is it worth it to buy Seagate?

[callmecars]

Here are the CrystalDiskMark benchmarks for my current 2TB & 3TB Seagate Barracudas. This 2TB HDD (on the right) is about 3 years old, and the 3TB HDD (on the left) is about 2 years old. As you can see the 3TB is slightly faster in all the tests.

 

In the real world things I do with them I don't feel a difference between them and never had any problems performance-wise. Keep in mind that they are both non-OS drives (the 2TB was for a while until I got my SSD), so I can't test OS performance.

 

Hope this helps.

 

Greetz,

Stef

thanks for this!

and yeah even if the 3tb is faster, what I'm asking is about fail rate. but it seems that in your experience that Seagate HDDs don't really fail much right? 

[Stefken89]

thanks for this!

and yeah even if the 3tb is faster, what I'm asking is about fail rate. but it seems that in your experience that Seagate HDDs don't really fail much right? 

 

Not in my experience at least.

 

I am not saying that they don't have failures, every brand of drives has failures.

A lot depends on the shipping & packing while shipping, and the situation you put the drives in (don't put a consumer drive in an enterprise environment, temps, etc...).

 

EDIT: forgot to put my point in for that last sentence ^^.

That is why you should have backups or drive redundancy if you don't want to lose data.

[Guest]

Keep this in mind - if all drive manufacturers failed as much as people claim, everyone would be like OCZ: bankrupt from failed products. Someone has a good experience and they're not likely to yell and scream how good it is, have a bad experience and you can almost play 'spot the vegan' - they tell everyone that WD/Seagate/HGST ect are terrible.

[callmecars]

Not in my experience at least.

 

I am not saying that they don't have failures, every brand of drives has failures.

A lot depends on the shipping & packing while shipping, and the situation you put the drives in (don't put a consumer drive in an enterprise environment, temps, etc...).

 

EDIT: forgot to put my point in for that last sentence ^^.

That is why you should have backups or drive redundancy if you don't want to lose data.

 

 

Keep this in mind - if all drive manufacturers failed as much as people claim, everyone would be like OCZ: bankrupt from failed products. Someone has a good experience and they're not likely to yell and scream how good it is, have a bad experience and you can almost play 'spot the vegan' - they tell everyone that WD/Seagate/HGST ect are terrible.

darn it... I'm just getting paranoid when I'm looking at reviews and stuff since I don't really have the option right now to have a back up drive because of budget constraints....

and seeing annual failure rates online just make me more nervous and all... especially when people say that their drives (seagate) fail just after warranty expires.

what I can think of right now is that it's probably just like a lottery? just hope I don't win the failing drive....

I'd just like to ask @Stefken89 if you've have good experience with variety of Seagate HDDs? because here https://www.backblaze.com/blog/best-hard-drive/they say that there is one specific model of Seagate drives that suck, while there's another that's good. And sadly the ones they say that suck are the ones available here where I'm at...

[michaelk12]

I have a barracuda, nothing's happened in 2 1/2 years, but the failure rate is too high for Seagate, i'd rather spend more for 10% more peace of mind if I had to do it again.

[connorpiper]

which WD color are you talking about?

 

Blue (WD10EZEX) 

[Stefken89]

darn it... I'm just getting paranoid when I'm looking at reviews and stuff since I don't really have the option right now to have a back up drive because of budget constraints....

and seeing annual failure rates online just make me more nervous and all... especially when people say that their drives (seagate) fail just after warranty expires.

what I can think of right now is that it's probably just like a lottery? just hope I don't win the failing drive....

I'd just like to ask @Stefken89 if you've have good experience with variety of Seagate HDDs? because here https://www.backblaze.com/blog/best-hard-drive/they say that there is one specific model of Seagate drives that suck, while there's another that's good. And sadly the ones they say that suck are the ones available here where I'm at...

 

First of all: Backblaze's report sucks. They do this every year. Linus & Luke adressed this last year in the WAN show (I went and searched for it: 

 

 

just after the 30min mark). I'm not gonna go over why their report sucks, there are a lot of reasons, just check out that WAN show archive if you are interested.

 

@Windspeed36 is right: if there were actually that many failures they would be bankrupt + most people that have a product that works fine will not write a review or yell about it, only people who are disatisfied.

