ANOTHER one of my hard drives has died (with no warning whatsoever). This time luckily only one with all my game libraries on. It was a 4Tb drive with all my Steam, Origin, Epic, GOG and XBox Live games on. There might have been some old saved games backups on there, but mostly just game binaries.
Anyway, I’ll have to replace it. I’ve always been a hard believer in Seagate. My experience in Western Digital has been shaky at best, but this was maybe 15 years ago. Seeing how I’ve been losing hard drives these last couple of years, maybe it is time to reconsider?
So what have your experiences been with regards to reliability with these two hard drives?
For me it’s the opposite. I had problems with Seagate many years ago and went Western Digital.
I don’t think there’s all that much difference between theme these days. I’m sorry that your hard drives are failing. I think you can probably go with either and be fine.
I’m in team WD. I’ve had WD hard drives in my machine for many many years and have never had any kind of failures or issues. But there is so little to choose between Seagate and WD that you can honestly choose the cheapest one with the most features. Perhaps now is a good time to look at high speed hybrid drives if you don’t go down the SSD route.
I always prefer WD drives just more reliable from experience over the years the only unreliable wd drives that ive had were a few 40 gig IDE ones from the late nineties early 2000’s and i think about 2 5400 rpm 1tb blue ones from 3 or 4 years ago (which are essentially wd green drives since they rebranded the green also to blue)
I had one seagate that was DOA. So it didn’t technically die on me, it just never worked. Most my hard drive failures were WD, or other brands that aren’t around anymore…
Whenever anyone asks me what brand I recommend, I always say “Whichever ones die less for you”. So if you have problems with WD, go Seagate, and vice versa. Everyone has a different brand that fails on them.
One of my colleagues at MyBroadband has written up the latest Backblaze report. It looks like Western Digital (HGST drives) are currently the most reliable in the 4TB range.
Thanks for the responses. Looks like WD it is. The price for both is the same, so it really comes down to the hard drive.
My last dealings with WD was back in early 2000s… Think they didn’t have the WD Blue back then. I miss the days when hard drives came standard with a 3 year warranty and lasted forever.
The enterprise level hard drives come with a 5 year warranty, but they come with a heavy price so I bought one of those for content a year or two ago, but not going to spend that kind of money for non-crucial files.
They were good at one stage. I had an 80gb that lasted for probably a decade. However, I remember in 2001 when we started as a new small development team at a company, they provided us with computers and they all had Maxtor hard drives (or maybe Fujitsu, but I’m pretty sure it was Maxtor). In that same year, 2 of the 3 hard drives had failed within one week of each other. They replaced the 3rd as a precaution.
Hmmm… I see that both Seagate and WD has downgraded their drives to 5400rpm instead of the usual 7200rpm that I bought.
I took out the broken hard drive now, can’t remember when I bought it but it says Date Of Manufacture was 25 Jan 2017 so I suppose I bought it a couple of months after that which would give me pretty much 3 years of usage.
It also seems that there is a 3rd choice: Toshiba.
It is R200 more than the other two but 7200rpm, same 2 year warranty and according to Backblaze, they had 45x 5TB drives that lasted 4+ years before replacing them due to capacity reasons (only 2 lost in that time due to failures).
Does anyone have any experience with these drives?
Ok, so it was a tough decision. I was quite keen on trying out the Toshiba which looks quite solid and reliable, but at the end of the day I went with a Seagate FireCuda 2Gb. The combination of (alleged) speed and the 5 year warranty did it for me. If I’m lucky, the drive fails just before 5 years and I can get a new one under warranty .
I’m just going to have to learn to not keep all my games installed at once and manage my space better.
P.S. I wonder why this SSHD can have a 5 year warranty but they can’t do it for the normal hard drives. From my understanding, the SSD on this hard drive is only like 80gb or something. Would also be interesting to learn how they get 5x the performance of a traditional hard drive from that.
