Seagate Or WD

[jonh.h]

so i want to buy, 2tb external hdd what should i choose WD or Seagate?

 

[Haeking]

Seagate

2 minutes ago, jonh.h said:

so i want to buy, 2tb external hdd what should i choose WD or Seagate?

 

 

[Morgan MLGman]

I wouldn't recommend Seagate. I had so many Seagate drives fail, both at work and at home, and had a great example of how "good" their drives are recently.

 

A small QNAP TS-410U broke at one of our customers, we took the device to diagnose what was wrong, turns out something on a drive bay PCB popped and the device didn't want to boot because of that. It turned out that three out of four drives died because of that electric shock, coincidentally three of those were Seagate (Barracuda LP) - the fourth one that survived was a WD Red drive.

 

I also personally had a Seagate 1TB Barracuda that died on me for no reason with only 14hours (!) of uptime - it wasn't brand-new but it wasn't used for over a year so it was basically new. So from my own experience, I highly recommend getting WD/HGST/Hitachi/Toshiba drives over Seagate.

[jonh.h]

ok thanks for your opinion

[Bananasplit_00]

the cheaper one id say.

[Aleks NE]

17 minutes ago, jonh.h said:

so i want to buy, 2tb external hdd what should i choose WD or Seagate?

 

I've had seagate in all my builds. Never failed me, but tbh go for the cheaper one.

[grimreeper132]

I have never had a problem with either companies drives so go for the one which is cheapest as they both are good quality.

[typographie]

I'd get the better deal. And no matter who made your HDD, always keep a backup of the important stuff.

 

For whatever my experience is worth, the only hard disk failure I've ever had was a Seagate drive, and it was replaced under warranty without issue.

[seagate_surfer]

On 7/28/2017 at 6:50 AM, Morgan MLGman said:

I wouldn't recommend Seagate. I had so many Seagate drives fail, both at work and at home, and had a great example of how "good" their drives are recently.

 

A small QNAP TS-410U broke at one of our customers, we took the device to diagnose what was wrong, turns out something on a drive bay PCB popped and the device didn't want to boot because of that. It turned out that three out of four drives died because of that electric shock, coincidentally three of those were Seagate (Barracuda LP) - the fourth one that survived was a WD Red drive.

We are sorry you had trouble with Seagate BarraCuda drives. It is worth noting that the competitor product you mentioned was a NAS-rated drive suitable for use with a QNAP use, whereas BarraCuda LPs are desktop drives, not rated to be suitable for NAS use. For a NAS device such as the QNAP unit you mentioned, it is always recommended to go with 24x7 rated NAS-label drives like our IronWolf & IronWolf Pro, and choose ones that show up on the compatibility list for your device.

If you'd like further information on the importance of choosing the right drive for the right application, here is a video which explains further.

Edited July 31, 2017 by seagate_surfer
added link

[Mira Yurizaki]

I've had Seagates that worked fine. Even their first 3TB drive with a horrible reputation (which the initial Backblaze report might've used)

I've had Maxtors that worked fine. Even though everyone says Maxtor sucks.

I have Hitachis that work fine.

I have Fujitsus that work fine.

I have WDs that work fine.

 

The point is: everyone's fine. Everyone also sucks. The amount of back and forth you can find between WD and Seagate at this point is noise.

[Morgan MLGman]

9 minutes ago, seagate_surfer said:

We are sorry you had trouble with Seagate BarraCuda drives. It is worth noting that the competitor product you mentioned was a NAS-rated drive suitable for use with a QNAP use, whereas BarraCuda LPs are desktop drives, not rated to be suitable for NAS use. For a NAS device such as the QNAP unit you mentioned, it is always recommended to go with 24x7 rated NAS-label drives like our IronWolf & IronWolf Pro, and choose ones that show up on the compatibility list for your device.

If you'd like further information on the importance of choosing the right drive for the right application, here is a video which explains further.

