Seagate vs Western Digital - Which drives are truly best?

Everyone has an opinion on WD vs Seagate drives, but I use data on 250,000 drives to track progress and failure rates over 10 years to discover which drives are actually the best. So which should you buy? I look at Toshiba also, which has less data but still gives a good indication of their place in this dance.
BackBlaze data overview : • Comparing Seagate vs W...
10tb - 16Tb Disk AFR Comparison : • Failure Rate Analysis ...
4tb - 8Tb Disk - Enterprise vs Desktop Reliability : • Desktop vs Enterprise ...
Thank you to BackBlaze for publicly sharing their data. Link to their data source here : www.backblaze.com/cloud-stora...
And thank you all for the support and comments, and I am sure this video will create much debate on experiences people had with these manufacturers.
You can support me at www.buymeacoffee.com/sometechguy
Thanks to everyone for watching, hope you enjoy the content.

[@nemesis851_]

WD self destroyed their reputation when they SECRETLY changed to shingled, using same public facing model number

[@sometechguy]

This was my issue, and I stopped buying WD as a result. But I think it’s really useful to get a view on this comparison, though I do a lot more digging before buying WD for sure.

[@PrivateUsername]

I have some old WD drives, from 2009 and 2014, which are still spinning just fine. All the newer WDs I bought recently have been garbage, just like all the Seagate drives I've ever had the privilege(?!) to own. I have switched to Toshiba with no worries so far.

[@Darkk6969]

@@PrivateUsername All manufactures have good and bad years with their products. No different with WD or Seagate.

[@eleventy-seven]

Backblaze hard drive data has been the place to go for years. They offer quarterly reliability results on their tens of thousands of drives in their cloud servers. HGST now owned by WD and Toshiba beat Seagate every time.

[@Aereto]

​@@nickatnite90s I buy NAS drives and External HDDs with WD. or other devices with redundancy data protection. But for solo drives, I'd look elsewhere and use data analytics for average failure rates.

[@dermick]

I replace a lot disks - nothing like Backblaze, but 100s per year - and my experience is that exact same models can be built in different facilities, with different QA processes, and they have different failure rates. I'm about 30% of each Toshiba, Seagate, and HGST. Very little difference - I just treat them like consumables. I have a lot of respect for the Backblaze team - they are doing great work to help the industry by sharing their data - we all benefit from this competition and transparency. It would be awesome if AWS, Azure, FB, Apple, Netapp, Google, and all the other huge storage suppliers would do the same. They have this data.

[@spamviking8591]

Not trying to call you out, but you should go look at your numbers if you think that Seagate is in the same universe of reliability as pre-WD Hitachi drives.

[@techwolflupindo]

Treat the Backblaze date with a grain of salt. Those are drive failure at very high temps. They run them at high temp to save on the AC bill. My experience is at room temp, WD tends to fare better then the rest. But at high temps, same as the Backblaze experience. Some drives are a lot more reliable at room temp then others while others are slightly better at high temps.

[@dermick]

@@techwolflupindo Very interesting point - I had not considered that Backblaze were operating their disks at higher temperature. All my systems are in "normal" datacenters, running at around 25c. Another environmental consideration which I believe the Backblaze guys discuss in their findings is vibration. They have a lot of spinning media in each rack - I have maximum 20 systems in a rack with 16 spinning disks each. Backblaze has probably 2-3 times that density.

[@davidgilpin5200]

I still have PTSD over the Western Digital desktop "Green" drives. About 10 years ago I lost data when a desktop WD Green drive failed. The drive motor died... I then discovered my backup was invalid. I lost some photographs and years of email archives... WD replaced the drive under warranty and less than a year later the replacement WD Green drive also died. I haven't bought a WD disk drive since.

[@Bassie071]

your backup is no backup until you test it

[@zeroturn7091]

They couldn’t have been any worse than the MyBook externals from 20 years ago with the blue rotating eye. I lost my whole CD collection to the click of death (toddler daughter vomited on the physical media).

[@RogueIRL23]

Greens are probably the worst drive ever

[@RocknR00ster]

I had the same issue. Green drive used just for backups and only plugged in to backup or get a file. 5 months in it crashed hard, corrupted file structure, no readable information. Destroyed that and went a different route. Luckily the backup to my backup was working and I didn't lose anything.

[@WizardmasterNZ]

Same me too, "WD My Cloud" came failure in short life less 2 years stop, I complete shocked that two Hard Drive is "GREEN" ...WTF !!, I thought BLACK should support NAS or Backup. Why Green drives ? ...I never trust a WD been cheat a installation cheap or low base a HDD. Last 5 years ago, I replaced new Synology NAS with fours of Seagate 4Tb IronWolf HDD still running very well, today. Plus... I alway a External backup from NAS as very well. When HDD will any chance failure, Synology NAS will send the Alert message to my mobile phone. No matter, you choose any trust brand of Hard Disk, until you will lesson which brand HDD will failure or Loss data in short term.

[@mcwolfbeast]

Nice overview! Also, this aligns perfectly with my own experience handling many disks over the years, in the desktop market. Failure rate beyond DOA was generally low, but always notably higher with Seagate than with WD.

