I’m looking for a new mechanical harddrive (I have a SSD as the system disk) for my desktop, gaming computer; probably 2TB and 7200rpm. There seem to be a large number of units that fit the bill (usually with around 64mb cache) from Western Digital, Seagate, Hitachi, Toshiba etc. Is there anything that separates them and makes one manufacturer the no brainer over the others?

I read some stats somewhere that Western Digital had the least failures whilst Fujitsu had the most fails.
Also look at the manufacturers warranty. Most had slashed their warranty period years ago and since then only a few have increased their warranty periods

Not really these days.

Time was, you asked three techies for advice and you’d get three different answers as eveyone has their favourites, but there were usually common ‘avoids’ (I’m looking at you, Fujitsu).

Personally I’d go for WD or HGST, but there’s little to choose between them for most practical purposes. For a gaming rig I’d want a high RPM disk with plenty of cache, maybe even a hybrid drive. Last time I looked, WD “Black” was WD’s performance outing.

I read some stats somewhere that Western Digital had the least failures whilst Fujitsu had the most fails.

Yeah. The stat you’re looking for here is “MTBF” – mean time between failures.

craigxxl – Member

I read some stats somewhere that Western Digital had the least failures whilst Fujitsu had the most fails.
Also look at the manufacturers warranty. Most had slashed their warranty period years ago and since then only a few have increased their warranty periods

Oddly, the Fujitsu desktops we have in work came with Seagate HDDs

Doesn’t seem to be much between them – that’s someone who’s got through their fair share over the last few years. WD are amazing re. in and out of warranty replacement.

Last time (2Tb Black), they asked for a photograph of the serial number and proof of purchase before they posted a replacement. It was 2 years old. I had another drive fail a month out of warranty. They wanted that one (free) posted back but had a replacement with me withing 10 days.

For that alone they get my money.

For gaming, I wouldn’t care about 7,200 vs 10,000 rpm nor cache. The games will load a little more quickly but in-game performance will be the same as modern games use CPU / GPU and RAM memory efficiently. I gained 1 fps in GTA with a SSD vs WD green (lower speed, energy efficient drive).

Honeslty, go on amazon or wherever and look for the best Seagate vs WD deal.

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-reliability-q3-2015/
Actual statistics.

I’ve stuck with Western Digital for the last few, had reliable performance from the Red series, didn’t need the warranty to justify the cost for the Black series.

WD Green series I’ve had less success with and they have failed quite often.

Seagate I have swapped loads out recently.

Problem with recommending drives is the failure experience is based on what was being manufactured two or three years ago, if you want to really know what to buy now you need to invent time travel to be really certain.

If the data is important then get what’s available and use a decent RAID or backup system.

Only failure I’ve ever had in my life was on a Western Digital Red in my NAS.
Hey-ho, I bought WDs to replace it.

And i’m using mostly WD in various flavours and sizes. (Green/Red, 1TB, 3TB)
Raid for the actual back ups and “normal” file storage for the day to day working files.

RAID is not backup (and the FakeRAID you get in consumer systems even more so). RAID is all about availability (and can be a swine to recover from if the stack itself goes West). Take backups.

If you’re using a RAID stack as a backup, you’d be better off splitting it into single disks and taking two copies.

From ghostly’s link

Wow, what happened to Seagate? That’s a lovely demonstration of what allan23 just said.

If you’re using a RAID stack as a backup, you’d be better off splitting it into single disks and taking two copies.

Noted, researched (briefly) and done. Or at least, the NAS is chugging away doing it……..

In 2012 there were massive floods in Thailand, Western Digital’s factory shut, Seagate’s didn’t.

One rumour was that in order to capitalise on or prevent a shortage of disks, Seagate ramped up production and QC slipped.

It seems a feasible rumour, I have one customer with a set of servers bought in 2012 with Seagate Drives and almost every disk has been swapped out.

Where do those figures come from? Surely they would only find out about the in-warranty failures.. I didn’t tell anyone when my disk died!

If you read the link….. it’s statistics from a server farm running around 50000 discs.

OP I have been very happy with my Western Digital Black 7200rpm 750gb

Its been running for 2yrs (?) trouble free in my Mac Mini as only drive. SSD was too pricey I thought for size I wanted

FWIW I think 750gb is largest size WD black you can get which runs at 7200rpm

My mate works in the Apple shop and I asked if he could do me a deal on one of their Seagate HD’s. He said I didn’t want one as they’ve had a lot of failures. He told me to get Western Digital which is what he uses even though he has to pay full price.

Sounds like he was right.

Are you reading that graph upside-down? I did at first.

Didn’t realise i had quite *that* much data on the NAS. Might be time for some bigger drives too…….

I’ve had failed drives and drives that Have never failed after a decade.. Just go with a mainstream brand and take your chances.. I’ve got 2 old seagate IDE drives I use as a mirrored back up for music.. Both over a decade old.

Samsung not mentioned?

Seagate bought Samsung’s HD business.

Which probably explains the graph.

Samsung’s were the dogs danglies so once theirs were factored in that may be why the failure rate for Seagate dropped.

Interesting HGST’s low failure rate, given they were once owned by IBM and had the infamous “Deathstar” drives.

Cougar – Moderator
RAID is not backup (and the FakeRAID you get in consumer systems even more so). RAID is all about availability (and can be a swine to recover from if the stack itself goes West). Take backups.

If you’re using a RAID stack as a backup, you’d be better off splitting it into single disks and taking two copies.

This is so true, especially if you buy the discs all at once (so they’re all from one batch). Trying to recover from one disc dying, then another during the resilver, then another during the second attempt on a RAID-6 array wasn’t the best day I’d ever had.

Interesting HGST’s low failure rate, given they were once owned by IBM and had the infamous “Deathstar” drives.

That was a bad batch I think; they’d been solid for ages before HSGT took them over. They were my go-to for a few years, much better than the old ones.