Which HDD is more reliable WD vs Seagate

[Gaurav]

Anyone experience here in IT hardware can help me decide on my next purchase of SUPER reliable internal Hard Drive, irrespective of cost.

I have researched few but don't know which one is really top class: WD Gold, WD Black, Seagate Enterprise and Seagate Ironwolf. These all 4 comes with 5 years warranty and price range is also similar.

Reason for so much fuss on reliability, because my current internal storage drive (not OS drive) is failing a just after a year and a half and shifting tons of data to my NAS is terribly painful with dying HDD that transfers at 110 KB instead of MB.

[Frederic]

Hi Gaurav,

I have always worked with external WD drives for that purpose. In my opinion there is no drive that is SUPER reliable. Especially the external ones which can come up with issues if they are not safely removed after usage. (although you click on safely remove storage, i had issues with these drives in the past).

For most of my data which i want to access regularly, i went with Dropbox and got a subscription for 10 Euro per month.That gives me 1 TB of storage and easy access and synchronization options. I use about 400 GB on the cloud now.

For my other stuff (movies, etc...) i keep it on duplicated external drives because they are cheap. One is always connected to my WD media player on the TV, while the other is safely in the drawer. I use the windows program Synctoy to synchronize them with each-other, but there are other programs for that on different platforms. 

Because SSD drives have no moving parts, they might be more reliable i would guess, see link below:

https://therevisionist.org/reviews/ssd-vs-hdd-one-reliable/

I can agree with their statement:

 

1. At least 3 copies of data.
2. On at least 2 different mediums.
3. At least one off-site.

 

Edited May 22, 2018 by Frederic Nuyttens

[Gaurav]

Thanks Frederic, we not only share the same Pajero but we have so many things in common buddy.

I do have 20-30 WD external drives with certain data labeled and stowed in drawers, I do have WD media hub that is attached to TV for tons of movies, I do use synctoy for syncing data between PC, NAS and external drives.

I don't use cloud due to the size of data to be backed up in a jiffy is pain and that's why I invested in 16 TB Synology NAS last year and I'm very happy with the accessibility and performance so far.

My PC has SSD for main OS and application and plus 2 standard HDD (3TB) for data access and temporary storage (1-6 months). One of these two HDD is failing and I need to replace them with HDD as I can't afford SSD for 3-4TB size.

[Frederic]

Hahahaha yes that seems to be the case  and i thought i was the one having lots of data !

A 16 TB NAS is fantastic to have of course. Do you have experience with RAID systems ?

SSD is indeed still expensive..

 

 

[Gaurav]

Yes my NAS has RAID and that offers 12 TB usable space and peace of mind if anyone HDD fails I can replace that HDD and rebuild the RAID.

[Barry]

I used to work for seagate manufacturing HDDs. 12 hour shifts, random drug tests, managers with no knowledge of the product, it was no fun. The day the factory got shipped off to Malaysia was one of the happiest days of my life. 

[Frederic]

1 minute ago, Barry said:

I used to work for seagate manufacturing HDDs. 12 hour shifts, random drug tests, managers with no knowledge of the product, it was no fun. The day the factory got shipped off to Malaysia was one of the happiest days of my life. 

So the lesson of today is Gaurav, don't buy the Seagate drives manufactured during Barry his tenure 😂

[desertdude]

I did some research on this sometime back and seems like the general consensus was that hard drive failure rate of any brand not SSDs go up after 2-3 years so if you are really worried best to replace with new drives after 2-3 years..

Although personally Ive had good luck with Seagate and Toshiba. 

[Gaurav]

My 3TB Seagate is just one year and a half old drive started to fail now. Checked the souq invoice as it has only one year warranty. So now specifically looking for 5 years warranty product that can last for some time.

[shadow79]

seagate is good if original it better then wd