[@sometechguy]

Thank you! There are certainly better models and worse models for reliability, and external factors play a role. But yes, my experience also.

[@CyberBlaed]

Not bad. of the Arrays I have run over the years, I've only ever had failures from seagates. while I share anger with everyone else at WD for the cheeky change to the RED nas drives, they have by far been the most reliable for me. 4TB, 8TB, 10TB and 14TB. (However I run significantly more WD drives due to this so disproportionately I should have more failures from WD, but I don't) Anecdotal at best, but the data here speaks for itself with BackB going through thousands while I only go through well... Hundreds. :D still, nice to know there is options for everyone and dive into what they love.. DATA HOARDING! :D

[@JeffRyman69]

When Hitachi was a separate company their drives designed for data center use were generally the best. WD bought Hitachi, so unless they have lowered quality, the HGST enterprise drives should still exhibit the longest life. Just my $0.02 worth.

[@AdrianBawn]

This matches my experience. I have had zero issues with any of the hitachi era HGST drives ive bought. They were a touch more expensive at the time, but quality is worth the cost.

[@terryott544]

SomeTechGuy: great work and thanks. You invested the time/energy into doing the deep dive into the publicly-available Backblaze drive data that I always wanted to. You saved me a lot of work, and did a truly spectacular job of it. Your conclusions are sound, your data visualizations were helpful, and you were very careful to explicitly flag when certain drive deployments were too small to draw any meaningful conclusion on. You've given me a really strong reference to cite when defending my pitch to spend more money up-front on several hundred WD Ultrastar drives vs Seagate Exos drives in few months here for a work project. Much appreciated, mate -- bang-up job!

[@sometechguy]

Thank you, this is all greatly appreciated. Good luck with the project and hope they serve you well! The data is great, and I am really appreciative of the way BackBlaze share it, though I think transparency of this data is good for all drive purchasers, including them as it helps hold suppliers accountable. It does take some work to augment and process the data to get the best out of it, so appreciate the recognition of that. 🙏

[@Varo486Photography]

After seeing many comments bashing on Seagate, I feel like I should speak. Any drive can fail without a reason or a warning, regardless of the brand and model. There was a case with 3TB Seagates a few years ago, where they would often fail. This is not the case anymore. I end up going for what's cheaper per terabyte, and it does the job. Just remember to have backups of your data to avoid a scare, and if the drive fails, return if in warranty, or replace it. They're failing eventually, anyway. I recently went for a 12TB Exos X16, and will probably buy more for my server. They're fast and quite cheap for what you get. I've had both WD and Seagate drives fail, without conclusive results. Failures have been random so far. I've lost seagates, WD drives, toshibas, and even maxtor drives, which aren't even in production anymore.

[@sometechguy]

Thank you, and I agree with all this, and I said the same in the video. I have owned (and supported environments with) many Seagate and WD drives (as well Quantum, Maxtor, IBM, Fujitsu,Conner and Hitachi and probably others) and they all fail from time to time. There are models that are better or worse, and I had drives fail that were very likely due to handling issues on transit rather than manufacturing quality, including visible dents which could have been missed at installation. My goal here is to find what data reveals holistically as everyone has anecdotal experiences. But as I said, no one brand are really terrible, so you should treat all disks as potential failures and plan accordingly. And sometimes the price benefit of a drive may quantifiably justify buying a drive that isn’t the most reliable. And availability, service and ease of replacement for failures are also considerations. Thanks for the balanced and thoughtful comment!

[@Handler9]

How do you define a drive failure? Do you use ZFS and Raid configuration to know when it fails or do you only treat a complete failure as a failure? I’m thinking of how can I avoid “silent failures” when SMART data looks fine but some portions of the drive are already gone.

[@xBloodXGusherx]

How does this channel only have under 3k Subs? Just stumbled upon a gold mine here. Thank you! Subbed!

[@sometechguy]

Thank you, and spread the word. 😜

[@Modenut]

People using the term "spinning rust" reminds me of DJs saying they're "spinning hot wax"

[@harryshuman9637]

I actually went over my 14 HDDs I used in my server that I ran since 2010, and it appears that all my WD drives survived a decade. My lone Toshiba and Samsung HDDs are also from 2012 and 2015 respectively and work fine. None of my Seagate drives survived.

[@rodrigofilho1996]

I have a near 20 year old Samsung 80GB IDE drive, over 30k hours on it, it still has 0 smart erros. :O :)

[@Lonewanderer30]

Yep, I've had 5 Seagate drives fail on me in the last 8 years, one was a very expensive at the time BarraCuda Pro 14 TB. I wouldn't touch them now.

[@alexk7467]

The first hard drives I ever purchased in my life were seagate, this was back in the late 2000s. One was a 500GB and the other 1TB which I used as external storage, I had a backup of my data so luckily I didn't lose anything. After that I've been sceptical about buying seagate drives again and prefer to buy WD because I've never had a WD drive fail.

[@pr0fessoro]

@@rodrigofilho1996 because they don't have G-list table...

[@rodrigofilho1996]

@@pr0fessoro Its running on my TRUENAS Scale as boot for 3 years now, Total ZFS erros still are at 0.

