Good old monopolies in effect, your options are bad or worse.
I remember an era where Seagate Constellation (enterprise disks) were so bad, I was replacing them a dozen per week.
Also, from my experience SanDisk didn't get tainted by WD acquisition. Their Extreme Pro SDs still as reliable as before, and their portable SSDs hit the speeds and reliability they advertise.
Every manufacturer makes a design error almost once a decade. Seagate did it, Maxtor did it, WD did it before (their drives were very finicky), however all big producers are in good shape now, from my experience. I can equally trust a Seagate IronWolf Pro or its WD equivalent, or a Samsung SSD and its SanDisk equivalent.
Problems happen, PCBs got revised, things got recalled. Everything is new, but nothing has changed.
Have a nice day.
:)
I wonder if it's just a case of each of us having one HDD of a particular brand fail on us violently, and then finding others who were in the same boat.
Coined when there was a time where if you didn't have Seagate drives in a RAID you were more likely to loose your data than not ;)
And yeah I started buying WD at that point. Backblaze stats weren't a thing back then tho.
That is absolutely the case and anyone with enough experience could confirm it. Both WD and Seagate have made some real trash drives, and both made at least one or two models that were trash at scale. If you timed it just right you could jump from one to another and experience massive failures with both! You also probably have a drive from each that's been running for 20 years somehow.
There's also Samsung.
The above post probably typo-d "Seagate" while meaning "SanDisk".
https://www.storagenewsletter.com/2014/04/01/seagate-acquire....
Hasn't it?
Talking about 3.5" HDDs, sourced from external drives: WD is still ok in my book. Both the Backblaze report [1] (newest, quarterly version, check the drive hours, WDC has less than HGST so far) and my own experience show they are ok. I used to buy HGST based on Backblaze's reports, but now I am using WD external drives in my NAS. My oldest and most used disk (one of the parity drives) has more than 3 years power on hours with nearly 900 start/stop cycles. It shows no signs of failure so far.
I get these HDDs from external drives (called "shucking"), 10TB WD My Book or WD Elements Desktop. It is a bit random what you get, but between 7 HDDs (+1 currently in testing) over about 3 years, I only had one non-Helium drive that runs hotter than the other all Helium drives. No failures yet, no bit errors as well, performance is at least good enough for media storage, currently reading at about 180MB/s sequentially.
I saw one problem: USB errors with WD's USB-SATA bridge and I even had to remove the newest disk to run the test, it would drop from the bus via USB. Might be because it is a refurbished disk or something fishy with the USB 3.0 ports on my server, so I won't blame WD for it.
[1] https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-q2-...
I wouldn't. I use my external drives as offline backups, so they don't get plugged in that often. SSDs lose their data if they aren't powered up regularly. And of course, they're much more expensive per TB than spinning rust.