western digital v.s. seagate HDDs

[kingjames488]

talking about storage drives here, so no need to suggest an SSD...

in terms of reliability for storage which do you prefer?

personally I've never had a seagate drive fail on me, and had one WD external fail soon after getting it.

how about you?

[Bad 💀 Motha]

Well for one they do not even make Blue anymore. Blue actually took the role and model placement of Green many years back. They are junk. They also don't make high capacity Blue, for reliability concerns. WD Red and Red Pro are cheap enough as it is. Who is buying a HDD less then 4TB or more these days?

WD Blue was for like 500GB, 750GB, 1TB, 2TB
And only most versions of the WD Blue 1TB were 7200rpm, the rest were 5400rpm; again because it took the role of what used to be WD Green.

Do not confuse any of this with WD Blue SSDs, those are perfectly fine.

[Elucidator]

It depends on which factory it comes from. A lot of companies fused with WD or Seagate (which means WD and Seagate bought them and rebranded their stuff).

There is also Toshiba still making HDDs by the way, which are so far I can tell also very good. (Japan has yet to fail me xd)

I had troublesome experiences with Seagate, they simply stopped turning on at some point.
I haven't had that with WD, but WD (on the low end drives at least) seems to have (in my experience, which is biassed by the way) earlier breakage of HDDs. (them failing internally)
e.e;

I rather not get drives from either of them to be honest, but yeah-- if you need to, I recommend looking at the drive types. Something with more warantee generally lasts longer for example.
Things designed to turn on and off a lot are good for desktops. Things where they assume its constantly powered (WD Black / Red for example) not so much, though Red, if it is an At Home nas, then it will allow it turning on and off frequently I am guessing.
external drives as well, also don't mind power/no-power

As for drive failure, depends on whether it is designed for a lot of use or not.

[Illusion of Progress]

Postat inițial de Bad 💀 Motha:

Well for one they do not even make Blue anymore. Blue actually took the role and model placement of Green many years back. They are junk. They also don't make high capacity Blue, for reliability concerns. WD Red and Red Pro are cheap enough as it is. Who is buying a HDD less then 4TB or more these days?

WD Blue was for like 500GB, 750GB, 1TB, 2TB
And only most versions of the WD Blue 1TB were 7200rpm, the rest were 5400rpm; again because it took the role of what used to be WD Green.

Do not confuse any of this with WD Blue SSDs, those are perfectly fine.

Yeah, I knew you meant HDDs.

They still make Blues though. Like you said, they've just transitioned to being 5,400 RPM and more for general storage, same as the Barracudas did. And that's simply a result of the HDD itself shifting in use. There's not enough demand for high performance, high RPM drives across all models, so that's why only the top models retain higher RPM and why general drives shifted to lower RPM many years ago. Most consumers want HDDs to be cheap because they are more and more using them for storage roles only and prioritizing cost per GB.

Reds are good, but cost a bit more, and aren't necessary if you aren't running a NAS or having the drives run all the time. Blues are cheaper (especially the SMR ones, though I personally don't go for those) and fine too.

[Bad 💀 Motha]

I don't even have a customer asking for less then 4TB nowa days, unless its an SSD. And they are often poor folks I'm dealing with too. Sure not rich.

I'm just saying, WD Blue is low capacity drives. Who is buying those anymore?

HGST 4TB and 8TB are super cheap, omg. Yet have WD Black performance.
Even if a WD Blue was available in 8TB for example, it would be considered an extremely low end drive. Those were always very slow in their read/write compared to most other consumer drives.

Red doesn't have to be considered as a NAS drive. It can be used for whatever you want.

They used to have WD Purple also, but Red Pro basically replaced those.

[Lunch-b0x]

I'm going to answer with the option you don't want to hear. SSD. SSD's are far more reliable than HDD's ever were. If you need storage and are geniunely concerned about reliability, You will be able to retrieve, read, and write data so much faster. The extra cost is well worth it...even though both "reliable" and "cost saving" should never be your search criteria at the same time in this context.

Hard drives are so archaic nowadays, and I personally believe they have no business being used anymore, in any case whatsoever.

[Bad 💀 Motha]

SSDs above 4TB aren't affordable by any means.
So if you want like 8TB or larger, then HDD is really the only way to go.
Not one of those pre-built external drives, but an off the shelf 3.5 inch 7200rpm SATA HDD, installed into your own USB 3.x caddy.

If you can go the SSD route though, yes do that.

I was able to snag a couple 8TB Samsung SSDs cheap enough during Black Friday Sales. But for some, their jaw would still drop seeing even the discounted price for those.

[Lunch-b0x]

Postat inițial de Bad 💀 Motha:

SSDs above 4TB aren't affordable by any means.
So if you want like 8TB or larger, then HDD is really the only way to go.
Not one of those pre-built external drives, but an off the shelf 3.5 inch 7200rpm SATA HDD, installed into your own USB 3.x caddy.

If you can go the SSD route though, yes do that.

I was able to snag a couple 8TB Samsung SSDs cheap enough during Black Friday Sales. But for some, their jaw would still drop seeing even the discounted price for those.

Once again, the words "reliable" and "cost saving" (in your case "affordable") don't belong together in this conversation. OP want's reliable hardware.

You have "fast", "reliable", and "cheap". You can only choose two of the three, and HDD's are only ONE of those things. At any rate, you can get 4TB M.2 NVME SSD's for ~$400ish USD and 8TB 2.5" SATA SSD's for ~$600ish USD. That's no where close to unreasonable pricing.

