That question can't be answered because both HD and WD have made some very reliable drives and some rather crappy drives. What product lines are we talking about. The WB Black is decent performance drive and has a 5 year warranty.....On the other end of the scale you have the WD Blue which sits way down past.
If ya look over at storagereview.com database, you sill see that Seagate made the most reliable drive as well as the least reliable drive. The Raptor was well know for its speed for an inexpensive drive but had failure rates as high as 25%.
Even among model lines we see variations....the Seagate 7200.10 was a great drive ..... as was the 7200.12. However the 7200.11 had firmware and other issue. In addition one size drive in a model line can be great and the other problematic
Look here for performance:
http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/hdd-charts-2013/-01-Read-Throughput-Average-h2benchw-3.16,2901.html
Here for reliability
http://www.storagereview.com/php/survey/survey_mfr.php
Year 2011 returns
Here’s the breakdown model by model for 1 TB drives:
- 3.65% Western Digital Caviar Blue (WD10EALS)
- 3.59% Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000.C (HDS721010CLA332)
- 2.89% Western Digital Caviar Black (WD1001FALS)
- 2.79% Western Digital Caviar Black (WD1002FAEX)
- 1.61% Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 (ST31000528AS)
- 1.57% Western Digital Caviar Green (WD10EARS)
- 1.31% Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 (ST31000524AS)
- 1.27% Western Digital Caviar Blue (WD10EALX)
- 1.15% Samsung SpinPoint F3 (HD103SJ)
And the breakdown for 2 TB drives:
- 5.53% Western Digital RE4-GP (WD2002FYPS)
- 5.07% Hitachi Deskstar 7K2000 (HDS722020ALA330)
- 4.75% Hitachi Deskstar 7K3000 (HDS723020BLA642)
- 4.42% Western Digital Caviar Black (WD2002FAEX)
- 3.48% Seagate Barracuda LP (ST32000542AS)
- 3.40% Seagate Barracuda XT (ST32000641AS)
- 3.05% Western Digital Caviar Green (WD20EARS)
- 2.98% Seagate Barracuda Green (ST2000DL003)
- 2.20% Samsung SpinPoint F4 EcoGreen (HD204UI)
There is usually a reverse correlation between performance and reliability.....slower (green) drives are more reliable.
2012 results
Here now are the stats for the 3 TB drives sold over the period:
- 7.65% for the Hitachi Deskstar 7K3000 3 TB
- 4.86% for the Seagate Barracuda XT 3 TB
- 3.36% for the Seagate Barracuda 7200.14 3 TB
- 3.12% for the WD Caviar Green 3 TB
And the 2 TB drives:
- 4.60% for the WD Caviar RE4 2 TB
- 3.91% for the WD Caviar Black 2 TB
- 3.32% for the WD Caviar Green 2 TB WD20EARS
- 2.28% for the Seagate Barracuda 7200.14 2 TB
- 1.94% for the WD AV-GP 2 TB
- 1.46% for the WD Caviar Green 2 TB WD20EARX
- 1.03% for the WD RE4-GP 2 TB