IS WD MORE RELIABLE THAN SEAGATE?

[Nko]

I know there are some threads about this and for what i rea most users agree tha wd is better than seagate when talking about hdd . But i wanted to ask you guys What is the best HDD in terms of price/performace .
I am planning to buy a 3tb western digital but people say the more capacity the less quality . i mean the huge ones have more problems and errors on storage. So Would it be better to just stick to a 1tb one? Like samsung ( a lot of people say it is a really good one if not the most reliable). Thank you for the answers

 

[zdbc13]

They are all about equal, in my opinion. Depending on your hardware you may have trouble with the bigger drives. How much space do you need? I love my 1tb Samsung.

 

[Nko]

im making a gamming build ( this is my first time) and i also buy movies and music so ill need if posible the highest capacity. As i read , a lot of people have trouble with the 3 tb independet from the brand so maybe for a safe build is better that i get a 1 tb one ( For example samsung ) and then if need more buy an external drive, what do u think? my build:

Processor: Core i5-3570K
Ram : G.SKILL Ripjaws X Series 16GB DDR3 1600
Video . nvidia gygabyte gtx 670
Hard disk: barracuda 3 Tb Seagate
Mobo: ASRock Z77 Extreme4 LGA 1155 Intel Z77
CPU cooler : COOLER MASTER Hyper 212 EVO RR-212E-20PK-R2 Continuous Direct Contact 120mm Sleeve CPU Cooler
Shell: COOLER MASTER HAF 912 RC-912-KKN1 Black SECC/ ABS Plastic ATX Mid Tower Computer Case
SSD: Intel 520 Series Cherryville SSDSC2CW240A3K5 2.5" 240GB SATA III
Power supply: CORSAIR Enthusiast Series TX650 V2 650W ATX12V v2.31/ EPS12V v2.92 80 PLUS BRONZE Certified Active PFC

They are all about equal, in my opinion. Depending on your hardware you may have trouble with the bigger drives. How much space do you need? I love my 1tb Samsung.

 

[zdbc13]

If you have plenty of SATA ports that's a safe bet. Also as you fill it up and get more drives you're less likely to loose all your data from a disk failure. Also implement a backup strategy....

 

[cadder]

It is real hard to get good up to date statistics on this. Every manufacturer can make a drive that fails and the people with failed drives are very vocal about them. I like to look at the feedback on newegg.com. I have noticed in some size categories that WD is very much more reliable than Seagate but in others not so much. I don't recall a category where Seagate had better feedback though. As for large drives, I was going to buy a 2TB for our office a little over a year ago and the best feedback on newegg.com was for a samsung model so that is what I bought.

WD is still my preference in rotating hard drives but I will consider as much customer feedback data as I can find and that might sway my decision a little bit.

I'm looking forward to the time when hard drive manufacturers catch up with the shortage created by the floods and normal competition starts to rule the pricing and quality.

 

[stickmansam]

I would consider them about equal. I've used seagate drives for years without issues and WD as well. It hit and miss with both companies in my opinion.
The 3TB drives are okaya s long as you avoid the 7200.10, 7200.11 and 7200.12(12 is better than the 10/11 but still some issues). Get the 7200.14 as it it pretty much the fastest 7200 drive and usually the best pirce/GB.
Make sure the drives as the 64MB cache ones, which would mean they are the newest ones from both sides.

 

[dextermat]

Hi,

+1 zdbc13

It also depends on model of hard drives.

Some WD (ex 160 gb and 250 gb had lots of fail) while 1 most 1 tb hard drive (black, blue green are pretty solid)

vs some 1 tb seagate has terrible failure rate.

You have to keep in mind that heat is one of the worse enemy for HD.

You can download hard disk sentinel trial to monitor your hard drives.

With the build you have you might want to consider SSD to gain a bit of performance.

 

[willard]

im making a gamming build ( this is my first time) and i also buy movies and music so ill need if posible the highest capacity.

Heh, yeah. "Buy". We all know that enormous media libraries are exclusively pirated. No worries, you're not asking for help with piracy, so you're fine.

