point that I know of with any statistical significance.

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

So the question to the OP is it worth the extra $30 for a lesser chance of failure based on the blackblaze data? And also a 5 year warranty instead of a 2 year.
 
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Do you have backups ? If not, then buy two of the cheapest drive.
 
The premium on the WD Black is only worth it if you care about the longer warranty. I've owned 6 Blacks over the years and multiple Seagates, and the only drive that has failed on me was a Black. Obviously this is statistically insignificant. But I should mention that I've noticed the Blacks to be noiser than other drives.

Regarding the data on Backblaze, they buy the cheapest drives currently available which is why they had a lot more Seagates. A large portion of failure rates on the Seagates were from Green drives received via warranty replacement for older drives. It's kind of already known that Green drives are trash, including the WD ones, because they were designed to hold and serve up media, not much else.

I think it's also important to note that, despite the track record of the major manufacturers as demonstrated by the Backblaze case, current drives are constructed differently, with the biggest change being platter density. Typically, a drive with fewer platters has a lower chance of failure, and back then, high density drives had lots of platters. The ST1000DM003 ($64) and Black WD1003FZEX ($85) are both single platter parts. The Seagate should really be compared to the Blue WD10EZEX ($60) which is a single platter with a 2 yr warranty.

I think the Black is still a consumer grade drive because it used to be so popular among gamers. Seagate's Constellation ES.3 drives are targeted at enterprise and come with 5 yr warranties. An "expert" on another forum recommended them and I've had one running as a backup drive in a small business server for over a year now. There are no 1TB platter density drives in this series but two platters will operate faster than a single platter so it's a good balance of reliability and performance. There is also the Constellation CS series which do have 1TB platters but only 2 yr warranties for enterprise application.

Bottom line, if you're not concerned with RAID, and care about a 5 yr warranty, get the Black. Otherwise, the Blue and Barracuda are much better values. For future RAID, either enterprise or NAS drives are the way to go.
 
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