Of course, this particular situation doesn't prove anything as the device died from electrical overvoltage because the PSU died and one of the parts on the PCB near SATA ports popped and burned so it might've been a coincidence  

 

I just had bad personal experience with Seagate drives both in my own PCs (as I mentioned in the 14-hour 1TB Barracuda drive, also had 3 other Barracudas that died prematurely) and at work (I chose to buy twelve 8TB Seagate Archive drives for a QNAP TDS-series drives and two were DOA and we were already close to the deadline when they arrived while all eight WD Red 3TB drives that I also chose for a Dell PowerEdge server worked without issues).

 

It just makes Seagate drives hard to recommend for me, that is why I also always include words like "from my own personal experience" or "IMO" in such recommendation so this is clear to the one asking.

[davidna2002]

go with ssd

[Zakuul]

An external HDD? I would go with Silicon Power, why? Shock resistant HDD, I've had my A30 for a few years now, it's traveled the world and been beaten up and it has absolutely no problems at all.

 

My WD My Passport I bought on the other hand, suffered a small bump (not dropped) and it started clicking and half a TB of data was lost. I do admit, internally HGST or WD. But external? I think the lesser-known Silicon Power wins.

 

http://www.silicon-power.com/web/category/ExternalStorage

[mr moose]

Return rates for both companies are similar, my experiences with both companies are similar.  Go with the cheapest/best features.

[seagate_surfer]

On 8/1/2017 at 8:30 PM, mr moose said:

Return rates for both companies are similar, my experiences with both companies are similar.  Go with the cheapest/best features.

Thank you Mr. Moose for your comment!

It's always good to hear those types of contributions from a user since it's much more valuable than coming from a manufacturer!

 

Our own and independent research on current hard drive series do not show significant differences in drive reliability. Nowadays objectively all major hard drive manufacturers are working hard to optimize performance as well as reliability with each new generation of drives. Obviously each physical drive will fail at some point - however, if the right drive type is used in each scenario, modern hard drives usually last much longer than their minimum life time expectancy.
 
Therefore, much more important than the decision on the brand is to pick the right drive for the right purpose:
there are roughly three main types of hard drives: Desktop & Gaming (current Seagate lineup: BarraCuda), NAS (current Seagate lineup: IronWolf), and Surveillance (current Seagate lineup: SkyHawk). They all connect in the same way, but were engineered with different uses in mind. IronWolf drives are rated for 24x7 use and optimized for NAS enclosures and extra vibration protection, so they have a lot of firmware optimizations and extras that make them costly for your typical desktop user or gamer.

 

Bottom line: we would first pick the right DRIVE TYPE for the specific scenario and then go for a certain manufacturer, model or price! Also -no matter which brand or manufacturer- we would suggest to pick a drive from a current series since every major brand is improving the drives each year based on experience and customer feedback!

 

@OP: since you are looking for an external drive, in case you would like to consider a Seagate, you can check out our current Portable External Drives for Laptops and our current Desktop External Drives.

[System Error Message]

get both. 2.5 inch drives from both are decent but both fill their 3.5 inch drives with terrible drives only worth it if on half price.

 

I have a WD mybook (has WD green inside that still works only because i modified firmware) - would not recommend. I have recently gotten an 8TB seagate external drive (archive HDD), horribly slow and runs hot but doesnt have the same problems WD  greens have.

 

I have WD red with a custom external enclosure, works really well. My old 2.5 inch seagate drive also uses a custom enclosure.

 

For 3.5 inch external drives my recommendation is to build it yourself. Get a decent enclosure and pair it with a decent drive. WD green is a big no, archive hdd is too slow for normal use.

 

I have not had any of my hard drives fail yet. My friend once had a surge which blew his WD blue circuit board. One of the above posts mention seagate failures, it just so happens that barracudas use more power than reds so the surge went for those first. protection should be used always, at least a surge protector.