Barracuda Vs. Western Digital

[SovietBroski]

If I was set on buying a 5Tb Helium filled HDD, which would be a better general use drive, the Barracuda or the Western Digital Red, and why?

 

EDIT>   My thought on why it has to be a helium drive is that the helium drive is obviously air tight (therefore water proof / resistant) so if the modified AIO I am running fails than there is a lesser risk of data loss even if the cooling failure is bad enough to damage other critical components.

[Enderman]

Why do you need a 5TB helium drive for "general use" ??

[Oshino Shinobu]

Well... WD Reds aren't Helium filled (apart from the 8TB version). Also, if this is general use in a desktop, you really don't need a helium filled drive or a WD Red. Something like a WD Blue would do, or you could go for a WD Black for the 5 year warranty. 

[TomPlum]

To be fair when it comes to drives, given the high failure rate in general, it's difficult to say which brand is better. 

 

I've had lots of Seagate Barracuda drives for general use in my PC and had no failures. I've also got Seagate externals. again, never had an issue.

 

I've also got 8TB of WD Red in my NAS drive running 24/7, also no issues.

 

Yet, you see people on forums complaining that their Seagate and WD drives are failing after a short period of time. Luck of the draw. Some batches turn out bad, and consequently, people sometimes receive 5+ failing or DOA drives at once. I'd say it's down to personal preference and price. If you can find a good deal on one, go for that.

 

Just make sure you choose the right type of drive for your use. You can see the difference in WD Drive colours here: http://blog.usro.net/wd-hdd-colors-difference/

 

edit: As other have pointed out, a 5TB drive seems un-necessary for 'general use'. Maybe for heavy raw 4K video storage? But not general use. 2TB would be a sweet spot for your OS, lots of programs, media and games with some room to spare for the future.

 

 

[Q..]

Pick the one that fits you're budget best.

[fjdhdhcyfhf]

WD red is a NAS drive for use in raid environments. one red disk on its own is useless and money is better spend on a black edition drive

[Oshino Shinobu]

1 minute ago, SCHISCHKA said:

WD red is a NAS drive for use in raid environments. one red disk on its own is useless and money is better spend on a black edition drive

While it's good for RAID environments due to extra features like TLER (useless for FreeBSD/majority of Linux systems though, as they use software RAID), the vibration dampening and sensor on the WD Reds is useful with multiple drives all running at once. 

 

I'd agree that for general use, WD Reds are a waste of money. Blue or Black are better choices. 

[Nfan]

You can look up some failure stats in this blog https://www.backblaze.com/blog , for exmple here https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-reliability-stats-q1-2016/

[Oshino Shinobu]

1 minute ago, Nfan said:

You can look up some failure stats in this blog https://www.backblaze.com/blog , for exmple here https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-reliability-stats-q1-2016/

Backblaze's failure stats are completely useless for comparing reliability for a myriad of reasons, please don't rely on them for anything.

[samcool55]

1 minute ago, Nfan said:

You can look up some failure stats in this blog https://www.backblaze.com/blog , for exmple here https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-reliability-stats-q1-2016/

Little note with those results tho, they run them in a server farm and they aren't designed for that.

And if you really have to follow those numbers Toshiba is actually a very good option, somehow...

[aisle9]

WD, Seagate, Toshiba and Hitachi all make perfectly fine HDDs. Choose the one that's got the features you want and costs the least, imo.

[Nfan]

4 minutes ago, Oshino Shinobu said:

Backblaze's failure stats are completely useless for comparing reliability for a myriad of reasons, please don't rely on them for anything.

Stats are stats they are never useless, I don't say to look at plots that combine all sizes in one column. So what are the reasons?

 

5 minutes ago, samcool55 said:

Little note with those results tho, they run them in a server farm and they aren't designed for that.

And if you really have to follow those numbers Toshiba is actually a very good option, somehow...

Why are Toshiba HDDs bad?

[samcool55]

1 minute ago, Nfan said:

 

Why are Toshiba HDDs bad?

No idea, most people say they are bad but personally, i don't agree!

I have a 4TB drive from toshiba and apart from the noise (it's relatively loud during use and for some reason it makes similar sounds to a very very old IDE drive) and it works just fine.

[Oshino Shinobu]

11 minutes ago, Nfan said:

Stats are stats they are never useless, I don't say to look at plots that combine all sizes in one column. So what are the reasons?

 

Why are Toshiba HDDs bad?

The stats are completely useless due to the lack of information and suitable testing methodology. If the environments the drives were in were consistent or at least documented, as well as the age of the drives, their condition when bought and so on was documented, the results would be somewhat usable, but still rarely relevant. 

 

Backblaze has a business practice of taking the cheapest drives they can get (including ripping them from external enclosures and buying refurb drives) and shoving them into large datacentre environments. Now, this is obviously not a good measure of a a desktop drive's reliability in the first place, but they fail to mention what revision of their racks they are mounted in, the temperature they are operating in, the amount of data being written/read to the drives etc. etc. 

 

One of the most important aspects there is the lack of information on the racks being used. Backblaze has several revisions of their mounting racks, ranging from no vibration dampening to quite a bit in the newer ones. Obviously, drives mounted in the racks with no dampening are going to be more likely to fail, but we have no idea what drives are in what racks, or the density of the drives in the racks, or pretty much anything else. 

 

They haven't posed the results as much of a reliability test as they have done in the past (ever wonder where the misconception of Seagate being unreliable came from?), but it is still somewhat presented in that way. All it shows is their failure rates for drives under a variety of conditions, it can't be applied to anything else with any real sense of validity. 

 

EDIT: To be clear, I have no issue with Backblaze's business practices. From what I know, in terms of actual data loss, they are reliable. They simply choose to go for cheap drives and replace them instead of investing in expensive drives which can lead to large amounts of investment when expanding capacity. Just, their failure stats are not useful for comparing with anything else. They're not even useful for comparing which drives to pick from Backblaze's point of view unless they have more detailed documentation that they don't release publicly. 

[DatScrubBoi]

Looking at the reviews for the Barracuda comparable WD drives the WD is far more prone to failure, that's why I bought the Barracuda and I've been pretty happy with it.