Your preferred brand of HDD?

[Coup27]

~snip~

Thanks for the answer. Do you know the reasoning behind this decision?

 

[smitbret]

Hi all,

I'm curious as to what brand of HDD people here prefer the most and why.

I have heard generally good things about WD and HGST. Seagate seems to have had an "oopsie" in the 1TB-3TB generation with drives being exceptionally unreliable (I had one act strangely and eventually die a few years back), but 4TB+ drives (and newer 1TB-3TB) ones seem to be OK.

I recently ordered a couple of WD 5TB black drives, but I am actually in need of even more drives as I start endowing all of my systems with more storage than SSDs can provide without breaking the bank.

I'm willing (and in fact want to) try some additional brands/models as well aside from WD (if only "for science") which is my main motivation for starting this thread.

I has been/had been using Seagate as my default for the last bunch of years because they have always seemed to give me a little more performance for my $$$. Reliability is almost a given in the HDD arena; of the 3 dozen or so HDDs that I have used in the last 7-8 years only one has failed and that was because it was in an external enclosure and fell about 6 feet onto a concrete floor while it was powered up and spinning. Even then I was able to recover everything that I needed before it went completely belly up.

With that being said, 3TB drives are in my sweet spot and I can't bear to use a 3TB Seagate. They are such an outlier in reliability that it is just not worth the chance. Currently I have been rolling with Toshiba in 2TB & 3TB and they are just as good as everything else.

 

[Deders]

Hey Coup27,

Apologies for the late answer.

Basically WD Green is getting integrated into the WD Blue family. The drives with capacity up to 1TB will be the WD Blue drives as you know them while the 1TB+ drives from the WD Blue line will have the features of the WD Green: low power consumption, noise levels and heat and designed for massive secondary storage and backups.

Here's a quote from our website:
"All current WD Green capacity, cache and form-factor configurations will remain available through their lifecycle, but under the WD Blue brand*...
*The WD Green hard drive functionality will remain the same. However, it will now have a WD Blue label with a slight change to their model numbers (ex. WD60EZRX will now become WD60EZRZ)."

The only possibly confusing part would be the two versions of the 1TB WD Blue (5,400 RPM and 7,200 RPM versions). You can consider that as comparing a 1TB WD Blue with 1TB WD Green.

Here's WD Green's main page where there's more info on this: http://products.wdc.com/support/kb.ashx?id=NCEuMQ

Again, I'm sorry for the late answer.

Captain_WD.

Does this mean that blue's will park their heads more frequently like the greens did or is this feature not going to be continued?

 

[midwestfisherman]

Hey there Arachnotronic,

It depends on what exactly you are going to use the drives for. As a WD Representative I can give you more details about the Western Digital drives and which is designed for what:

WD Black drives are great for performance, extensive usage and heavier workloads but can me a major overkill for simple backups and storage and are not appropriate for RAID arrays and NAS/Server usage.

For the RAID/NAS/Server usage I would recommend checking out WD Red drives are they are much more appropriate with the additional NAS/RAID features (such as TLER). Pretty much any NAS/RAID rated drive would be a better choice for such type of usage.

For general inexpensive storage that doesn't require faster access times or great performance I would recommend checking out WD Green. They are designed for secondary storage and backups with energy-saving features and cool and quiet performance.

Here's some details about WD Green and WD Red:
WD Red: http://products.wdc.com/support/kb.ashx?id=AY5lrY
WD Green: http://products.wdc.com/support/kb.ashx?id=7K2Ds3

Feel free to ask if you have questions or if I can help with something else

Captain_WD.

Great info! Question, I have been using WD Blue drives for my storage needs. Not technically a NAS but an external HD in an enclosure. Is this an appropriate use for that drive? BTW, I've experienced no issues with the Blue drives.

 

[hectorsm]

I prefer Hitachi because they are the quietest and most reliable drives I've used. I also like WD drives but they are not as quiet as the Hitachi's.

 

[Brado78]

WD Blues are ok for enclosures but, they are more designed for everyday computing. I use Greens in my enclosures. As they are designed more for that purpose. (Secondary Storage)