Western Digital or Seagate?

Mandryn · May 16, 2016

I'm searching for some new storage solutions for my personal gaming pc. I was looking, and I noticed that Western Digital seems to have a 40 dollar price overhead to Seagate for the same 3tb drives. does anyone know why this is, or is it just paying for the name?

RCFProd · May 16, 2016

WD's Black series is a higher quality HDD though and comes with 5 years warranty. I presume we are talking about WD's Black series pricing.

Anyways. Seagate suffers from high failure rate with their 3TB drives making them avoidable. You'd be well off with 2x Seagate Barracuda 2TB or 2x WD Caviar Blue 2TB, or even 2x Hitachi Ultrastar 2TB.

Seagate 3TB Failure rate info:
http://www.eteknix.com/3tb-seagate-hard-drives-43-failure-rate-constant-use/

azaran · May 16, 2016

Pretty much for the name. I've used both over the years and have had some fail more than others. Everyone on here will have the same kind of story. What I'd look at is stats for performance, spindle speed and warranty. WD just recently switched their Blues to a 5400rpm while Seagates DM models still has theirs at 7200rpm. OF course different models will have different prices structures to go along with perfomance and warranty. So you want to try and compare apples to apples. For instance, comparing a WD Black to a Seagate DM would be a bad comparison.

Evil Mastermind · May 16, 2016

Hitachi highest survival rate and seagate has the worst (western is higher by few % though). Western is planing to buy Hitachi O:

Hlsgsz · May 16, 2016

Mandryn :

Just get a 7200RPM WD Blue if you don;t have an SSD or a 5400RPM if you do and don;t worry about it.
Use http://pcpartpicker.com/ to fing teh best prices.

RCFProd · May 16, 2016

Storage: Hitachi Deskstar 7K2000 2TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive ($54.00 @ Amazon)
Total: $54.00
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2016-05-16 10:18 EDT-0400

Storage: Hitachi Ultrastar 2TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive ($59.95 @ Amazon)
Total: $59.95
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2016-05-16 10:18 EDT-0400

Storage: Seagate Barracuda 2TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive ($65.88 @ OutletPC)
Total: $65.88
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2016-05-16 10:19 EDT-0400

Solandri · May 16, 2016

RCFProd :

This is exactly the wrong way to use the statistics Backblaze provides. You cannot look at a single high failure rate, and extrapolate it to the entire brand of drive. WD's failure rate was lower in that graphic only because the average age of the WD drives was less than a year, vs 2-4 years for the other brand drives.

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/best-hard-drive-q4-2014/

You have to look at specific drive models. The high average failure rate for Seagate drives is almost entirely due to two models. 1.5TB ST31500341AS and 3TB ST3000DM001. Remove those two drives from the stats and (if you insist on doing it the wrong way and compare by brands) Seagate is better than WD.

That's exactly what Backblaze did - removed the problem drives from their servers. And as a result their Seagate drives were more reliable than WD in the 2015 stats.

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-reliability-q4-2015/

So ignore the brand name. Look for or avoid specific models.

And WD has a $40 price premium over Seagate because huge numbers of people misread Backblaze's previous reports and concluded Seagate sucked while WD was great. Their 2015 report eliminates the problem Seagate models, and you can see WD is actually less reliable on average than Seagate. Ignore the brand name, look for specific models.

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Western Digital or Seagate?

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