Who Makes The Most Reliable Hard Drives?

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Who makes the most reliable hard drives? Personally, I am a fan of WD's 4TB enterprise drives. Which brand have you had the best luck with?

All the drives are "consumer grade" rather than "enterprise" drives, because enterprise drives are more than twice the price. Backblaze says: "Even if there were no warranty, a 15 percent annual failure rate on the consumer 'desktop' drive and a 0 percent failure rate on the 'enterprise' drive, the breakeven would be 10 years, which is longer than we expect to even run the drives for."
 
i've had frequent issues with WD drives, but never any with seagate (it's now the same company anyway i think?). i know it's vice versa for a lot of people... just my experience. like everything MSI was complete garbage in my case, badly manufactured, broken, buggy bios... others love MSI. i have no idea, must be bad luck.
 
My Hitachis have been steady workhorses. WD Green sucked it early, WD Red still going. Out of that sample size, nothing can be deduced.. however what I have observed is that the Hitachis are never benchmark leaders yet solid and consistent.
 
From experience with enterprise drives Seagate is by far the worst. WD has been really good. The company I work for switched from WD to Hitachi about 8 months ago. I thought that was going to be a mistake, but we've had very few DOAs, and only a couple die in the field.
 
Hitachi. End of story.

I've been buying Hitachi's for a couple of years cause Seagate's just fail like it's their birth right. Western digital is usually a hit or miss. They either work for 5 years or they fail within the first month.

My only concern is that Hitachi may gain a reputation for reliability and then turn around and hand their manufacturing to someone like Foxconn, but the Foxconn in the bad part of China. For profit reasons. A popular trend in corporations.

But no seriously buy Hitachi.
 
WD drives, but never any with seagate (it's now the same company anyway i think?)

No. WD and Seagate are different companies. HGST is a division of WD. Seagate also acquired Samsung's hard drive division but no new drives have been developed with the Samsung brand for quite a years.. Toshiba produces hard drives where some of these have Hitachi designs.
 
I've had quite a few WD's in my days. Had one fail after moderate usage. Started making a bad sound, I was lucky to get my data off it. These days I have a noisy Raptor that still works. But by far, my Seagate drive has been superior in cost and noise levels. For mechanical drives, I'd have to vote Seagate at this time.
 
In all fairness, Seagate Constellation and Cheetah HDDs are rock solid, I've yet to see one fail with over 10-15 years of usage.
However, their consumer Barracuda HDDs have always been lacking.

I haven't had bad luck with them lately, circa 2012 models, but anything from 2011-past was garbage.
WD, save for their Green HDDs, have been solid.
 
The fact that they're using consumer level drives in a storage server setup means they'll have a much higher failure rate compared to most desktop situations. With desktop drives, they aren't tuned to compensate for drive vibration like enterprise drives are. There are going to be many "failures" that really aren't failures. They would just be drives that couldn't handle the vibration of all the other drives as well as it would need to.

Still, I'm very impressed with the HDS drives they show. That's an impressive failure rate under those circumstances. Looks like I have a new favorite. My latest 4TB drive is a HDS drive. Let's home WD doesn't muck with their production methods and ruin that quality.
 
Roughly 7-8 years ago, had a Seagate fail. OCZ SSD failed as well after 10 months.

Since then, several Seagates, Western Digitals, Samsungs & a Crucial SSD are all still running and have been rock solid.

Due to the Deathstar nonsense back in the day, I'll never purchase anything Hitachi.
 
Still, I'm very impressed with the HDS drives they show. That's an impressive failure rate under those circumstances. Looks like I have a new favorite. My latest 4TB drive is a HDS drive. Let's home WD doesn't muck with their production methods and ruin that quality.

WD sold the 3.5in part of their Hitachi purchase to Toshiba.
 
No. WD and Seagate are different companies. HGST is a division of WD. Seagate also acquired Samsung's hard drive division but no new drives have been developed with the Samsung brand for quite a years.. Toshiba produces hard drives where some of these have Hitachi designs.

It's pretty shocking how few drive companies are left.

Western Digital = Hitachi/HGST = IBM

Seagate = Samsung = Maxtor = Connor

Toshiba = Fujitsu

HP = ?
 
I've had nothing but problems with WD in the 90's and thought I'd never buy one again. Well, there was a good deal on a 512 gig in... 2001 if I remember and, of course it failed pissing me off something fierce. I've had a Samsung fail without much time, (love their displays so I was kind of surprised)... So with just my experience I like Seagate.
I do have an old Conner 40 meg that is indestructible though! It's been dropped on the floor, left outside in a musty shed for years, and even been tazered and it still works (last I checked) lol.
 
Due to some of the jobs I've worked, I've had thousands of hard drives of a few different brands. My experience is pretty much the following;

Western digital/Seagate overall have been the most consistent and reliable for me. The few I've had fail were RMA'ed quickly and without hassle. I've have drives from both companies that have 10+ years and thousands of hours of uptime on them. I really cannot complain.

Hitachi Deathstar pretty much sums up my feelings on that drive. I've had just an overwhelmingly negative experience with hitachi.

toshiba/Fuj/HP and a few others. Hit and miss, nothing particularly exceptional one way or the other.
 
We had 5400 network stations at my last job, on from 7 AM to 5 PM, 5 days a week. After 6 years of observation I'd go with WD over Seagate any day.

Hitachi's I've only ever used in laptops, but they seem solid too.

