• Welcome to Overclockers Forums! Join us to reply in threads, receive reduced ads, and to customize your site experience!

Western Digital vs Seagate- which is better

Overclockers is supported by our readers. When you click a link to make a purchase, we may earn a commission. Learn More.
woca said:
Which company do you guys think is better for hard drives?
Click to expand...
Neither is "better". I prefer whoever has the cheapest drives, this time around it was WD. Last time it was Seagate. They both have nice warranties/etc...
 
In general, the answer would be "it depends".

WD has the Raptor series for those seeking the fastest (and most expensive) SATA drive around, while Seagate has perpendicular technology, for the best performing 7200RPM drives in addition to very high densities.

Value varies from day to day, sometimes WD has the best GB/$ ratio for a given class, other times Seagate does.
 
I only buy seagate drives. Out of the 12 drives that I have bought over the last 3 years, I have had no failures or problems at all.
 
I buy whatever I can get my hands on for cheap. Iv owned WD and havent had issues, Iv owned seagate and ahvent had issues either.
 
I have no reservations between the two. Whichever is the cheaper per GB at the time.

All else being equal, I'd choose Seagate, just because...
 
I've never used WD drives, but they have current models that are very highly regarded.

I have several Seagates and can attest to the quality of their technical support people and the quality of their drives -- I've never had a problem. I recently bought a couple 7200.10 320GB drives and they are quiet, fast, cheap, and they include a 5 year warranty.
 
Every Western Digital drive I have had my hands on has failed. Granted it hasn't been too many, but when you loose the amount of data I have lost due to WD drives, I reserve my right to hold a grudge :) . I have mostly owned Maxtors (now owned by Seagate) and have had one fail, but it was nice and gradual and I had plenty of time to react to the failure vs the WD which just up and died.

I work in an enterprise storage company and I stress test thousands of drives a day. They are mostly Seagate drives with some Fujitsu and Hitachi drives. I would recomend any of those three brands. Right now I'm personaly leaning toward buying some Hitachi drives myself since they seem to have a lower price than Seagate but should be more reliable than WD.
 
Zerix01 said:
Every Western Digital drive I have had my hands on has failed. Granted it hasn't been too many, but when you loose the amount of data I have lost due to WD drives, I reserve my right to hold a grudge :)
Click to expand...
The only grudge you should have is against yourself, you should have made backups of everything, be it on DVD or other HDD's...:beer:
 
Zerix01 said:
Every Western Digital drive I have had my hands on has failed. Granted it hasn't been too many, but when you loose the amount of data I have lost due to WD drives, I reserve my right to hold a grudge :) . I have mostly owned Maxtors (now owned by Seagate) and have had one fail, but it was nice and gradual and I had plenty of time to react to the failure vs the WD which just up and died.

I work in an enterprise storage company and I stress test thousands of drives a day. They are mostly Seagate drives with some Fujitsu and Hitachi drives. I would recomend any of those three brands. Right now I'm personaly leaning toward buying some Hitachi drives myself since they seem to have a lower price than Seagate but should be more reliable than WD.
Click to expand...

It's interesting how reliability varies; does anyone remember the infamous "Hitachi Deathstar"?.

We build a small volume of machines, about 50-75 per year and have been at it for 6 years now. That's quite a few machines in the field. The vast majority have either WD or Seagate drives, of which only 5 (2 Seagate, 3 WD; knock on wood) have ever failed. During our first year, we were using Maxtor, and realized a 40% failure rate with them (20 out of 50).

On the other hand, I've had 2 120GB and 1 500GB WD drives in my personal machines fail.

The problem with apocryphal data is that it just can't take all of the variables into account and the sampling numbers/spread is just too small. There's also the issue of specific model series or production runs from any manufacturer resulting in lemons.

This is why it's very difficult to single out one manufacturer as "most" or "least" reliable. It's more productive to research a given model/version previous to buying.

That said, I came across an interesting article by Google from February this year entitled "Failure Trends in a Large Disk Drive Population". Good reading and a definite myth buster.
 
Well, my preference is Seagate because they provide a really good support locally here, also their $/bytes ratio and performance is good too.

Last year I had one of them died but still under warranty, it was used for bout 2 years. I just walked through their local distributor, after few minutes of paper work, verification on the warranty seal, then voila, they just pop out with a "new" replacement for it. :D

The best part is, no questions asked ! :)
 
Last edited:
thideras said:
The only grudge you should have is against yourself, you should have made backups of everything, be it on DVD or other HDD's...:beer:
Click to expand...

At the time that happened DVD burners were still too pricey for me and a second hard drive was a no go for the same reason I didn't have a DVD burner. Also the only reason I had bought a WD instead of Maxtor was the price. Damn this thing called money.

At any rate the company I work for does not use WD drives, and I doubt it's a contract issue due to the variety of other competing brands we do use. So reliability could be a factor in that decision.
 
I've never had a problem either way after using both Seagates and western digitals product. When i'm in the market, as long as it's either WD or seagate, and not maxtor... i could care less.


~ Gos
 
hafa said:
The problem with apocryphal data is that it just can't take all of the variables into account and the sampling numbers/spread is just too small. There's also the issue of specific model series or production runs from any manufacturer resulting in lemons.

That said, I came across an interesting article by Google from February this year entitled "Failure Trends in a Large Disk Drive Population". Good reading and a definite myth buster.
Click to expand...

Very true, I see this occasionally, a new part number for a drive comes rolling through our test process and they are very problematic. This does not happen often but I have seen it. Luckily this is why we test the drives and stop the issues in house, then let the manufacture know about the issues.

I skimmed through that Google report when it was released. Very interesting stuff. One busted myth that stuck with me from the report is that hard drives do not tend to have a higher failure rate when temperatures increase, until they are pushed past their rated heat limit.
 
thideras said:
The only grudge you should have is against yourself, you should have made backups of everything, be it on DVD or other HDD's...:beer:
Click to expand...
I would not necessarily agree with this statement. I once managed a game project where the guy who was responsible for maintaining our DAT backups failed to do so for quite a while without notifying anyone. When 7 drives failed all at once (due to multiple brown outs), we lost 1 month of work...
 
With my IT work I have seen many failed hard drives. In my environment these failures are almost exclusively Maxtor products. It is important to note that the drives were small and this was about 3 years ago.

Our Hitatchi and Western Digital drives have a much much lower failure rate in our environment than the Maxtor drives. Seagate branded drives are a very small portion of our fleet thus their lifespan/stablility are not as apparant at this time.
 
I've owned both. My WD in my P3 is still going strong after 6-7 years. I bought one dead Seagate recently and it was RMA'd without much hassle so no real complaints there. IMO you can buy a dead drive from anyone, it's the customer service and warranty that speak volumes in that situation. Seagate came through nicely. Their perps work great (quick, quiet etc...) so I'll stick with Seagate on this rig for now.
 
I like to avoid using Maxtor drives as well as I have had three die on my in the past. The 36GB WD Raptors I'm using right now have lasted me 4 years so far and neither has died causing the RAID-0 to fail.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Similar threads

magellan
Upgrade Seagate DiscWizard for full backup functionality?
Replies
4
Views
299
magellan
magellan
petteyg359
Optical audio output that supports DTS encoding
Replies
1
Views
346
Evilsizer
Evilsizer
c627627
Western Digital Gold appears to go to sleep minutes after last use
2 3 4 5 6
Replies
110
Views
7K
BrianDH
B
trents
Weird problem with external USB hard drive recognition
Replies
3
Views
500
trents
trents
C
which is better
Replies
4
Views
367
EarthDog
EarthDog
Back