Comment on What's the difference between a $50 HDD and a $200 HDD?
ArbitraryValue@sh.itjust.works 2 months agoWD, Seagate
Has Seagate changed? After having multiple Seagate drives fail, I did some research on failure rates and Seagate was way worse than every other brand. Since then I have only been buying enterprise-grade WD drives. However, I did my research almost ten years ago and a lot could have changed since then.
Yes, Seagate had a bad run of drives. But that was only certain models, and like you said, years ago. WD had a similar bad run after Seagate recovered, and currently they’re all roughly equivalent. But you can find Backblaze’s data somewhere if you want to read numbers.
Bottom line, there’s always a failure risk, just be prepared for it.
It’s not that Seagate improved (which it may have), it’s more that WD has noticeably declined. It’s not a race to the bottom (yet), but there’s effectively no competition any more, so they aren’t incentivised to improve quality.
lemmyvore@feddit.nl 2 months ago
Any difference you personally experience between the three big brands is meaningless. For any failed HDD you have there’s going to be another person who swears by them and has had five of them running for 10 years without a hitch.
But whatever’s cheaper in your area and stop worrying. Your reliability should be assured by backups anyway not by betting on a single drive. Any drive can fail.
Enkers@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
Backblaze regularly releases failure rate statistics of their drives, and it’s often a big enough dataset to be quite meaningful. I haven’t been keeping up with it lately, but there certainly was a period of time where there were substantial differences in the failure rates of different manufacturers.
So while you do still need to have drive failure mitigation strategies, buying more reliable devices can definitely save you time and headache in the future by having to deal with failures less frequently.