[@EBF-oc3ke]

I like your content and presentation. Subscribed.

[@sometechguy]

Thank you, appreciated!

[@artysanmobile]

I have made good use of datasets like yours so generously shared by others. My archives are small, 20-30TB, done in triplicate for safekeeping of music projects I produce. Over the past 15 years I’ve watched WD leading the way, then lose it to Seagate, and back and forth, in cycles of approximately 1-3 years. I suppose that data has helped my modest needs, and I’m grateful for yours. Seagate 5400rpm has been my archival pick for at least 4 years now. I still prefer WD Black for session work where speed matters. In fact, I have 8 of 8 working flawlessly dozens of records. Once archived they are wiped and re-used. Their durability has been nothing short of amazing, some being 7 years old! I have not lost any data since employing my current method.

[@roysigurdkarlsbakk3842]

Thanks for the update :)

[@coisasnatv]

I have Seagate backup drivers that have been working since 2002.

[@trjgiggs5489]

The conclusion of This Video, Supports My Personal Experience Over The Past Twenty Years. I Have Western Digital Drives from Around 2005 That I Now For Storage of Archiving. A 160gb from about 2005 and a 360gb from about 2009. I have built up over the years an Inventory Of Old WD drives that are still Working. I use the old ones for Archiving Now. I can Also say that the 2TB WD Purple is a very Robust Series, Considering the Amount of Abuse I have done the one I have. AND IT STILL WORKS FINE AFTER FIVE YEARS.

[@MachtNixPasstSo]

That's exactly my experience as well. Pretty much EVERY Seagate died after 5-10 years, while Wester Digitals are running strong even after thirty years. But I'd like to throw Connor, IBM and - oh god - Quantum into the mix. All my Connors are extremely durable as well - even my 100 MB one is still kicking. IBM - especially the DHEA, DHEA and DTTA - are extremely loud and not as durable as I thought they'd be. Not the worst, but not as good as WD or Connor. Quantum: loud, nervebraking noise, slow, not very durable.

[@SwiatLinuksa]

I have Caviar 250MB from 1994, used it on my Amiga 500 with HDELSAT extension and after 30 years it works. Noise like hell but it works ;))

[@sometechguy]

I love this! I also had an Amiga 500 with the extension and had a hard drive. I think mine was maybe a 42Mb, but it’s been so long…

[@mrdali67]

Those that have been around long enough will remember how legendary the WD Raptor models with 10.000rpm were when they got introduced. Tjhey were pretty small in capacity but god they were fast for a spinner in raid0 for a boot drive but made a lot of noise

[@St0RM33]

After many years i only use HGST drives. There's one in my original FAT PS3 and 2012 laptop still working, and 2 HC530 on my desktop PC, all running no-hassle for 3-4 years backing up daily

[@-iIIiiiiiIiiiiIIIiiIi-]

Been running a Western Digital drive for over 14 years. Those motherfuckers are built like tanks.

[@tweed0929]

I agree. Heavy as hell and require maintenance all the time. May break down on you without a warning.

[@Chickenbreadlp]

My personal experience told me to never buy Seagate ever again. 3/3 drives I bought brand new failed within a year. And these weren't all bought in the same lot, heck they weren't even all the same model (1 air filled 8TB, 2 helium filled 16TB). Outside of a firmware defect in one of my Samsung SSDs, Seagate drives were the only drives to have ever failed on me, and not just once .-. Sure, a sample size of 3 is basically nothing, but as a consumer, it's the personal experience and the warranty claim that follows that leaves an impression. And if anything, Seagates Warrenty service has significantly worsened. I had bought the 16TB drives after I had gotten the 8TB drive replaced, and less then a year later, when those started to fail as well, Seagate refused to pay for the return shipping, and didn't even offer a chat to help me guide through the process. Ended up just shipping those drives back to the store I bought them from

[@davidyoder5890]

I haven't watched the video yet, but my own preference is Seagate. I've had so many WD failures over the years, I just quit buying them. For SSD media I rely on Crucial, and for high capacity mechanical I rely on Seagate (specifically IronWolf).

[@uhohwhy]

buy WD black series

[@m-Parsa]

Exactly, WD sucks.

[@_sneer_]

I’ve had exactly the opposite experience. Most of my seagate HDDs died, most of my WDs are fine. HGST is what I went with for my important server though.

[@davidyoder5890]

@@_sneer_ that's so weird! I have about 50TB of Seagate IronWolf drives in a RAID array at one of my clients. I don't think it has been powered off since 2017. Not a single drive failure.

[@mayday6880]

It could be Seagate IronWolf is better than their older ones? we don't know. But it's strange Seagate gives 5 Year warranty, could be expensive when this drive is bad. IronWolf is filled with Helium, I'm not sure previous Seagate models had this.

[@galimirnund6543]

I have always bought WD. The only problem I have ever had was returning a faulty 4 gig HD and they replaced with a 'refurbished' drive. I called WD and complained, I emailed them and they finally sent me a new one. I just sent the 'refurbished' one back. I did buy a black edition and it is noisy...you can hear it clicking away when loading something heavy.