[Illusion of Progress]

Postat inițial de Bad 💀 Motha:

I'm just saying, WD Blue is low capacity drives. Who is buying those anymore?

Define "low capacity" because if you're defining anything single digit TB as low capacity, then sure, you can make the claim that Blues only exist as low capacity drives. But you're talking about sizes like 4 TB and 8 TB, so I'm getting the impression that's not the criteria you're using. And Blues exist up to 8 TB.

I don't know, who's buying them? You said your own customers are buying as low as 4 TB so ask yourself.

Postat inițial de Bad 💀 Motha:

HGST 4TB and 8TB are super cheap, omg. Yet have WD Black performance.

H.G.S.T. hasn't existed for five years, having been purchased by Western Digital. So anything H.G.S.T. made will be a Western Digital labeled product, or if it's actually H.G.S.T. labeled, it's old now.

Do these "super cheap" drives compete with Blues in price per capacity? If not, there you go.

Or are the used/refurbished/or my favorite term they use, "renewed" instead of new? If they are, just stop. You realize you can source used with any drive and it puts us back at square one with there being a price disparity?

I'm also not sure why it performing like a Black matters? You seem like you don't even realize that 7,200 RPM on mainstream drives have long fallen out of favor, and I just explained why in my previous post. It's why the Blue and Barracuda, mainstream drives, transitioned from 7,200 RPM to 5,400 RPM. Hard drives are used more for storage now, and less for performance. Want performance? SSDs. Want capacity? Cost-per-GB-advantaged HDDs. I'm not saying higher RPM/performance drives are always pointless, either. I am merely saying they aren't the only good option for storage like you're positing.

You seem like your mindset is "hard drives are slow, so at least get the less slow one" when I actually see that as backwards. Both are rather slow, and 7,200 RPM doesn't really save them from that, so it's a needless expenses at times, especially for light storage role drives.

https://imgur.com/a/y7RV83s

That's obviously neither a fully "fair" comparison, nor one to show peak performance, but I hope it shows the point that either are rather slow, and 7,200 RPM isn't always going to be worth paying for in a storage role drive. Even the Red drives are offered in 5,xx0 RPM.

Or maybe you're falsely thinking that because some 5,400 RPM drives are actually incredibly slow (like USB external 2.5" ones) that all are? I don't know, but if that's it, that's wrong too. There's a pretty easy to notice difference for me, even blindly, between my external 5,400 RPM drive and my internal ones.

Postat inițial de Bad 💀 Motha:

Even if a WD Blue was available in 8TB for example, it would be considered an extremely low end drive. Those were always very slow in their read/write compared to most other consumer drives.

Even if they exist? It's existed for over a year.

https://www.westerndigital.com/products/internal-drives/wd-blue-desktop-sata-hdd#WD80EAZZ

No, they weren't always very slow compared to most other drives. That's straight up false in the context of "always" as you claim, and even now it is. They perform okay for what they are. They're just not performance drives. Then again, no HDD is.

Postat inițial de Bad 💀 Motha:

Red doesn't have to be considered as a NAS drive. It can be used for whatever you want.

Of course you can. But unless you have a need to run them 24/7 or in a NAS or something, which is where I'd agree on taking a Red over a Blue, then Blues are cheaper (with the option if to be even more cheaper with SMR), so...

[_I_]

hgst is toshiba, they still make drives

[kingjames488]

Postat inițial de Lunchb0x:

Postat inițial de Bad 💀 Motha:

SSDs above 4TB aren't affordable by any means.
So if you want like 8TB or larger, then HDD is really the only way to go.
Not one of those pre-built external drives, but an off the shelf 3.5 inch 7200rpm SATA HDD, installed into your own USB 3.x caddy.

If you can go the SSD route though, yes do that.

I was able to snag a couple 8TB Samsung SSDs cheap enough during Black Friday Sales. But for some, their jaw would still drop seeing even the discounted price for those.

Once again, the words "reliable" and "cost saving" (in your case "affordable") don't belong together in this conversation. OP want's reliable hardware.

You have "fast", "reliable", and "cheap". You can only choose two of the three, and HDD's are only ONE of those things. At any rate, you can get 4TB M.2 NVME SSD's for ~$400ish USD and 8TB 2.5" SATA SSD's for ~$600ish USD. That's no where close to unreasonable pricing.

when I got my current hard drive it was considered a high-end drive and still only cost like $300 lol... $600 is kinda ridiculous for a consumer level drive IMO.

[JohnMars78]

Postat inițial de _I_:

hgst is toshiba, they still make drives

Hitachi is definitely not Toshiba, mister.

[_I_]

oops, my bad, one of those two
its now owned by wd, a few drives still have the name

[Tiberius]

Whichever gives you the longest warranty

[Viking2121]

Doesn't matter to me, I run a mix in my server, I got 8 HDD in my server, ranging from WD, Seagate, HGST, and Toshiba, I couldn't tell you what one is worse or better, I recently had a power flash here and it killed a WD 4TB Blue drive, I had a old 1TB Seagate that would park its head so loud I thought it was going to die, it still works, still parks its head really loudly, Got a old 750GB WD Black that runs at 60C with heavy file transfers, its taken it like a champ for years.

Had a 6TB Seagate die for no real reason, wasn't too old either, so idk, I don't have a problem with running either brands personally, just go with has the longest warranty, and always have multiple backups regardless if the HDD is suppose to be the best on the market or not, its a mechanical part, its going to die, its just when.

[Talby]

over the years I have accumulated about 2 dozen dead HDDs on my shelf - 15 of them are seagate

¯\_(ツ)_/¯