Do the brands of HDDs and SSDs manufacturer matter?

ajy0903 · Jan 15, 2015

Exactly like the title says.

Do the brands of HDDs and SSDs manufacturer matter?

The retail store I go:
It has "Western Digital", "HGST a Western Digital company", "Seagate Technology"

And "TOSHIBA" for HDD and "SAMSUNG", "orsair", "SANDISK", "Intel", "Patriot", "OCZ", "PNY", "TOSHIBA", "Centon", "Kingston", "ASUS", "CRUCIAL", "VISIONTEK" for the SSDs.

Or the quality/reliability/performance/etc. are depends on people who buys and use of the products?

Woomack · Jan 15, 2015

Recommended are generally:
HDD: WD or HGST
SSD: Samsung, Corsair, Sandisk, Intel, Crucial ( other's can be good if you know what actually is inside these SSD as some series have some issues )

Personally I base on WD HDD and Crucial/Samsung SSD. That's for performance and reliability/support.

ajy0903 · Jan 15, 2015

@Woomack:
Thanks for reply.

Wait, I forgot about Western Digital bought HGST.

And I heard something about Western Digital's HDD for server. It says their model has the TLER issues? What about that?

Oh, ok, cool.

Robert17 · Jan 15, 2015

I've owned/operated Intel, Crucial, Kingston and Patriot SSDs and never had any problems from any of them. Some owners described problems with the early Marvel controllers but since that time Marvel seems to have made some positive adjustments.

HDDs, I've also had great success with WD and Seagate; some folks have some Seagate issues but I'm not one of them.

ajy0903 · Jan 15, 2015

@Robert17:
Oh ok.
Thanks for reply.

nstgc · Jan 15, 2015

ajy0903 said:
@Woomack:
And I heard something about Western Digital's HDD for server. It says their model has the TLER issues? What about that?

There is no TLER issue. TLER (Time Limited Error Recovery) is a feature in their enterprise drives, as well as the velociraptor, which allows them to be used in hardware RAIDs without the controller flipping out at the first small hang up and kicking the drive out of the array.

AS for brands, I've only had experience with Seagate and Samsung's consumer HDDs, and since I stopped buying Samsung HDDs, Seagate has bought them out. My advice is to stay as far away from Seagate's consumer drives as you possibly can. From both my own experiance, and what I have read, they are of the worst quality possible. It's like comic books. The reason they are printed on that super cheap paper is because there is nothing worse.

Robert17 · Jan 15, 2015

Oh, yeah, and my first HDD was an IBM but they don't make HDDs any longer, so avoid their used 10MB drives. No longer under warranty by about 25 years.

ajy0903 · Jan 15, 2015

@nstgc:
Thanks for reply.
Then why the people in this forum says don't buy Western Digital HDD for the server/NAS unless you buy enterprise drives?
What I wrote about "TLER issue", I found it from this site's storage forum

Silver_Pharaoh · Jan 15, 2015

Robert17 said:
Oh, yeah, and my first HDD was an IBM but they don't make HDDs any longer, so avoid their used 10MB drives. No longer under warranty by about 25 years.

I found an old 250 Mb HDD in my high school's lab once.
Plugged it in - sounded like a jet engine getting up to speed :rofl:

That said, I trust WD for my important stuff.
I have a Samsung HDD for my backups though. It's loud, slow and the G-Sense error rate has risen twice since I bought it used. Also has a bunch or read errors in the SMART logs.

So yeah, avoid Samsung.

nstgc · Jan 15, 2015

ajy0903 said:
@nstgc:
Thanks for reply.
Then why the people in this forum says don't buy Western Digital HDD for the server/NAS unless you buy enterprise drives?
What I wrote about "TLER issue", I found it from this site's storage forum

That's actually sounds advice for any manufacturer's drive. You shouldn't put a drive without TLER or a similar feature into any thing that will be using a RAID controller. If you do, the drive will drop out of the array and then you lose tons of data. I have first hand experience with this. back in 2004 I lost 500GB of data when my RAID5 lost 2 drives for this exact reason.

As far as I know, only enterprise grade drives and the WD velociraptor (which previously was marketed as an enterprise drive and still is sold for workstations), will have RAID specific firmware. If you aren't planning on using a RAID, or if you only plan on using a RAID 0 (don't do it, you will regret it unless you have good, frequent backups), then you don't need to worry about it.

What are you planning to do with these drives? How many, and how will they be used?

ajy0903 · Jan 15, 2015

What are you planning to do with these drives? How many, and how will they be used?

I just wanted to know for future ref. Cause I will have to buy more storage in future eventually, right? And I don't know how many of course. For usage, Gaming PC/Encoding PC/HTPC/Home Server/Internet PC/etc..

EarthDog · Jan 15, 2015

Check out the hardware failure rates thread.

It's going to give you the best picture we have on.failure rates.

ajy0903 · Jan 15, 2015

@EarthDog:
Thanks for reply.
Where/which one is it?
Cause searching forum only gives very older threads.

EarthDog · Jan 15, 2015

It's an older thread... A year + maybe. I started the thread so you can search that way too.

I'm mobile and its a bear.to search, sorry.

ajy0903 · Jan 16, 2015

@EarthDog:
Oh ok.
Hope you were talking about this.
And for rate, the lower failure rate, it is better, right?

EarthDog · Jan 16, 2015

That's the thread and yes, of course less failures are better.

deathman20 · Jan 16, 2015

Yeah for HDD's: WD is mostly what I would be looking at going forward, but I'm curious on the Seagate/Samsung 4-8TB drives using the new recording method. To early to tell so can't say yes or no to them yet. I've currently have original Samsung 2TB drives (pre-buyout) and they work great in my Raid5 system. I'm happy to have them, and sad the division was sold.

As for SSD's: It comes to some what of a preference and warranty thing. Overall Intel/Samsung and Crucial are probably my top pics. I've owned drives from all these companies and not one has given me an issue over the time I've had them. Right now I'd probably edge more on Samsung's side though for drives.

ajy0903 · Jan 16, 2015

@EarthDog: Looking at the list, guess the failure rate depends on "product models", not just the whole manufacturers. Cause some Seagate HDD, they have lower percentage then Western Digital HDD.

@deathman20: Thanks for reply. Oh, ok.

don256us · Jan 16, 2015

I help support about 800 computers. We just finished a complete replacement over a three year period. The first year, we bought about 175 machines that happened to have Seagate/Samsung hard drives. We've had about a 10% failure rate on those. The next two years the computers just happened to come with WD drives. We have close to 600 of the WD machines and have a much lower *number* of failures. Not just a lower percentage.

My rule is to stay away from drives where the manufacture starts with a "S".

I personally buy a lot of WD drives. I started to get the HGST brand (Old hitachi now WD) after I'd see a great review showing them as the best in reliability.

In therms of SSD's, I stay away from any TLC chips.

Woomack · Jan 16, 2015

Big part of SSD market is now TLC but quality/durability improved much since it was introduced to the market. For example at the beginning server SSD were only SLC and now I see mainly MLC.
I have similar experience with server HDD. Most that I had to replace in customers servers were Seagates ( usually rebranded ).

@Robert17
Problems with marvell wasn't in SSD but in SATA controllers ( desktop boards and cheap pcie controllers ). Controllers used in SSD were actually more reliable than any other controllers. Problems in SSD were mainly with SandForce which now is part of LSI and the biggest supplier of server RAID controllers and pcie SSD.

Toshiba SSD are also good but not as popular as some other brands. They are now owner of OCZ so I expect that quality of OCZ storage products will raise.

Do the brands of HDDs and SSDs manufacturer matter?

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