Seagate vs Western Digital external hard drive

[mr friendly guy]

Ok, so I have a 3 TB external hard drive. I figure I would most probably upgrade to a new one sometime next year as I have only 350 GB left. Now I have always used Western digital for my storage needs. Both Seagate and WD are easily available at the local shop. The price difference for a 8 TB HDD is only $10, so not a biggie.

However Seagate comes in more variety of storage. For example WD Hard drives with more capacity than my current ones only comes in 4TB and 8 TB at JB Hi Fi, and I most probably don't need a 8 TB drive for around $400 +. Seagate also comes in 5 TB which is more likely what I need in terms of storage.

However I don't have much experience with Seagate, so I wondered what people think about Seagate products. Are they reliable? How do they compare with Western digital ones?

[General Zod]

I haven't been a fan of Seagate ever since they 'accidentally' shipped a bunch of new drives with viruses pre-installed.

[mr friendly guy]

Bit of research suggests WD trumps Seagate, although Hitachi works best.

http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/1750 ... ard-drives

This is of course for 4 TB hard drives. I want at least 5 TB at least.

[Borgholio]

I've always supported WD over Seagate. Their internal drives always were faster and more reliable.

[Edi]

I've always supported WD over Seagate. Their internal drives always were faster and more reliable.

My experience as well. Never had a WD hard drive fail on me yet and some of them are pushing 50k power-on hours.

I have never yet had a Seagate drive that didn't die of hardware failure and only one of them ever reached anything close to what my WD drives have.

[Sea Skimmer]

Seagate is just bad,last I was looking it was pretty damn consistent that in everyone's tests they did worst on lifespan. Western Digital is not so great if its used for servers, but of the cheap drive makers it is certainly better then Seagate.

Samsung drives have lasted very well in my experience, as not one has died yet in up to 9 years of use, but I've paid a premium for all of them too.

[EnterpriseSovereign]

I have to agree with what I've heard so far. Every bad drive I've ever had has either been a Seagate or Seagate subsidiary. A few years ago a batch of drives were shipped with dodgy firmware that turns the drive into nothing but a paperweight. It took me close to a year to get together all the various parts to unbrick the fucking thing (which involved partial disassembly). That unbeknown to me the Maxtor replacement drives that I'd ordered had the same shitty firmware, one of which failed within days of purchase in exactly the same way, was the last straw. I immediately jumped ship to Western Digital and never looked back.

While researching SSDs I found that Sandisk is actually a WD subsidiary. In theory this should mean they make decent drives- it's only been relatively recently they've been making solid states that have decent capacity without breaking the bank.

So yeah, avoid Seagate at all costs!

[Zixinus]

A minor point of advice: look at how many years of gurantee they give for the drives. No matter which brand you choose, that is likely a good indicator of quality. Ones with three or five or more years is advisable. Even within a reliable manufacturer, there are quality differences.

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

A number of "Seagate" external drives are actually Samsung ones because Seagate bought over Samsung's hard drive business. I have had issues with many of them, namely the 2.5" ones.

[mr friendly guy]

As it turned out, I was planning to buy the drive near Christmas or after where there will be a big discount. It turned out the Western Digital had a discount of $30 making it cheaper than the Seagate one. Given the superior reliability of Western digital, it was a no brainer to get it. Thanks for everyone who gave me advice.