[@technicallyme]

I have ptsd from Seagate drives. After the tsunami I had Seagate drives dell used in both workstations and servers die at an alarming rate for 4-5 years. Dell has also had issues with memory and capacitors in the 20 years of working with them but both of those issues were corrected in less than a year. The Seagate issues just kept going and going from what I saw

[@ErikGoode]

Seagate drives seem to fail more for me although WD Green drives are also not great. My best luck has been with WD Red (in a consumer use case). Great content. Love the stats. Subscribed.

[@sometechguy]

Thank you, appreciated!

[@Aereto]

I use WD Reds for RAID arrays since they are purpose built for it. Datacenter HDDs are above spec for my use case current unless I am building more active spec servers.

[@Nikioko]

I have two 16 TB Seagate Exos for redundant data storage and a docking station. Inside my computer, there aren't any SATA drives any more.

[@tetnia]

Was HITACHI, HGST. HGST, Inc. (Hitachi Global Storage Technologies) was a manufacturer of hard disk drives, solid-state drives, and external storage products and services. HGST, Inc. It was initially a subsidiary of Hitachi, formed through its acquisition of IBM's disk drive business. It was acquired by Western Digital in 2012. So now Western Digital

[@Handler9]

How do you define a drive failure? Do you use ZFS and Raid configuration to know when it fails or do you only treat a complete failure as a failure? I’m thinking of how can I avoid “silent failures” when SMART data looks fine but some portions of the drive are already gone.

[@sometechguy]

If a drive is 'failed' is one of the data points that BackBlaze provide. I have not found a definitive definition, but from the data is looks like it is an actual failure, as in the drive stops responding or reports itself as failed. It is possible they also have thresholds for failures from SMART data, and they certainly look closely at specific SMART stats but I suspect from the data that drives with over thresholds on these stats are decommissioned and not marked as failed as there are significant numbers of drives that get removed without ever being reported as 'failed'. They don't seem to retire drives based on age, so I would guess its based on rising SMART counters, or known defects. SMART will often reveal the early signs of failures. For example, Reallocated sectors, uncorrectable errors, pending sectors, uncorrectable sectors and command timeouts. Blackblaze also talk about these in this blog which could help, but it looks like a quarter of their drive failures had no indicators from SMART data. www.backblaze.com/blog/what-smart-stats-indicate-hard-drive-failures/

[@Handler9]

@@sometechguy thank you for such a detailed or thorough response. Cheers!

[@denalimike8159]

Great video

[@MrSpirit99]

Depends highly on model year, I think. Some WD where shit, some Seagate too. ATM it's Seagate I had bad experiences 2ith.

[@lld401]

Great video quick question can we run seagate sas 12gb/s model in a modern pc or only 6gb sata connection?

[@sometechguy]

Thanks for watching, appreciate the feedback. For your question, it's down to the controller in the host. Typically PCs come with SATA controllers on the motherboard, so work with SATA disks, but if you install a SAS controller then you could use a SAS disk.

[@interproservice]

I hace a Buffalo NAS 8TBx2. If I use it 2 times a month will it be working for a at least 100 years? :)

[@FireLiteCreations]

Excellent video! Can you make video on Seagate Ironwolf Pro vs WD Red Pro? Including reliability, price, customer service, warranty, and RMA experience?

[@zstation64]

Toshiba. Been using their NAS drives at home and at work for 5 years or more, no problems with them at all. Basically they’re the HGST designs, but not cheapened by WD (which were also HGST before WD ruined them).

[@drescherjm]

At work where I have 100+ drives we had lots of failures with Enterprise Seagate (or Dell Branded) Constellation ES.2 and 3 drives. For us those were worse than most non Seagate desktop drives of the time. Although with that said we still have some systems with these drives and if they made it 4 years they seem to reliable after that.

[@keylanoslokj1806]

So which are more resilient?

[@sometechguy]

The Backblaze data does have older drives from 3tb down to as low as 80Gb I think, though I didn’t see any constellation model numbers there. They are likely on the same platform as some of the barracuda desktop drives from back then, which had mixed reviews. I do plan to look deeper at that range of drives as they have a large number of drive hours, to see what it reveals.

[@drescherjm]

@@keylanoslokj1806HGST were our best drives.

[@sometechguy]

And HGST were acquired long ago by Western Digital, but do to Chinese govt restrictions the businesses and technology didn’t really merge until after 2015. The Ultrastars covered in this video are descended from those HGST products, and as the video shows, it doesn’t look like that reputation for quality has been damaged under WD.

[@nipunmohonroy5925]

Hello Sir thank a lot for your video creations your videos are very tough for me to get my answer, which company 1TB HDD is good for me as a secondary storage for downloading and storing data, considering longevity. can you please help me?

