What is your go-to HDD manufacturer?

[SpencerJ]

Comments welcome!

[JorgeB]

Used to be WD and still have a lot of them, but after several similar failures now buy mostly Toshiba, as a bonus they are usually cheaper, at least in my country.

[Squid]

Seagate.  Cheaper than WD's and IMO better quality.  I won't touch WD themselves, but have no trouble with Hitachi.  The average lifespan I get from Seagate Barracuda's is around 9.5 years

[S80_UK]

Mostly Toshiba right now, the ones that I have being based on designs from Hitachi / HGST before it was split between WD and Toshiba.

[Hoopster]

Almost exclusively Western Digital for me with a couple of HGST.  The only drives I have ever had fail (and they failed spectacularly) were Seagate.

 

Everyone appears to have different experiences with the same brands.  With the top manufacturers its the luck of the draw.  They all make good drives and some occasional lemons.

Edited April 14, 2022 by Hoopster

[SimonF]

Recent drives 18g Tosh. Prev Seagate and Tosh. Test serv has Seagate,Hitachi, HGST SAS

Edited April 14, 2022 by SimonF

[ChatNoir]

Mostly using shucked WD drives except a few Seagate old drives I pulled from my old syno.

[KingfisherUK]

Seagate all the way for mine, mainly for the warranty.

 

My first (currently main) Unraid server has 22 4TB Ironwolf drives in the array with 2 6TB Ironwolf drives for parity, been running that for around 18 months now without issue. Just built a second server (initially for testing purposes but will migrate as main server eventually) has 6 18TB Exos X18 drives (one for parity) and so far, all good.

 

Each to their own at the end of the day, I know Seagate had their issues with some of the Barracuda drives a few years ago, then WD had the whole CMR/SMR fiasco so none of them are perfect.

[BVD]

Seagate, WD, doesn't really matter to me, as long as it's their enterprise line - currently Seagate  Exos x16 and WD Gold 16TB. Best $/GB with a 5 year warranty, and right at 1w each in standby. Get enough drives in any chassis going, and I've had poor luck with the damned every single manufacturer's consumer lines (at least as far as HDD's go.

[itimpi]

I’ve just had a number (5 out of 8 ) of WD Red drives I bought a few years ago (not at the same time) start failing SMART tests.   The Seagate drives I bought around the same time are all passing their SMART tests gone, so on that basis Seagate is my choice.

[wgstarks]

Usually go for HGST when I can get them. Also had really good luck with the 4TB WD Reds.

[BlinkerFluid]

Enterprise SAS drives when possible. WD Ultrastar line or HGST lately

[pinion]

The cheapest. Which is usually shucked WDs.

[HardwareHarry]

I take the last reports from Backblaze and use the most reliable HDDs in that list when combining age, amount of drives and failures.

My conclusion from following this list since years is that in most cases you can not trust a manufacturer you have to have a look at specific drives.

 

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-q1-2022/

 

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-2021/

 

 

Edited May 12, 2022 by HardwareHarry

[Squid]

The problem that I've always had with backblaze is that they don't quantify what they consider to be a failure, and they use whatever drives they can find cheap in an enterprise environment.  Tossing a ST4000DM into an enterprise environment isn't a fair comparison against enterprise drives which are designed for that workload.  Somewhat akin to entering a car in the Indy 500 running an engine from a Chevy Cruise vs everything else.  Sure, it'll work but it'll also fail pretty fast.

[AnthonyC]

After problems in the past with WD I’ve steered away from them. I have used lots of Seagate drives without any failure's so it’s become my trusted drive manufacturer.

[Zonediver]

WD-REDs since 2013, now Purple PROs 👍

Since 2013, i lost 4 drives - 3x3TB and 1x4TB of the REDs - all from 2015/2016 (out of 20 REDs)

Edited May 19, 2022 by Zonediver

[Oakfig]

I just bought Seagate iron wolf on Newegg, 12tbx3 and when I scanned the qr code none gave me a green check mark.

[lcadmedia]

Recently bought 2 WD Gold 16TB. First time I bought HDD in about 10 yrs. All SSD & NVME until I switched to Unraid.

[-Daedalus]

WD, for no reason other than you can't really beat the price/TB when the Easystore/Elements drives go on sale.

[kizer]

Used to be Western Digital Greens/Blues. Now I run Exclusively Seagate IronWolfs. 

[Eny]

4x 10Tb Ironwolf Pro.

 

I hope it was a good Choice.

[gentux]

WD Ultrastar HC550 since they can be had for around 18€ per TB at 18TB and work since 8 months and are HGST heritage seems like a no-brainer. I have had Seagate IronWolfs, they still live but they're slow compared to Data Center grade drives and not cheaper at least here and these days.

[lpkvh08]

Seagate has been the most unreliable drive for me. A lot of youtubers support Seagate probably cuz they give away free drives to them. All my Seagate desktop and NAS drives have failed in 1-2 years. I have had a Ironwolf 6TB drive fail in under 6 months.

 

WD/HGST has been quite reliable for me. I still use the HGST 6TB drive I bought years ago along with the Ironwolf 6TB. Only thing I hate is the excessive heat and noise.

 

Toshiba is my new favorite now. I have used their 6TB drives for a few years now and they are quite good. I prefer Toshiba MG series drive. They run cooler and are not too noisy. And last quite long.

[SLNetworks]

On 6/2/2022 at 8:00 AM, Oakfig said:

I just bought Seagate iron wolf on Newegg, 12tbx3 and when I scanned the qr code none gave me a green check mark.

What's that suppose to mean?