WD Red Plus or Seagate Ironwolf?

[da na]

Looking to upgrade my nas to 4tb. I will be buying two of these drives for RAID. 

Amazon.com: Western Digital 4TB WD Red Plus NAS Internal Hard Drive HDD - 5400 RPM, SATA 6 Gb/s, CMR, 128 MB Cache, 3.5" -WD40EFZX : Electronics

Amazon.com: Seagate IronWolf 4TB NAS Internal Hard Drive HDD – CMR 3.5 Inch SATA 6Gb/s 5900 RPM 64MB Cache for RAID Network Attached Storage – Frustration Free Packaging (ST4000VN008) : Electronics

Can't afford much more so I want the best possible drive for the money. I lean towards the WD as I have had bad experiences with Seagates but never had a WD fail on me. And the Red Plus are CMR not SMR like the regular Reds. 

Advice? 

[AbydosOne]

9 minutes ago, Mel0nMan said:

Advice? 

It's a pretty small sample size (moreso on the Seagate side), but I've had a much better run with WD than I have with Seagate.

 

All of my NAS and archive drives (4x10TB, 3x8TB, 3x14TB) have been WD, and they're all still running (including four 3TB Reds I sold to my friend after I put 24,000 hours on them).

 

One of three Seagate 3TB drives developed bad sectors (including missing data (recovered from backups)); the other two are SMR (though surprising not slow for mass storage).

[da na]

5 minutes ago, AbydosOne said:

It's a pretty small sample size (moreso on the Seagate side), but I've had a much better run with WD than I have with Seagate.

 

All of my NAS and archive drives (4x10TB, 3x8TB, 3x14TB) have been WD, and they're all still running (including four 3TB Reds I sold to my friend after I put 24,000 hours on them).

 

One of three Seagate 3TB drives developed bad sectors (including missing data (recovered from backups)); the other two are SMR (though surprising not slow for mass storage).

Thanks for the info. I'm a bit wary of Seagates since those are the most common I see that have failed dramatically/irrecoverably in the piles of recycled drives I look through. Although some of the older Barracudas weren't bad at all...

I'd consider a Hitachi Deskstar like the ones that came with my workstation, they are extremely well built and reliable. They are very loud though (I assume these Reds aren't much louder than two Blues, prolly twice the platters for twice the capacity?) and can get rather expensive.

[Oshino Shinobu]

Between the two, there's really not much difference. Both are CMR, both have the same warranty period, both have the same MTBF and the same/similar features for vibration sensors, TLER etc.

 

If you feel better with WD, go for that, though both will do fine. Seagate is no more or less reliable than WD or any other major brand when comparing similar drives to each other.

[BondiBlue]

For only two drives it really just comes down to personal preference. I have 6 Seagate drives (all BarraCudas) and 6 WD drives between my server machines, and none of them have given me a single bit of trouble. The only drives I've had give me any trouble lately are a couple Hitachi drives, but to be completely fair they were far too old to be trusted, and they didn't completely fail. 

 

These days I don't really favor Seagate or WD. There's just not much of a difference in their reliability for the most part. 

[da na]

3 minutes ago, BondiBlue said:

For only two drives it really just comes down to personal preference. I have 6 Seagate drives (all BarraCudas) and 6 WD drives between my server machines, and none of them have given me a single bit of trouble. The only drives I've had give me any trouble lately are a couple Hitachi drives, but to be completely fair they were far too old to be trusted, and they didn't completely fail. 

 

These days I don't really favor Seagate or WD. There's just not much of a difference in their reliability for the most part. 

The campus IT department has a bias against Hitachi, frequently calling Deskstars "Death Stars" or "Death Meth" since there was a bad batch in the '00s that failed quite quickly, but my experience is much the opposite and my such bias is against Seagate (and Toshiba, their drive designs are trash). I guess it all comes down to perspective. 

[BondiBlue]

5 minutes ago, Mel0nMan said:

The campus IT department has a bias against Hitachi, frequently calling Deskstars "Death Stars" or "Death Meth" since there was a bad batch in the '00s that failed quite quickly, but my experience is much the opposite and my such bias is against Seagate (and Toshiba, their drive designs are trash). I guess it all comes down to perspective. 

The Deathstar thing is actually pre-Hitachi. That's from the time when IBM still manufactured the Deskstar series drives. I have plenty of newer Hitachi drives that work perfectly fine, so I don't personally have an issue with them. I haven't used any Toshiba drives myself in several years, but not for any particular reason. 

 

I might still have one of those Deathstar drives around here somewhere - I'll have to look for it. Last time I used it the bearings were so bad it could be heard through a closed door.