[@sometechguy]

The reason it is hard to give definitive answers as it can depend on some factors that change, such as price and availability, and then even though they appear to make great drives, I have some reservations about WD based on some of their business practices. Based on the historic data, Seagate, Toshiba and WD all make good drives and any would be a good choice, but overall WD appear to make the more reliable drives for the long term with Toshiba a little ahead of Seagate, but with a bit less data to base their reliability on. Seagate reliability appears to drop off as the drives get older, but the chances of failure are still not high. For any drive, backup your important data and assume the drive can fail. But price is a consideration, so if Seagate are cheaper then they are still a valid choice. I personally also buy WD very carefully as they have a history of not being transparent about drive specs and I would avoid SMR drives for performance reasons. So, if all the prices are similar then I would go for WD but check the model numbers carefully against the datasheet and make sure you are getting a 'CMR' drive and not an 'SMR' one. If you are buying WD Blue, there is a big mix of these, and it isn't always obvious which is which.

[@nipunmohonroy5925]

@@sometechguy Thank you very much sir I thought having less mechanical part can give Seagate long life. I will study 'CMR' drive 'SMR' drive

[@micbanand]

bought 4x WUH721818ALE6L4 18TB Black Friday in 2021 still going strong in my DIY unraid server. Backblace still reports under 0,3% failrate :)

[@snowwsquire]

great video

[@sometechguy]

Thank you, appreciate taking the time to comment.

[@ianemery2925]

As I understand it, Toshiba bought out Hitachi's consumer disk manufacturing plants, certainly, all the Tosh DC01ACA200 drives I have ever bought, internally identify as Hitachi. They have been ultra reliable for me, although two died due to being dropped (not by me), causing surface damage; the remaining one, bought in 2008? still has no errors reported, ditto an early ACA300 with close to 45,000 hours powered on. My main annoyance is the price, I paid £50 each for the ACA200s, and £55 for that ACA300; the ACA300 is now listing at £200.

[@zstation64]

Agree, I’ve had great success with Toshiba N300 drives.

[@thegeforce6625]

Toshiba bought out one half of HGST’s division (1-3 platter drives), and WD got the other half of it (4 platter and up drives)

[@ianemery2925]

@@thegeforce6625 Thanks for the details. It will be interesting to see what happens as drive densities reach the state, Tosh need more than 3 platters - or have they already reached that point??

[@vudoodaddie]

Most of drives that failed on me were Seagates.

[@kahvac]

I have (1) UltraStar 18tb SATA drive and (2) much older UltraStar 10tb SATA drives that run about 16 hours a day everyday have not had an issue with any of them..nothing. So far these drives have been reliable.

[@jacquesb5248]

mmm pondering getting 4 20TB ironwolf drives

[@flink1231]

I had 3 seagate drives and 2 died in less than 2 years. I had 3 WD reds and 1 wd enterprise l, 1 red and the enterprise died in less than 5 years. I have 1 consumer hgst drive from 2010 still going strong and 2 ultrastars with 1 and 5 years going strong. I also had a 15 year old IBM scsi drive that was retired without ever stopping to work (Current WD ultrastars were HGST but prior to that it was IBM hdd division). Net, from my pov, I will go with ultrastars if I can. All else is reliability nightmare.

[@lackness69]

I have a seagate for my cctv. 2 hdd already failed in less than 5 years. Im thinking of trying wd purple now.

[@AdrianBawn]

I always refer to Backblazes stats before buying a new hdd, and honestly Tosh and HGST have been my go-to for years now. Seagate burned me when I lost an entire batch (about 40 drives) back in the 500gb days of the early/mid '00s. Things may have moved on but the amount of loss I suffered means I will probably never buy their drives again, and honestly all the stats seem to back up that decision anyway. If BB stats show a marked improvement in Seagate's reliability over time, I might consider moving back but all the time HGST / Tosh beat them I will stay with those instead. But ultimately, all drives fail at some point. Backups, and redundancy are the things people should be practicing no matter which manuf you buy.

[@kangaroo4024]

still keep a 4Tb Toshiba HGST in my pc for media back up. has be coming up on 10 years old

[@sometechguy]

HGST really made great drives, and I am glad to see that pedigree doesn't currently appear to be diminished in the current WD offerings. The data also suggests that picking up second hand HGST disks for non-critical workloads could be a reasonable thing to do.

[@masterblimpy]

For super critical data like family photos only trust 100gb Optical Media such as M disc. Since it is write once shouldn’t have to deal with Bit Rot. Everything else can sit on a Hard Drive. 3-2-1 is enough. Would be nice if we could have Linear Tape at an affordable price.

[@jimktrains0]

Optical disks do suffer bit rot.

[@thegeforce6625]

@@jimktrains0M-Disc’s don’t experience data rot due to how they’re constructed.

[@Skobeloff...]

I have had 3 Seagate drives fail, including 2 with broken connectors that basically just deteriorated. 1 WD black drive failed, but that was 2nd hand from a rescued computer, so I can't really hold that against Western Digital. I currently have 3 6TB WD HDD's, wouldn't even consider Seagate again. I also have 2 Kingston NVME's (1TB KC3000 and a 2TB Fury Renegade), as well as a 4TB Lexar NM790 that will be delivered this week. Neither WD or Seagate were competitive, or of any interest when I was recently looking for NVME's

[@SianaGearz]

I chose Crucial for my SSDs this time around again. For no particular reason other than I haven't heard many complaints about the models I picked. Went for a P5plus 2tb NVMe and a 4tb mx500 SATA. Used to have an MX100 before and I'm still impressed with it. Had a Samsung QVO 970 in the interim and that was a mistake in several regards. My "favourite" bad reliability story was with Maxtor DM80. I had upwards of a dozen of them. I had to send most of them in several times. Lifetime warranty, but shipping fees to Ireland did add up eventually. Was not entirely surprised when they went bankrupt and then got absorbed by Seagate. I wonder if it's the ghost of Maxtor that did your drives in. I had some IBM Deathstars as well. Those survived just fine though!