As i read , a lot of people have trouble with the 3 tb independet from the brand so maybe for a safe build is better that i get a 1 tb one ( For example samsung ) and then if need more buy an external drive

Why an external drive? Just stick another internal one in there when you need the space. They're cheaper and faster. Only get an external drive if you actually need the drive to be external, they're not the best option for adding more space.

Ram : G.SKILL Ripjaws X Series 16GB DDR3 1600

Get 8GB. There is literally no benefit to getting more than that unless you're doing video editing or 3D rendering.

The rest looks good.

 

[omnisome]

I certainly wouldn't say Western Digital drives are any more reliable than Seagate ones. The 7200.11 drives by Seagate were terrible though.

 

[merloin]

I wouldn't say Western Digital drives are any more reliable than Seagate ones, not at all. The 7200.11 drives by Seagate were terrible though.

That's the truth. I had 3 different Seagate 7200.11 drives completely fail within one month of each other. I've not had any WD drives fail ever though. Since my Seagate experience, I tend to stick with WD more often than not.

 

[fudoka711]

When it comes to internal HDD's, they're pretty much even. But if any brand is a little better, it would be WD, at least when it comes to their Caviar Black line.

Also, external HDD's seem to be a wash as well. Just go by reviews.

One category I strongly feel WD (Caviar Black) has an advantage over Seagate's comparable model though is their 2TB internal HDD's. I went through four 2TB seagate internal HDD's (all failed within a day...boy was it annoying to have to return everything and what not) and the one WD Black 2TB model I got hasn't had any problems. Although, the reviews I read for the Seagate model weren't the best anyways - I should've listened.

 

[omnisome]

Remember that Seagate has acquired both Maxtor and Samsung Hard Drives, and both of them manufacturers made some really great drives. I highly recommend Seagate's (previously Samsung's) Spinpoint F3 series.

 

[ddpruitt]

Most of the drives are more or less equal. The reliability of your drive is more dependent on the environment it's in and the type of use your putting it through than on the brand.

If you really need reliability run whatever drive you want and implement a backup strategy. All drives will fail at some point, make sure you're ready.

 

[Branden]

in my experience over the past 15 years building & fixing computers i've found that hitchi>WD>seagate>maxtor (with not having enough experience with enough other brands such as samsung or toshiba drives to form an opinion of them). i've never seen a hitachi fail, the only WDs i've seen fail were over 7 years old, about 1/4 of my seagates failed within warranty, and maxtor was practically guaranteed to fail.

with that said, i steer clear of ordering mechanical harddrives online (getting tossed around during shipping by UPS/purolator/fedex scares me), i'd rather buy a seagate from a local shop than get a WD dropped at my front door in freezing temps.

 

[zdbc13]

I hear you, Brandon, but how do you think the drives are delivered to your local shop? Probably just as good a chance for mistreatment. I've had laptop hitachi's fail. About the same experience with you on the others. Like I said above, I love my Samsung....

 

[maestro0428]

I use both. The only drives I have ever had fail were made by Hitachi, Samsung and Western Digital. Seagate seems to have had more issues in the past though, so I usually buy WD Blacks.

 

[getochkn]

In my stack of dead HD's from our own 9 PC's in the house and from customers, I have every brand of dead in there, so I don't think any one is better than the other.

Reviews on newegg/amazon/etc are good sometimes but they can be skewed because of noobs. I plugged in the HD and it didn't work at all. People like that don't even know how to get into computer management and initialize a drive, so their reviews are hit and miss.

 

[omnisome]

I hear you, Brandon, but how do you think the drives are delivered to your local shop? Probably just as good a chance for mistreatment. I've had laptop hitachi's fail. About the same experience with you on the others. Like I said above, I love my Samsung....

I was going to say the same thing. Branden, drives are not manufactured in the west anyway so they fly here, get put on trains, vans, trucks, carried by people.

I've personally had a really bad experience with Hitachi drives. I had 2 fail within a month of buying them.

I really like my Samsung HD103SJ.

 

[zdbc13]

Thanks Omnisome. I like your motto.

 

[omnisome]

Thanks Omnisome. I like your motto.

