1TB HDD advice, WD or Seagate?

P

Philip Foglar

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Hi guys,

Well, it is time for me to get a new 1TB HDD to replace my old Seagate Barracuda ST31000528AS 1TB which failed a few days ago. It has done well and racked up around 27464 hours of usage in a little more than 6 years, so I cannot really complain. Just was not expecting/needing this expense right now, but so it goes. Luckily I was able to get everything off the drive, so have not lost any data. The problem started on Monday when I noticed things were extremely slow on the machine, and then there was a read error displayed. I pulled the PC apart and gave it a "spring, err autumn cleaning" since there was a fair amount of dust but obviously this was not the solution. It's a dual-boot system and what was confusing me was that it was fine when booted on the alternative OS, and when I tested it with HD Tune it seemed fine. But when booted on this drive and running the same tests it was intermittent. It was only Tuesday afternoon that all of sudden HD Tune reported a fault - (05) Reallocation Sector Count, showing a value of 3 current and worst. Despite that, I was able to get some of the data off the drive that I had not yet backed up.

Now I have two options available, the Western Digital 1TB Blue WD10EZEX or the Seagate Barracuda ST1000DM003 (I think that's the model number), with the latter being slightly more expensive. The Seagate is also slighter better in terms of performance, but my concern is reliability. From some google searching it seems people are generally in favour of WD over Seagate, and a lot of this is based on an article that cloud backup provider Backblaze posted some time ago. But it seems that it's results and "testing" is somewhat questionable due to a number of facts, so as such cannot be taken too seriously unless you have the specific drives that they were referring to.

Basically I am trying to get an idea of what you guys think based on your own experience with these brands, and is it really a case of one brand being that much more reliable than the other? The fact that my existing Seagate lasted as long as it has goes against what most are saying, but then I do have a few old WD IDE drives that are older and still work faultlessly with longer hours of racked up usage. I even have a 12 plus year old IBM 80GB IDE that still works albeit it seems to now have developed a bad cluster, probably from being idle for so long - but that has an hour usage of 59931 the last time I checked! That's equivalent to running 24/7 for 6 years and 10 months!!!

So am keen to hear from you guys based on your HDD experiences.
 
Well, I was trying to decide what to put in my laptop, WD Blue or Seagate (can't remember which one) and decided to go for the WD Black due to the 5 year warranty.

Of those two, I would pick the WD.
 
It is also strange that these drives now only have 2 year warranty, the old Seagate had a 5 year warranty and so did the old WD and IBM drives. The WD Black is ideally the way to go, but not willing to pay that sort of money for a replacement drive for a PC as old as this. Also have heard people complaining that some of the WD Black internal HDD's are quite noisy.
 
I also have a ST31000528AS, which recently found 3 bad sectors:

Power on time: 1319
Total stop/start count: 3004

The key to a long HDD life span is keeping the Hard drive on as long as possible, less stop/starts = longer lifespan.
 
WD Red is middle ground for me between the blue and the black.
 
Check out the MTBF values (if available) for a rough indication of which is the most reliable.
 
Rickster said:
I also have a ST31000528AS, which recently found 3 bad sectors:

Power on time: 1319
Total stop/start count: 3004

The key to a long HDD life span is keeping the Hard drive on as long as possible, less stop/starts = longer lifespan.
Click to expand...

Yep, this is probably why the IBM 80GB managed so well - used to leave that machine on 24/7 for most of its life. The Seagate has been cycled typically once a day since I got it, and no power saving to turn the drive off or put the system to sleep.
 
WD black otherwise Seagate, me.personally every single WD drive I owned failed , only my maxtor and Seagates are still alive
 
Either of them, just make sure you buy two so that you have a backup.

Generally speaking, a hard drive is a hard drive is a hard drive, as far as reliability goes.
 
Used to be Seagate no question. Things have changed a lot in the last few years though and their image was tarnished a lot with the LP drives. Even the ST2000DM001 (non Barracuda) I am using as its backup have to go back under warrantee. They seem to have a lot of issues with firmware damaging the drives and updates aren't readily available. Would rather go with the WD blues, reds, and blacks next time.
 
Thanks for all the replies and advice guys! I still have to weigh all options, but I think I am going to go for the safe WD Blue 1TB option. Will update once I have got the shiny new drive fitted.
 
I have a 13 year old seagate drive and its still working very well! :D
 
Philip Foglar said:
Thanks for all the replies and advice guys! I still have to weigh all options, but I think I am going to go for the safe WD Blue 1TB option. Will update once I have got the shiny new drive fitted.
Click to expand...

It's the safe option, provided you have a backup in place.

Otherwise there's nothing to suggest it's safer than a Seagate. This comes down to luck of the draw.
 
Dealing with failed drives every day, DM series Seagate drives are definitely a lot less reliable then WD Blue drives of the same era. This is based on personal experience and the experience of other data recovery colleagues. As PP says though, no data storage is reliable unless backed up, but my personal preference would definitely be WD over Seagate for 2.5" and 3.5" drives.
 
Update: Been meaning to update this

Firstly, thanks for all the advice and recommendations guys!

I eventually decided to just go with the slightly cheaper and safer WD Blue, and to be honest, I am perfectly happy with my decision. The new drive is definitely faster than the old Seagate that it replaces, so the difference in performance from the WD Blue and new Seagate equivalent is not really a big deal for me, especially on this PC considering its age. I will have to dig through my screenshots, but do have some earlier HD Tune tests of the old Seagate when it was in its prime, so can see the difference between it and the new drive. The new drive has its own new characteristic sound but is quiet and just does what it has to.

So, happy camper, err, gamer. :)
 
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