[@Wannes_]

@@SianaGearz I had 2 Death Stars 100% failure rate The very same failure rate as the IBM Microdrives, unsurprisingly.

[@genrabbit9995]

My worst drive ever was Quantum. Ordered 5, returned 6 due to Doa.. How 5 became 6? Well the replacement for the DOA was dead aswell. The best one I've ever had was Samsung. Had like 20(1 dead) the rest running for like 12->15years.. Never fell below 100%. At the moment I havbe quite alot of Seagate X16/18/20/22 and except for one x18 @90% years in their all fine. My general experience is that brand names doesn't matter they all fall. Also the hotter they run, the faster they die. I do notr let them run higher than degree 40Celsius.

[@yoppindia]

can you compare failure rate based on RPM?

[@sometechguy]

This could be interesting, and there are some other metrics that could be worth an aggregated look at also, such as max/avg temps. Thanks for the comment!

[@tetnia]

Best HDD Hitachi. HGST, Inc. (Hitachi Global Storage Technologies) was a manufacturer of hard disk drives, solid-state drives, and external storage products and services. HGST, Inc. It was initially a subsidiary of Hitachi, formed through its acquisition of IBM's disk drive business. It was acquired by Western Digital in 2012.

[@Wannes_]

My oldest WD drives are 2008 vintage, I've yet to have a WD fail on me The 1 Seagate I ever bought, an Exos X16 12TB, was DoA, so it'll also be the last

[@SianaGearz]

DOA is actually a good situation, could be worse.

[@Wannes_]

@@SianaGearz You got a point there 🙂

[@sometechguy]

I had a couple of DOA Exos in the last year, but neither were really Seagates fault it seems. But were badly packaged and physically dented during transit. I think there is a risk that DOAs, early failures and even some longer term issues can be traced to bad handling in transit. And this could apply to any brand.

[@matthewlake3994]

Senate harddrives... twice are the only drives I've ever needed literally a fire extinguishers for... in light of that, they did perform before they caught on fire... never a problem with Toshiba or WD... Seagate just needs more precautions in cooling than other brands.... they can perform... for a price...

[@SianaGearz]

You know, the old Quantum FireBall drives were so unfortunately yet aptly named. Modern drives have nothing on them.

[@HereAfterNow]

Do reliable retailers not sell Exos x16s anymore???

[@sometechguy]

I guess it depends on your opinions on who is 'reliable'. But Newegg and B&H in the US still sell them and scan.co.uk and Novatech do in the UK also. Ebuyer in the UK do not seem to stock them at the moment, but stock on drives varies anyway. But broadly, them seem available. Of course 16Tb is the largest capacity they come in.

[@RN1441]

The risk model with WD has to take in to account the serious risk fo them once again hiding far worse drives within an existing model family.

[@nucleochemist]

The end of WD for me was actually just a USB-C 4 TB external drive which was replaced 3 times and they all failed in the same way. It ended up costing me as much for freight as it did the original purchase price of the drive.

[@sometechguy]

That makes me sad. Presumably drive failures rather than the enclosure itself.

[@fpvx3922]

Neither of WD or Seagate. I love my Toshiba ;D Been using them since they exist without a failure ever, even as personal Cloud drives :D

My first Seagate 2T barracuda died a few years ago and I have some WD drives and others. WD still works fine. Now I'll never buy Seagate drives again.

[@MillionMileDrive]

I just buy whatever cheapest renewed drive off Amazon. Never had a drive failure because often, I run out of space and replace the drives before they fail... lol

[@james42519]

Is wd black still one the best?

[@sometechguy]

Recent WD blacks are often SSD, as the use case is performance gaming. But for the larger capacity spinning disk versions, it’s highly likely that are the same hardware as the other colour lines, but each variant has some firmware variations. I don’t have data on recent black reliability though.

[@voidptr0]

For me, the order would be: 1. Toshiba/Hitachi if you can in any case 2. WD except Green 3. Seagate only Exos,

[@unumprovident101]

I've had Western Digital external hard drives disconnect and reconnect on my Dell Inspiron 3880 before

[@sometechguy]

Hard to say if that's the disk, the enclosure, the cable or some issue with USB or the host. If it matters to you, there are tools that allow you to look at the SMART data and see if there are problems, but I would say is less likely to be the physical disk itself in this case.

[@Kjaywest]

I use WD for my network & has a Seagate NAS drive that died in 2-3 months I’ve owned it.

[@-noname-6730]

Has Seagate Constellation ES.3 Failed. Switch to HGST Ultrastar without failures in 4 yrs.

