[protocol77]

hey guys for the last 6 or 7 years i have pretty much exclusively used Western Digital Drives i have a Caviar Black in this machine and in my home server i have about 7 Caviar Green Drives and a further 5 used as offline backups (Not a Fan of RAID) also One Hitachi, Two Samsung Drives and 1 Seagate


now i have been fortunate that all my drives have never been a problem (the Hitachi is a little loud but it was cheap at the time of purchase) however i might be looking to purchase some more for myself and others and i am wondering what is the consensus here for what people like to use

i am talking about what is currently on the market not 10 years ago as we all know they were probably better made back then i have some old seagates (80GB drives) i use for testing purposes those things short of running them over with a tank just won't die

however seagates has had a few rough patches with models in the past also as have the other brands (samsung was really really good until seagate bought them not sure how they are now have not seen many for sale lately)

i am looking for thoughts in regards to not only htpc use but also for home servers and general desktop use and also offline storage

1. Which Brand Do You Prefer
2. How Long you have owned them (roughly)
3. How They Perform
4. What you use them for

[ThePolarSky]

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[Dougie Fresh]

I have a mix of perfectly fine WD, Samsung and Seagate in my WHS. I buy on price and warranty now, heavily weighted towards the former.

[solamnic]

1)WD Green.. only (about 13 drivers)
2) The first one i think is more then 3+ years...
3) only one started to show smart problems after 1 year of use.. but it was replaced instantly by wd and i lost no data
4) Media Storage (win 7 server, jbod - no raid)

[twelvebore]

Well to first order there are only two HDD manufacturers left now, so flip a coin. I've used WD and Samsung at home, which have been fine, and some consumer-grade Seagates at work, which have also been fine. Seagate's bad patch was quite a long time ago, and I recall perceived problems with IBM (since HGST, now WD) and WD drives since then. So pick your poison.

However...

I'll be frank though, it's probably kind of pointless asking about drive reliability on internet forums. Most people don't use anywhere near enough drives of enough variety in controlled conditions to make any serious statistical comparisons.

[Dilligaf]

Seagate due to the longer warranty, until recently they still had a 5 year warranty

[thethirdnut]

@twelvebore - I agree.

You pretty much have to do your own research....What may be a rock solid brand could be going through a rough patch when time comes to order - ie Seagates bad firmware, IBM Deathstar, etc.

I check out reviews for popular brands and mix & match different brands from diff suppliers for a large build.

This all of course means absolutely nothing as far as guaranteeing no issues for yourself. Burning them in definitely helps, but I also had 2 x drives fail recently AFTER the 3-pass UnRAID burn-in, but both less than 400 hours.

[Malosar]

oh the IBM Deathstar, that was an interesting time as a PC technician back then.....

Several years of owning WD Green drives primarily for WHS with no problems whatsoever.

[jammyb]

The WD 3TB are the crappiest drives out there. Had 4 replacements in 6 months till I moaned and they sent a RED instead.

REDs on the other hand are WOWOWOWOWOWOWOWOWOSOSOSOSOSOWOWC!

135-40MB/s file transfers over SATA III! thank you please!

Last one I bought was a seagate and like ThePolarSky & Dougie Fresh, I now have no preference over brand. It's about cost. But if I'm feeling flush [did last nite and bought a NUC lol] I'd definitely recommend the WD REDs!

[thethirdnut]

I'd also have to agree with the RED's being a step in the right direction...

Better build - supposedly - than the Green's + also certified for 24/7 NAS use with a slightly better warranty. I only have 2 x 2TB of these at the moment, but plan to move onto more models like this in 4+ TB space from WD and hopefully other manu's in the future too.

[msarro]

I used to be pure WD, but now have a mix of WD, seagate, IBM, hitachi, and Samsung. Oh, and an OWC SSD as well.

I don't trust any of them to last for a long time, so I backup everything with cloud backup software. Simple and effective. If anything ever breaks, they can ship a disk with the contents copied to it, and I'm back up and running.

[ThePolarSky]

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