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Forum Index : Microcontroller and PC projects : Seagate or Western Digital?
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Grogster Admin Group  Joined: 31/12/2012 Location: New ZealandPosts: 9610 |
I've been trying to work out which is best or better etc. I have watched heaps of reviews on YouTube etc, and read lots and lots of comments on those videos, and now I am totally lost.  Some say that Seagate are unreliable, and die early or have a greater then average failure rate. Some say that Western Digital are unreliable, and die early or have a greater then average failure rate. Seagate is generally cheaper then Western Digital, and no-one seems to argue with that fact, so there is that. Do any members here have preferences or experience with both or either of these brands? I am looking for some clarity as videos and comments on videos have just totally confused me with anti-Seagate people saying they would never buy Seagate ever again, and anti-WD people saying THEY would never buy WD ever again.....   Who do you believe, when you have people saying BOTH brands are crap or wonderful depending on who says it? Sigh.  EDIT: What would be good, would be statistical data of failure-rates of different brands and capacities of drives. No-one seems to know that, and it all seems to just be opinion..... Edited 2021-09-28 13:07 by Grogster Smoke makes things work. When the smoke gets out, it stops! |
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| tgerbic Regular Member  Joined: 25/07/2019 Location: United StatesPosts: 66 |
I have been buying hard drives for decades for all sorts of uses from Maxtor, Connor, WD, Segate, Toshiba, HP and others. I also have a large stack of good but old (5 to 7 year powered on time) drives that I occasionally retask in older PCs. If I look at the old drives it is a mix of the previously mentioned drives. Probably more WD drives since I bought more of them. If I look at the new drives (bought less than 6 years old), I bought mostly WD 2T, 3T drives. I also used to let my rack of PCs run all the time (about 20 drives) but no more as the electric bill and room heat got to be a bit high. I had a couple of drives fail but I ran every two day incremental backups, server to server, with bi-weekly full disk virus scans. Almost all drives were desktop/workstation drives and only meant for smaller user workloads powered on 8 hours a day max. I think I was exercising them to death. The most important thing I learned is that you should consider the application when you buy a drive. Another is if you are going to churn the daylights out of a drive, put a heatsink on it. For file or long term storage, 5K RPM drives will outlast 7K drives, and are almost always plenty fast. I have some security network video recorders in the house and have bought security drives for them, meant to have constant writes 24 hours a day. They all have 3T and 4T WD and have been running almost four years without a single failure. I have 6 HP SAS drives (meant for always on network servers) that are almost 7 years old now, with no faults. I have updated all my workstation and server PCs in the last three years with WD 3T, 4T and 6T surveillance drives and have not had one failure. They are a bit slower (5600 RPMs) but not really noticeable. I put a 6 year old Segate in an older linux machine last week which tested great, but showed old-age on the SMART utility. The workstation I am writing this on has a Segate 3T root drive with almost three power on years. SMART tells me it is OLD but passes tests without exceeding any thresholds. Price is one thing but getting the right type of drive for the intended usage, picking a realistic speed and headsinking any drive that will get hot to the touch is more important than vendor. BTW, my massive Segate 5M hard drive I bought about 1984 for my S100 system still works. Regards |
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phil99 Guru  Joined: 11/02/2018 Location: AustraliaPosts: 2642 |
Your edit is exactly the problem. A drive failure can cause such anguish (for those without a backup) that they insist that brand is total rubbish. I have owned a number of both and found failures to be rare, the last 2 decades ago. They are both reputable brands, along with several others. Price is the only observable difference. Other objective statistics seem to be unavailable to retail customers. Edited 2021-09-28 14:17 by phil99 |
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Plasmamac Guru Joined: 31/01/2019 Location: GermanyPosts: 579 |
Hi , read this :Drive statistics Plasma |
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| Grogster Admin Group Joined: 31/12/2012 Location: New ZealandPosts: 9610 |
Thanks for the replies, Chums.  @ tgerbic: ALL my high-capacity drives these days, are destined for NAS operation. I have been buying WD Red's mostly, but they are quite a bit more expensive then the Seagates. I have had one 3TB WD Red failure so far, but all the others are still working OK. 3TB one that failed was assembled 29 July 2013, and I probably ran it for about 4-5 years 24/7. I am looking at using one Seagate Baracuda 4TB as a file-backup server build. By Seagate's own promo material, they recommend them for "Home servers". This NAS box would probably only have the one drive in it at this stage. Most of my NAS content is media, so they are just used for streaming media to a Raspberry Pi Media-player setup, so their life is easy and they are not pushed hard at all. They spend 90% of their life just sitting idle spinning away doing nothing. This is why I thought I would go for a cheaper Seagate drive for this next build. @ phil99: Yes, exactly. I've had WD and Seagate drives die on me over the years, but I don't automatically then blame the brand, as ALL drives die at some point. The trick is in trying to use a brand that has the lowest failure rate. @ Plasmamac: Danke. Very interesting information. Does look like Seagate have more deaths, but then if you are using 300% more Seagate's then any other brand, you would also expect that too.I have my media NAS backed up to an off-line copy of the same. This is another NAS box, which is not running, but is powered on every so often so I can do a sync between them. The offline one is the backup. Important documents etc are backed up six-ways from Sunday on the local machine, the NAS, USB drives and the cloud as well, so I think I am covered there reasonably well if my main NAS or main PC fell over and died - I can still retrieve those important files from either the USB or cloud backups. Having said that, and being reasonably prepared as I think I am, losing data to a dead drive is never a good thing or a happy experience with the capacities of today's drives!   Just wanting to minimize the  if/when a drive dies, and thinking you can to some extent do that by buying better quality drives?A few years ago, Seagate got into hot water with a firmware problem that bricked drives, but I expect that we are well past that now with any new Seagate drive - that was a few years ago now. But I do remember the "Seagate hate" that generated on many forums and videos, and probably did put those affected by that issue, off Seagate forever I expect!   Smoke makes things work. When the smoke gets out, it stops! |