[@NoName-male1968]

Out of 221 companies, 3 stay (Seagate, Toshiba & WD) and it doesn't matter which one they buy, it has to come from Malaysia or Thailand and they last forever. With luck, all HDDs made in China live for 7 years, some only last 5 years. And please never use an HDD from Korea, it's better to sell it straight away while it's still spinning.

[@HappyBuddhaBoyd]

WD Blue for my computer....but Seagate Ironwolf / Exos for my NAS.

[@St0RM33]

HGST FTW

[@Neuer_Alias_erstellen]

interisting

[@Lonewanderer30]

I've had nothing but trouble with Seagate drives for the last 8 years. I wouldn't touch them with your bargepole now.

[@phoenixbird7579]

I bought 3 Seagate HDD in my life and all of them failed, meanwhile I had tens of WD HDD only 2 failed slowly and was able to move the data before totally died. in fact I have a WD gold which is 12 years old in this pc that I am using to watch the video. I only use WD Black and Gold, so cant speak about green and blue and other versions.

[@manitoba-op4jx]

my home server is on a 12 year old seagate constellation 2tb drive. has been the whole time.

[@AdrianBawn]

I don't want to tempt fate but I would highly recommend getting a newer drive and mirroring it. Or at the very least doing a bare-metal backup to an external HDD. A drive that old is on borrowed time regardless of the make/model.

[@nillinx1234]

How do you really know which drive is the best when you cant run say a 5 year uptime test?

[@sometechguy]

Its obviously hard to identify the survivability of current drives that have not been available for long, and even the drive manufacturers only provide a 'projected MTBF', which interestingly is often not supported by real data. But what you can do it look at historical drives from each manufacturer where you do have a lot of long term data, and compare trends to see if newer models appear to follow similar trends, which can provide about as good an indicator as possible. For example, drives in the data set I looked at vary from 9 years of uptime and then 7.2 years, 6.5 years, 5.8 years, 5.3 years and 5.0 years of data respectively, which cover all the manufacturers. And then from 3.8 years down to 2.5 years being the smallest time frame of drives that did not yet reach 5 years of power on time. And this is actual power on hours time, not date based. So thanks to BackBlaze sharing this, we have as a minimum 2.5 years of real power on data for a sample of 10's of thousands of drives with many being 5+ years. And for most drives, its between 200 million drive hours, with the largest being 1.2 billion hours. In other videos I also looked at other drives, including consumer units that also have long run time. Of course, if this data isn't compelling, then its totally its fine. Its just a data point that you choose to consider if you want to. And I hope some people find it useful.

[@williamyf]

¿Do y'all realize that Toshiba also makes HDDs? ¿Don't you? Seagate and WD are not the be all end all of HDDs. for all the comenters that will say that you are tired of Seagate and WD, Toshiba is worth a look. They have the wole line. 2.5", 3.5", client, NAS, Surveillance, Enterprise, 5400RPM, 7200RPM.... So bear in mind you have 3 options, not 2.

[@sometechguy]

Thanks for the comment. I did cover this in the video, it’s just that there is less data than the other two for as complete a comparison. I also included what the available data tells us in the conclusions. Maybe you didn’t get that far, but it’s there.

[@Peter2k84]

Sighhh, had to replace so many Seagate HDD's in my past PC builds basically burned me for life ever trying the brand again 🤷‍♂️ And funnily enough, that was a running theme with my friends, too 🤷‍♂️🤷‍♂️🤷‍♂️

[@SomedooodCreator]

i am debating whether to buy 4 10tb exos, and 4 16tb after it rather than 4 16tb and 4 16tb. If on SHR2, 2 16tb fail and i can rebuilt it from 4x10tb and 2x16tb, then i will go with the first one. if not, then the 2nd. Edit: after 1min of thinking, I have come to the conclusion that im fucking stupid.

[@rotemlv]

Biggest mistake of my drive buying history was buying that HC320 poc. RMA after a few months, and still that piece of shit failed right after the warranty, as in a few months. That would have been fine (it really wouldn't) if not for the excessive noise. After realizing the gravity of my mistake buying such a drive, I did some digging and found that if you don't live in a castle or a mansion don't buy any of the shown drives, as the noise will drive you mad (maybe even in a castle though). Funny, had 1 seagate fail in 2008, the replacement I got under warranty is still functioning in my PC to this fucking whoring day. Don't buy enterprise drives, the sleep you will lose compared to the cost overhead of just getting a few large capacity SSDs will cost you more long term.

[@krypton1260]

Why no Toshiba?

[@sometechguy]

Hi, check the description (and the video). It’s covered but the data isn’t as extensive.

[@zal333]

2 of my Seagate drives had failed...

[@dleonmag01]

Es interesante. Se agradecería que fuera un poquito menos doctoral (académico)

[@willemvanderdekken6883]

When can we dump all “spinning rust”😅 drives and change to affordable SSDs for larger volumes? But for some reason SSDs still don’t live up to the old adage “a chip is a chip and a chip costs one dollar…”

[@sometechguy]

The technologies both offer some differences currently, so until the cost per TB, drive density, write endurance and long term data decay gaps on SSDs are closed some, there will still be a place for HDDs. But yes, I think the technology will be consigned to history at some point, just like floppy disks.