Thanks

 

[zdbc13]

Here's something slightly off topic. I think manufacturers push external hard drives so hard because they continually fail (usually knocked off the desk or down the stairs) and they get to replace them often. What a money maker!!!!

 

[Branden]

I hear you, Brandon, but how do you think the drives are delivered to your local shop? Probably just as good a chance for mistreatment. I've had laptop hitachi's fail. About the same experience with you on the others. Like I said above, I love my Samsung....

yes, drives get to the shop by being shipped as well. the difference being the amount of care and protection drives being shipped to the store vs the care an individual drive gets being delivered to your house. drives going to the store go in better protected bulk packaging by someone who regularily and carefully delivers fragile and expensive computer parts, whereas the package being dropped off at my front door is being delieverd with much less protection and more likely to be jossled around because the delivery guy doesn't know or care that what's inside is fragile. i'd bet that from factory to store shelf (or newegg warehouse) drives don't get mistreated or tossed around. i can control the amount of care an individual drive gets when i bring it home from the store on its 10 minute journey, but i can't control the amount of care purolator takes when delivering an individual drive during its hundreds mile & several day journey.

 

[Nko]

And between the SAMSUNG EcoGreen F4 ST2000DL004 2TB
http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822152245

and the SAMSUNG Spinpoint F3EG HD203WI 2TB
http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822152202

woud you advice me one over the other or i better stick (for a safe buy) to the
Samsung HD103SJ . than you all for your answers

 

[wkdzel]

I don't have any kind of factual statistics to quote so this is just my personal experience speaking. To qualify my statement: I've been working on PCs since 1996 in both amateur and professional roles.

The short of it is that between the drive makers the reliability seems about equal in my experience. At some point or another they've all had problems. Some people just tend to hate a manufacturer because they lost data on one drive but that is foolish. This kind of thing will happen with any manufacturer, always keep a backup. A particular line of drive may have an inherent design flaw though so if you see a lot of bad reviews on a lineup then you should avoid that particular model lineup, not necessarily the manufacturer all-together, but this kind of thing is pretty rare.

WD has a big reputation but they're just as susceptible as anyone else to a bad batch of parts coming into the factory. I've owned many Seagates and one did refuse to spin up once after years of service. Used the freezer method to get it spinning again and got my data off it. I've had a WD start getting bad sectors all over the place that i had to replace once as well. The rest of the numerous drives i've used simply outlived their usefulness. At one point I had 6 drives in a software JBOD array just to try and make use of them but even that was replaced by a single drive after a while.

Total drive size does not affect the quality if we're talking about the same lineup. For instance the Seagate Barracuda 7200.14 family has up to 1T per platter. The difference between a 7200.14 with 1T of storage and 3T is how many platters are inside of it. The performance and reliability are the same. When you look at the datasheet for that family the stats are all the same until you get to the smaller versions of it that have a smaller cache. The problem comes in when you're bargain hunting and you're looking at a 3T WD green drive vs a 1T WD Black drive, now we're talking different families and in that case yes, the bigger capacity drive will not perform as well as the smaller drive but that's because you're comparing the Performance lineup vs the low power lineup, but if you're comparing a 1T WD Black vs a 4T WD Black, they're the same in performance and reliability.

The whole "bigger drives have read/write problems" may be an old hold-over from when the sectors were physically getting so small that they were having problems writing to one without affecting adjacent sectors because the poles of the magnetic field were parallel to the platter surface but we got past that with perpendicular recording which hit the market back in 2006-07.

That's my 2 cents, hope it helps.

 

[Hawkeye22]

Here's something slightly off topic. I think manufacturers push external hard drives so hard because they continually fail (usually knocked off the desk or down the stairs) and they get to replace them often. What a money maker!!!!

It depends. My motherboard has 10 sata ports. My case has 4 internal 3.5 drive bays. I never thought I'd need more than 4 drives, but now I have 6, lol! I don't see why people buy retail external drives like freeagent, mybook, and what not. I prefer to buy my own enclosure so I don't have to worry about voiding the warranty when I need to replace the drive within that enclosure.