Western Digital or Seagate?

[Gerowen]

After a recent drive failure I am in need of a replacement 12TB drive for my home server.  Which manufacturer, in your experience, makes a more reliable product for spinning metal mass storage?

[LIGISTX]

1 minute ago, Gerowen said:

After a recent drive failure I am in need of a replacement 12TB drive for my home server.  Which manufacturer, in your experience, makes a more reliable product for spinning metal mass storage?

Realistically..... its totally luck of the draw man. Everyone has had a bad experience one way or the other. I have had many seagetes die, but they were the TOTAL GARBAGE batch of 7200.12 3TB drives.... So, that was bad luck. Im sure plenty have had WD fail on them as well, and as such this creates a lot of internet opinions. In reality, its a total crap shoot.

 

The best any of us mere mortals can do is look at large rollouts of drives to see what the numbers game actually looks like. That said, unless you buy the exact drives they mention, it also should be taken with a grain of salt since every batch, every model, every capacity etc will have different manufacturing runs, firmware, possible issues in shipping, more possible vectors for issue than we can really account for.

 

But, that said, backblaze does a great job of tracking their drives historically... I would trust that much more than a bunch of random single person issues on a forum. Like I said, if my "history" swayed my opinion, I would never buy a seagate drive again as I had more than half of my 12 3 TB 7200.12's fail at one point or another. But, I also know, that is totally not indicative of seagate as a whole, if it was, they would be bankrupt AF. lol. 

 

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-stats-q2-2019/

[LIGISTX]

Also, backblaze does that sort of reporting quarterly. So you can look historically what the case has been. I just picked Q2 2019 as its most recent. They have PLENTY of web pages dedicated to such statistics. Good luck...

[seagate_surfer]

The Seagate report has about 108461 HDDs and about 75 percent of those HDDs (80621) are from Seagate and 10 percent of that amount belongs to the most basic of all; the BarraCuda, not the BarraCuda Pro but the single BarraCuda for office tasks and definetely not focused to heavy duties like that, just check their reports history and you will see that this is basically a Seagate tracker:

https://www.backblaze.com/b2/hard-drive-test-data.html