[@leewright6101]

iam a dj producer with over 296tb hdd space i have both seagate and westerndigital,., but best by far is western digital,,, i had 3 new 12tb seagates within 4 mnths all 3 failed at the same time , seagate useless fail all the time, the old 3tb were the worst back in the day would have thought they sorted there act out by now,,

[@sometechguy]

Thanks for sharing the experiences. I am hoping also they will see improvements, the results from the X18s were disappointing as it looked like the X16 were heading in a good direction and I have a X18 18TB drives that have been good so far. The dataset there was really small, so will have to see if Backblaze choose to go with the newer X20-X24 going forward and if we can get some good high scale data. They may be going with the Ultrastars at the moment from what I have seen recently. I have some of those coming also.

[@alexrosenberg_tube]

Seagate weaseled out of responsible behavior for their drives having a design flaw on me years ago, so never again. The server gets WD's data center drives (formerly HGST).

[@alpenfoxvideo7255]

OMG I have X18s in my NAS

[@sydskits5962]

I have tried drives from both companies both fail but western digital tend to last longer.

[@sometechguy]

This seems to be exactly the story the data tells. Thanks for sharing.

[@skuripandaburns3489]

HGST for the win.

[@sometechguy]

I am sure you know this, but just for clarity for anyone else; HGST has been wholly owned by WD for quite some time, and now the products are all branded WD, so HGST as a brand is now largely gone. But yes, their drives were superb, and I am sure that know how is a big part of the reliability of WDs current line up.

[@skuripandaburns3489]

@@sometechguy yes... I weep for the Deskstar lineup, I have two of those pushing 11 years now in my NAS and still working well.

[@StephanHL27]

Always got trouble with Seagate, never with WD

[@Gael_AG]

WD is out now !

[@davidyoudontcare3562]

let me know when you made a 2 minutes TL;DR version of the vid...

[@sometechguy]

Sure thing, it’s over on TikTok 😆

[@sometechguy]

But in all seriousness, there is a conclusions section that summarises the findings and takeaways. But there are lots of differing opinions on ‘who is best’, the video provides all the context to hopefully show how the findings are backed up, but at least will be able to provide you the data to determine if they are credible.

[@uhohwhy]

answer is WD

[@alleeadl289]

It's a disater that we need to analyse huge amount of data just to deside wich hard drive manufacturer isn't laying straight to our face about how amazing never fail products they sell to us. this is sad and frustrating. we can't trust any one of them they reduce the quality of the product whenever they like to just to milk more money out of our pockets. even after watching many of your videos and reafing a lot about external 2t hard drive recommendations i can't figure out wich model is the best. i have a great experience with HGST hard drive (TOURO MODEL) 1t it's working just fine for 10 years now while seagate "expanstion" 4t external hard drive failed me after just 4 mounth's. right now i can't decide what to buy to backup my files i need 2t external hard drive mybe i may go with some toshiba CRM model or look for HGST CRM model made by WD if they still exist.

[@LeicaM11]

Seagate, for sure! But there is WD only left these days. All companies belong to WD.

[@RocknR00ster]

Seagate, hands down is way better. Never again will my systems use WD drives. Not only because they fraudulently lied about drive performance design, but their drives have constantly been an absolute pain in the backside with smart read errors and random bit rot destroying data in a NAS.

[@link1565V2]

In my personal experience, Seagate have been far more reliable than WD. I have had many WD drives fail, I do not recall a Seagate drive dying. I run Seagate almost exclusively now in my home server and nas box. I live in Australia, and have often wondered if our climate makes any difference.

[@zdspider6778]

"Spinning rust" is a good description. You should also add EXPENSIVE spinning rust. Because DAYUM, son! Look at 500GB or 1TB HDDs (why they still make those in 2023?). Do you think it's justified to charge 10x more for 10x more capacity? When the manufacturing cost is maybe 2.5x more at best. Dafuq is wrong with them?

[@tofu_golem]

Western Digital drives well only last 3 years in a NAS, si literally anything is better than WD.

[@gekkkoincroe]

I have seagate 1tb it 2orked for 7years , so it's good but in those years 1ualitty of products plummbered exonentiatluly so i don't think I'll buy any of those two .

[@AnonYmous-yz9zq]

How about a dark mode, the graphs are unreadable.

[@sometechguy]

Hi, thanks for the feedback. We’re you watching on a mobile device or was this on a computer? I guess the details on the graphs maybe difficult on a phone.

[@dalewendorff7767]

Western Digital(back in the day) would ship spindle drives that had bad sectors from the factory. This turned me off to WD and I have been a Seagate customer since IBM sold their Deskstar line to Hitachi and went to poo. Faaaak I’m old.

[@Awesomes007]

I don’t know which is better, but I know it’s not Seagate.

[@republicoftexas3261]

Lol these comments. So many people hate one company or the other. They're definitely doesn't seem to be consensus.

[@sometechguy]

This is the way 😂

[@m-Parsa]

Never buy Western Digital. In the old times Maxtor was the best, and past few years Seagate.

[@safebet5841]

2 Seagates HDDs both died. No thanks.