Oh, but I'd always buy black editions. I don't know who makes the blue label drives from WD but I highly doubt they're of traditional WD quality.
 
Two of my Seagate 15k drives (scsi) have build dates of 2001 and 2002, and have been in almost daily operation since.
 
Stopped using seagate during the barracuda firmware scandal that caused tons of drives to randomly get stuck and had to be unlocked by firmware hacks.
 
Enterprise-grade drives from Western Digital or Hitachi. Nothing beats enterprise-grade. Consumer-grade drives can just suck it!
 
I've had the best luck with Hitachi/HGST.

Seagate drives have been disastrous for me. I had the infamous Seagate 1.5TB Green drive which had a 120% failure rate according to Backblaze. I had to have it replaced six times.
 
In all fairness, Seagate Constellation and Cheetah HDDs are rock solid, I've yet to see one fail with over 10-15 years of usage.

We have had quite a few failures in Dell branded Constellation ES.2 drives in Dell Workstations we use in a hospital environment. Although this is a small sample of a few dozen drives in raid5.
 
I've never had a good experience with Seagate. I used to buy them a lot when they were supposed to be so good and I probably RMA'd 3/4 of them. Finally switched to WD and rarely have problems (under 5% I'd guess). I've got some 10+ year old WD drives still in daily use (though nothing super critical of course).
 
dgingeri said:
Still, I'm very impressed with the HDS drives they show. That's an impressive failure rate under those circumstances. Looks like I have a new favorite. My latest 4TB drive is a HDS drive. Let's home WD doesn't muck with their production methods and ruin that quality.

WD sold the 3.5in part of their Hitachi purchase to Toshiba.

Actually, WD sold the Chinese part of their Hitachi purchase to Toshiba. HGST 3.5" drives come from the Hitachi Thailand factory that WD got as part of the deal; that factory was retooled after the flooding, and what is coming out of there since then is the really reliable stuff we're seeing now.

zero2dash and Dekoth-E-, the Deathstar moniker doesn't apply to HGST. It's a high-quality WD subsidiary now.
 
Whatever you do, do not use the brand that the IRS is using. Those things have an astonishing failure rate, resulting in catastrophic data loss. I'm expecting a class action lawsuit any time now. Any. Time. Now.
 
It's pretty shocking how few drive companies are left.

Western Digital = Hitachi/HGST = IBM

Seagate = Samsung = Maxtor = Connor

Toshiba = Fujitsu

HP = ?

You shouldn't make a list like this without knowing someone is gonna knock it for being incomplete lol. Just gonna like Wikipedia here.

Enterprise HDD... Hitachi is still the best for reliability
Enterprise SSD.... Intel & Samsung seem to do the best so far

Micropolis 9GB SCSI... So long as THAT never happens again, I'll never complain about hard drive reliability.
 
I'm racist, I only buy WD Black drives. Seagate is on my crap list. I should give Hitachi a try at some point.
 
I miss the old Quantum drives... Aside from their brush with their crappy fireball drives, Quantum Bigfoot, Atlas and Viking drives rocked!

@YardofTue - I will attest to Hitachi drives... They may not be the fastest, but they do have the longest MTBF of any hard drive out there.
 
I was a diehard WD fan for over a decade until I tried Hitachi. And now I buy Toshiba.
 
I keep buying Seagate hard drives for some reason but I haven't actually had problems with any hard drive I've bought in the last 10 years with the exception of a Quantum laptop hard drive that died after being hauled around in a backpack every day for 3 years (its Seagate replacement outlived the laptop and still works today).

Right now I've got 4 2TB Seagate Baracuda Greens in my server, 2 500GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 (Yes, they are more than 10 years old) along with the SSDs in my desktop, The old laptop drive in a USB enclosure and a newer one in my laptop (with an SSD). I probably have some more somewhere.
 
Hitachi for me, though I've had good luck with WD blacks. Typically I buy one of the two based on price.

I wish those backblaze cases were not so expensive, would be fun to get one, or two. :D
 
I miss the old Quantum drives... Aside from their brush with their crappy fireball drives, Quantum Bigfoot, Atlas and Viking drives rocked!

@YardofTue - I will attest to Hitachi drives... They may not be the fastest, but they do have the longest MTBF of any hard drive out there.

Same Maxtor drive in my mothers computer for the last 15 years... I had it in one of my computers for the first 5 years of it's life running 24/7.
 
Enterprise WD or Seagate is what I have in my PC. I have never had a failed drive other than the IBM Deathstar drives from the early 2000s.
 
Roughly 7-8 years ago, had a Seagate fail. OCZ SSD failed as well after 10 months.

Since then, several Seagates, Western Digitals, Samsungs & a Crucial SSD are all still running and have been rock solid.

Due to the Deathstar nonsense back in the day, I'll never purchase anything Hitachi.




I had a "deathstar" die in my mom's rig a few weeks ago...it literally caught fire at the sata connector and took out the drive above it as well before she could pull the plug. The PC was running still when it roasted and smoke was coming out the vents...luckily she was there when it went down.
 
I've bought WD Blue and Black, Samsung, and Seagate.
Had one Seagate fail (out of warranty), one WD Blue DOA (possibly shipping?).
One drive in a used laptop, forget who"s.
Um, usually buy what is on sale (and without warnings).
Avoided WD Greens.
 
If I had the money I would only use HGST.

but since I'm not made of money I use a combo of wd greens (non hot swap) and reds (hotswap).
 
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