WD Black or Seagate Barracuda

go with the black you got 5 years warranty and quality

The 5 year warranty is certainly better than the Seagate. Good point with the cache size... I was leaning that direction.

Personally I would go with the Samsung Spinpoint F3 drives. Samsung's hard drive division has been bought by Seagate but the F3 series is as fast as the WD Blacks and have a much lower return rate.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168...

WD Blacks fail at twice the rate of the F3s. 2TB drives fail at about twice the rate of 1TB drives overall.

http://www.behardware.com/articles/843-6/components-ret...

Having a SATA 3 ( 6 Gb/s ) interface is meaningless on a mechanical hard drive as not even a 10,000 RPM drive can saturate a SATA 2 ( 3 Gb/s ) interface. SATA 3 is only needed for an SSD.

Newer WD Blacks may not function correctly in RAID. They want you to buy the RE ( RAID edition ) drives.

no offense but those are RETURN rates from an e-tailer. it would be incorrect to assume that those are FAILURE rates.

True, but there is not another way of obtaining reliable statistics. Besides any deviance in the numbers would be spread across all brands/models.

To quote the article.

" The returns rates given concern the products sold between October 1st 2010 and April 1st 2011 for returns made before October 2011, namely after between 6 months and a year of use. Over the lifetime of a product the returns generally form a spread out U on the graph, with the bottom virtually flat. Our figures therefore cover the early part of the lifetime of products, where returns rates are high.

The statistics by brand are based on a minimum sample of 500 sales and those by model on a minimum sample of 100 sales, with the biggest volumes reaching tens of thousands of parts by brand and thousands of parts by model. "

As you can see from the numbers most computer parts that fail do so early in their lifecycle.

The website themselves admit it's not a perfect methodology but much like the power supply tier list it is generally correct. So you do get a pretty good idea of flawed products and overall reliability.

Thanks for the feedback! I considered the Samsung F3's. I know they're popular drives with overall good feedback. I'll think about it.

That's an interesting website that I had not seen before. Good resource to backup the feedback online which is often predominately negative. Happy people aren't as likely to write a review.

WD claims the following for their non-RE drives:

WD Caviar Black Hard Drives are tested and recommended for use in consumer-type RAID applications. (RAID-0 / RAID-1)*

* Business Critical RAID Environments – WD Caviar Black Hard Drives are not recommended for and are not warranted for use in RAID environments utilizing Enterprise HBAs and/or expanders and in multi-bay chassis, as they are not designed for, nor tested in, these specific types of RAID applications. For all Business Critical RAID applications, please consider WD's Enterprise Hard Drives that are specifically designed with RAID-specific, time-limited error recovery (TLER), are tested extensively in 24x7 RAID applications, and include features like enhanced RAFF technology and thermal extended burn-in testing.

For the setup I'm doing (RAID 1), the load on the hard drive is no different than a single drive (as I understand it at least)

i'm sorry, i just cannot "buy" the sample and they even admit to their own numbers being skewed:

Note that with the Western Digital RE4-GP (WD2002FYPS), there was quite a low sample (253) and half the returns (7) were made on a single sale: this abnormal rate for what is a “pro” drive can therefore be explained by a problem with transport.

removing that sale would have given the return rate at 2.84%, instead of 5.53%, for the second lowest instead of the highest return rate. its just too flawed.

Thats right, it's RAID 5 I was thinking of that WD Blacks will not do. My mistake.


Looniam, believe what you want. The only other way to get failure numbers is from the manufacturers themselves. Those are the numbers I would not trust. At least this study lists it's full methodology flaws and all.

I can say the following:

I have 5 Samsungs, 3 x 1TB F3's and 2 x 500GB drives. All over 2 and 4 years old and still working great.

I've heard that Seagate drives fail more than WD drives. No, I do not have proof but it is the general consensus in our IT dept   Hitachi seems to only be heard whispering from a distance...

I might actually snap up a couple more Samsungs before they run out!

Best answer selected by Rpopiel.

Ended up going with the 2 WD Black drives with 32 mb cache. I would have tried the Samsung had they been the same price but I saved 50$ with the WD. I'll report back if I regret my decision.

you wont regret using the wd black