HDD opinions

Hello all,


I have a friend who needs a new HDD since his current one is going out. He is currently looking at this: https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822179110

His main concern is reliability since the data going on is important and his second concern is speed since he is gaming on it. Any opinions concerning best HDD for reliability is much appreciated.

He is mainly comparing this drive to the WD Black drives since they are pretty good. He is looking to get similar or better performance and reliability to this drive. He is open to suggestions other than the seagate.

Thanks in advance.

I like WD HDDs. WD Black 2TB https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822236624

Hiatachi has a good reputation on this forum as well. Seagate seems to have significantly improved their reliability in the last couple of years. I don't think there is much difference in reliability between WD, Seagate and Hiatachi anymore. I have read stats that cast doubt on whether the WD Black series is much better than their blue series, at least in the average consumer environment. The blacks have bearing mounts at both ends of the spindle so may be more shock resistant.

Its really going to be a crapshoot...and everything you hear from people are anecdotal.To add to it, I prefer the Caviar black line as well.

If you search hard drive failures google, you will see testing on several drives in a data center environment. Not terribly realstic, but, something to add...

Okay thank you. He went with a seagate.

If this data is important he should have it backed up maybe raid 1

I will tell him. Thanks to everyone to responded.

trents said:

Hiatachi has a good reputation on this forum as well. Seagate seems to have significantly improved their reliability in the last couple of years. I don't think there is much difference in reliability between WD, Seagate and Hiatachi anymore. I have read stats that cast doubt on whether the WD Black series is much better than their blue series, at least in the average consumer environment. The blacks have bearing mounts at both ends of the spindle so may be more shock resistant.

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Actually Seagate reliability went down a lot in last years. Their results were pathetic for some series. We were talking about it many times on the forums. Where WD had ~3% RMA rate and Hitachi had ~2% then Seagate had ~10%. There were single series/batches with 30% RMA rate.

Not that others don't make mistakes like early WD Red had high RMA rate but most of their drives keep really low %. Generally there were no issues with WD RE3/4, Purple and new Red. There was higher RMA rate on Blue, Green and early Red but still not really high.
Seagate had high RMA rate on most their consumer series drives. Now they released new series ( all that animal stuff ) but it's not for a long time on the market so it's hard to say how good it is. Seagate Constellation was good but it's workstation/server drive and it costs much more.
Hitachi at least in Europe had low sales. After a lot of issues in the past, some distributors didn't want to sell their drives. However since couple of years ( maybe 5-7 ) they keep high quality and performance. Their drives cost a bit more than WD or Seagate but reviews are generally good and RMA rate is low.

Of course if you have luck then any drive will live 10 years+ but at least if you are working with NAS or other storage devices then some series are clearly not recommended. Seagate had no cheaper drives designed for 24/7 work for a long time. Even their series for monitoring etc from last years had problems to run as long as WD. Seagate has released new drives so will will see how they work. I guess that at the end of this year should be some reports about RMA rate.