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Gizmo Admin Group Joined: 05/06/2004 Location: AustraliaPosts: 5119 |
I bought a WD NAS drive once. It ran hot, and died after a couple months. Got my money back, didn't want it replaced. These days I tend to go for electronics with a low current draw, means less heat and probably a better designed circuit. Glenn The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago, the second best time is right now. JAQ |
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| Grogster Admin Group Joined: 31/12/2012 Location: New ZealandPosts: 9610 |
Here we go again..... Yes, nothing kills electronics faster then heat IMHO. If you can keep them cool, or as you say, design them to run cool(er), then the tend to live a lot longer. The old 5400RPM drives of old, tended to outlast the newer 7200RPM drives up until SSD's came on the scene with any decent capacity. 7200RPM drives run hot. I remember that. Any system(Windoze or Linux) these days, I install on SSD. Spinning HDD's are only ever used as mass-storage volumes for me these days. Probably the same for most people too I would expect. Smoke makes things work. When the smoke gets out, it stops! |
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| Davo99 Guru Joined: 03/06/2019 Location: AustraliaPosts: 1584 |
I have found over the years with many drives due to the amount of Data I generate that both Seagate and WD are equally BAD. Bit like models of cars. One brand has a winner, the other a looser, they change models and the reliability switches and you don't know the bad from the good with long term reliability till years later when they are well out of production. Take your pick and backup the backups and that's about as much as you can do. |
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| Grogster Admin Group Joined: 31/12/2012 Location: New ZealandPosts: 9610 |
I like that!  Smoke makes things work. When the smoke gets out, it stops! |
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Mixtel90 Guru Joined: 05/10/2019 Location: United KingdomPosts: 7938 |
IIRC the drives that ended up in my NAS were Hitachi so I'd better stay out of the Seagate/WD fight. I wouldn't want one of them going out on strike in sympathy. :) I do know they were *a lot* cheaper than the brands in question (especially as I had to buy 2 at the time) and that was a major factor. Mick Zilog Inside! nascom.info for Nascom & Gemini Preliminary MMBasic docs & my PCB designs |
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| Volhout Guru Joined: 05/03/2018 Location: NetherlandsPosts: 5091 |
The Seagate / WD fight has been going on for quite a while now. The company I worked for 10+ years ago used millions of them each year, and in their statistics they found not one superior to the other. What is important is that your interface with them correctly, and that your environmental conditions are met. Heat is one, Mechanical vibration and shock another. Plus...look carefully in the documentation: orientation of mounting. Most drives prefer horizontal mounting. Interfacing: - How stable are voltages that power them. Especially when spinning up and head movement. In large PC's there is an abundance of power, but in smaller NAS spinning up 3 drives at the same time may cause voltage dips. Since our application was consumer electronics (relatively low power) we spend quite some time on this topic. - Is the internal software allowed to do drive maintenance. (high density drives are also lossy, similar to SSD's, and have their build in re-locating algorithms. Not an answer Grogster, but I think it will be hard to get an answer based on real technical facts. Emotional posts on internet of failures that where not researched for the actual cause may not help you either. One thing that may be driving cost difference is the application of patents. I know that both Seagate and WD where in a patent war over the technology that allows writing data so compact on a magnetic platter. Maybe one of them won, and the other has to pay big time... BTW did you know the most expensive component in the harddrive is the read-write head ? And that there is only 1 company in the world (-or- there was at that time) making them... Volhout Oh, yeah, we used a lot of Hitachi's too. Edited 2021-09-28 17:25 by Volhout PicomiteVGA PETSCII ROBOTS |
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| Davo99 Guru Joined: 03/06/2019 Location: AustraliaPosts: 1584 |
Is there anyone else making Drives Now? I thought WD and seagate were the only ones doing Non SSD these days? Some may be theirs re branded of course. |
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| mclout999 Guru Joined: 05/07/2020 Location: United StatesPosts: 490 |
I think Toshiba is still actually making hard disk drives and not just relabeling them. I could be wrong. Hitachi is now owned by WD so not really an independent producer. |
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| Plasmamac Guru Joined: 31/01/2019 Location: GermanyPosts: 579 |
Grogster wrote : nothing kills electronics faster then heat IMHO. Gravity is the fastet HD Killer Plasma |
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| Grogster Admin Group Joined: 31/12/2012 Location: New ZealandPosts: 9610 |
HA HA! Yeah, OK, you got me there.  ....and I HAVE done that - unfortunately....  Smoke makes things work. When the smoke gets out, it stops! |
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| Davo99 Guru Joined: 03/06/2019 Location: AustraliaPosts: 1584 |
Not JUST Hdds either I have unfortunately found.  |
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| toml_12953 Guru Joined: 13/02/2015 Location: United StatesPosts: 442 |
Depending on what you want to do with it (and nostalgia is certainly a factor in some cases), an SSD (Solid State Drive) may be the way to go. They're much faster than mechanical drives, there's no mechanical wear, they're not subject to head crashes or errors caused by vibration, they generate less heat than mech drives and they're not affected by magnetic fields to which you'd commonly expose disk drives. On the downside, they are still more expensive per byte than mechanical drives and they last much longer if your application reads from them more often than it writes to them. I haven't heard of anyone who had worn out an SSD yet but that doesn't mean it hasn't happened. You can get them with the same interface as most common mechanical drives so you don't have to worry about how to interface them. You just disconnect your old drive and connect your new SSD. |
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| ryanm Senior Member  Joined: 25/09/2015 Location: AustraliaPosts: 203 |
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-q2-2021/ |
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