 

Yes, there is a chance you might get a failing drive right after warranty expires. That chance is always there, no matter which drive or what brand it is. I'm just saying I never had a single bad experience with seagate HDDs (barracudas in perticular). Am I lucky? I guess I am, but their failure rates are really not as high as "the internet" might suggest.

[tmlhalo]

-snip-

Basically the specs I was talking about last night are like this. 

 

Here is a side by side comparison to make it easier to see that lower rpm isn't always a bad thing if the disk has a high capacity from data density.

 

http://hdd.userbenchmark.com/Compare/WD-Green-3TB-2011-vs-WD-Blue-1TB-2010/1415vs1780

 

The first section under the pictures is the averages which is what we want to look at since the 2nd section is best case scenario peak benchmarks.

You can see the average read is only 1MB/s difference. The fact the slower spinning drive can keep up is due to the fact the needle is passing over much more densely packed clusters. So it can travel over the same amount of clusters going slower since the clusters are smaller. Just avoid slower drives at lower capacities like 5400rpm at 1TB because they lose the advantage of data density. At 3+TBs you can get the performance you want without having to fear from it being slow though. So like others have said, Seagate, HGST, WD greens are all going to work fine. So don't feel like 7200rpm WD blacks are your only option.

[Griffscavern]

Go with this review too. As far as consumer reviews go, you are more likely to write a review if you got a bad product. Most who have good experiences with something dont bother.So take those reviews, as well as any other, with a grain of salt.

Here is a review by a reputable source too, but like I said, take it with a grain of salt.

http://www.pcworld.idg.com.au/review/seagate/barracuda_3tb_st3000dm001_internal_hard_drive/427323/

[callmecars]

Go with this review too. As far as consumer reviews go, you are more likely to write a review if you got a bad product. Most who have good experiences with something dont bother.So take those reviews, as well as any other, with a grain of salt.

Here is a review by a reputable source too, but like I said, take it with a grain of salt.

http://www.pcworld.idg.com.au/review/seagate/barracuda_3tb_st3000dm001_internal_hard_drive/427323/

 

 

Basically the specs I was talking about last night are like this. 

 

Here is a side by side comparison to make it easier to see that lower rpm isn't always a bad thing if the disk has a high capacity from data density.

 

http://hdd.userbenchmark.com/Compare/WD-Green-3TB-2011-vs-WD-Blue-1TB-2010/1415vs1780

 

The first section under the pictures is the averages which is what we want to look at since the 2nd section is best case scenario peak benchmarks.

You can see the average read is only 1MB/s difference. The fact the slower spinning drive can keep up is due to the fact the needle is passing over much more densely packed clusters. So it can travel over the same amount of clusters going slower since the clusters are smaller. Just avoid slower drives at lower capacities like 5400rpm at 1TB because they lose the advantage of data density. At 3+TBs you can get the performance you want without having to fear from it being slow though. So like others have said, Seagate, HGST, WD greens are all going to work fine. So don't feel like 7200rpm WD blacks are your only option.

 

 

First of all: Backblaze's report sucks. They do this every year. Linus & Luke adressed this last year in the WAN show (I went and searched for it: 

 

 

just after the 30min mark). I'm not gonna go over why their report sucks, there are a lot of reasons, just check out that WAN show archive if you are interested.

 

@Windspeed36 is right: if there were actually that many failures they would be bankrupt + most people that have a product that works fine will not write a review or yell about it, only people who are disatisfied.

 

Yes, there is a chance you might get a failing drive right after warranty expires. That chance is always there, no matter which drive or what brand it is. I'm just saying I never had a single bad experience with seagate HDDs (barracudas in perticular). Am I lucky? I guess I am, but their failure rates are really not as high as "the internet" might suggest.

thanks guys! I finally got enough confidence and decided to go with Seagate! I hope it turns out well!

[EpicGeekonFire]

Honestly the HDD industry is a gamble for consumer drives.

 

But I can say that the WDs that I have haven't had any issues whatsoever.

[Doobeedoo]

I have 1TB and 3TB HDD from Seagate, they work fine. Only problems I had with Seagate drives was their first Momentus XT.