p.2 #2 · Seagate vs. Western Digital? Looking for drives
Seagate and WD through the decades have been like Canon and Nikon. They leap frog each other in technology, neither ever has a decisive technological edge (at least not for long), and each will occasionally take a misstep.
p.2 #3 · Seagate vs. Western Digital? Looking for drives
I have 11 or 12 Western Digital My Book external drives, both 500MB and 1TB
they are durable, reliable & fast
and I'm an equipment abuser
every weekend I set up my laptop and a drive in a dusty arena, shoot dog agility, dump my cards on to the drive ... often a drive will travel with me to 8 - 10 different arenas before it retires to my desk
I dump 1000's of images every weekend onto it, batch these images while dumping more, am using LR to show more images to clients, and the drives never slow down
at home, I'm sorting then uploading while editing other images on the drives
I've dropped them, they've been so dusty you begin to worry about them and they keep on ticking
knocking on wood, but have never had one totally fail, the oldest one is tempermental about accessing it, but once I find a way in, everything works fine
only the newest 2 or 3 are plugged in all the time, the rest just sit on a shelf ready to be hooked up again when I need images off of them.
p.2 #6 · Seagate vs. Western Digital? Looking for drives
I have two 1 TB WD drives and one green 2 TB WD drive in my 1st generation Drobo. I will add 1 more 2 TB drive soon.
I did have 1 WD drive crap out on me and there was a wrestling match as to who was responsible for the replacement between Drobo and WD but, they agreed and replaced it for free.
You can't win.
They all have problems but some have more then others.
p.2 #8 · Seagate vs. Western Digital? Looking for drives
The Seagate .11 series sucked but they have fixed things with the new .12 series. The WD green series are the least expensive and least reliable of the WD drives. If purchasing WD, purchase the black series.
p.2 #10 · Seagate vs. Western Digital? Looking for drives
While anecdotal information can be useful, you might want to visit a website devoted to reviewing hard drives. These folks love to talk gear, almost as much as photographers...
p.2 #13 · Seagate vs. Western Digital? Looking for drives
I have 5 1TB seagate server hard drives in my raid5 server. Absolutely no problems or failures and three more seagate drives in my desktop. I will be buying 3 more 1TB Seagates and and a new raid controller in this year's server upgrade. Link @ Newegg As many others have said, both WD and Seagate are subject to failure but with proper back up and redundancy your data should be safe.
p.2 #14 · Seagate vs. Western Digital? Looking for drives
Our youngest daughter had her relatively new Compaq laptop's harddrive fail...Seagate (made in Singapore).
I have a Western Digital 500GB MyBook, which is seldom powered on as it serves only as a data backup device...with under 1000 hours of powered on time, it suddenly decided to power up eratically and will not even spin up sometimes without dozens of power on/off cycles. Pick your poison.
With almost 25 years of history in computing, they are the only two harddrives I ever had fail.
p.2 #15 · Seagate vs. Western Digital? Looking for drives
Our company has been using Western Digital Enterprise class drives for a number of years. Not sure they were the best choice. With 30 computers running 3-4 drives each, we replaced 6 last month alone. Not sure what is happening with them. Some were under warranty still but, doesn't help recovering lost data. I think Seagate will be next at bat.
Paul
Oct 26, 2009 at 05:33 PM
stevekphotos Offline • • [X]
p.2 #16 · Seagate vs. Western Digital? Looking for drives
I've been working with high end consumer-class data storage for a number of years, and have to say that the Hitachi 1TB (and now the 2TB) hard drives are the most reliable of any brand. This is is because they used to be IBM.
Western Digital is probably #2 in that list, with their 2TB Green drives being decent, and Seagate/Maxtor a far 3rd.
I would highly recommend Hitachi if you're looking for a solid, reliable series of drives.
p.2 #17 · Seagate vs. Western Digital? Looking for drives
I use either WD or Seagate depending on which is cheaper I gave up long ago wondering which manufacturer was better than the other. You'll always find people with horror stories about a particular type of drive so I concluded they're all as good (or bad) as each other.
I also generally use 7200rpm drives, but I've read that for some bigger RAID arrays slower spinning drives are preferable because they generate less heat, and long-term exposure to excessive heat will kill any drive.
In theory, the enterprise versions of drives are supposed to be the most reliable, which is why they generally have a longer warranty (often five years) and cost slightly more. You might ask "what good is a warranty if it can't bring back lost data?" but that's not an issue if the dead drive is part of a mirrored RAID array.
Oct 28, 2009 at 07:53 PM
stevekphotos Offline • • [X]
p.2 #18 · Seagate vs. Western Digital? Looking for drives
Actually, hard drives come down to the quality of the manufacturer.
I purchased about 20 Hitachi 1TB drives over the last 2-3 years, and none of them have failed. They all work perfectly, with zero link failures in any of my arrays.
I purchased 7 Western Digital 2TB (Green) drives, which are significantly cooler, and 2 of them arrived DOA. The remaining 5 also generate numerous link failures, and randomly drop out of RAID arrays. I scrapped them. Same story with Seagate and their 1/1.5 TB drives.
I've been dealing with high end storage for years. If you want a reliable, fast drive, buy a couple of Hitachis, put it in a RAID 5 and don't look back.
p.2 #19 · Seagate vs. Western Digital? Looking for drives
My advice it to vary the types of drives you add to your storage array, at least slightly. If one drive has a defect that causes it to fail after a certain amount of time, you run the risk of others failing around the same time. Most storage arrays can only tolerate a single drive failing without data loss.
I gave up long ago wondering which manufacturer was better than the other. You'll always find people with horror stories about a particular type of drive so I concluded they're all as good (or bad) as each other.