Maxtor was the first i buy i don't remember 512mb   ye what a capacity for today standards 

Well  wat i have 4x4 tb WD black  in 2010 or so i do not remember, after 3 mounts of use in pc on off 2 ->4 time per day one failed one me 

problem was the data on it was very important for me in that moment 

so wat can be more easy swap the board (i do not remember if was necessary to swap the eeprom to but i did it) and the result was the same chaotic head movement, not that loud has in Maxtor drive  but if you keep it in the hand you can feel it has the head hit the max and min position several times 

 

yes nice, well recovery was very expensive so what i did was put hdd in a plastic zip bag and put in in a bowl of fridge cooled water and start the recovery process 

 

has the water getting warmer i keep adding ice cubes  recovery was 100% 

 

after this i buy Seagate barracuda when the warranty was out same for HDD  

 

i still have the 4x4 tb drives and are running every day in pc no bad sectors but Monday i will check smart to see the status, i did not check for 5 years or more  

 

with first NAS sinology i buy 4 x 10 TB Seagate iron wolf was not cheep,

 

all 4 was bad, not detected and the very pleasant sound of the chaotic head movement hitting the max and min stop, well 3 weeks was the replacement policy, you can imagine 

 

now i have 4x 8tb and 5x 10tb WD red,  10tb are in sinology and 4x8tb are in a QNAP TVS-471-i3-4G running Unraid 

 

sorry for the long story,  now you will say that i use the hdd in an hot or inadequate environment ->  all hdd had and have cooling fan and never temp go over 48 degree Celsius 

12 hours ago, clauberty said:

Maxtor...

 

all hdd had and have cooling fan and never temp go over 48 degree Celsius 

Every Maxtor I ever worked with, you could fry eggs on 🤣

 

What I really want to mention though - if your drives are anywhere *near* 48°C, you've got a significant cooling / airflow problem, and I'd recommend looking in to it sooner rather than later.

 

~50°C is fine for NAND/SSDs/NVME, no worries there. But HDDs become significantly less happy the further above 40C they run.

On 9/1/2024 at 12:26 PM, BVD said:

Every Maxtor I ever worked with, you could fry eggs on 🤣

 

What I really want to mention though - if your drives are anywhere *near* 48°C, you've got a significant cooling / airflow problem, and I'd recommend looking in to it sooner rather than later.

 

~50°C is fine for NAND/SSDs/NVME, no worries there. But HDDs become significantly less happy the further above 40C they run.

yes true 40 °C is what i want to write but one of my fingers decided to hit 8  

On 8/31/2024 at 3:59 PM, clauberty said:

Maxtor was the first i buy i don't remember 512mb   ye what a capacity for today standards 

Well  wat i have 4x4 tb WD black  in 2010 or so i do not remember, after 3 mounts of use in pc on off 2 ->4 time per day one failed one me 

problem was the data on it was very important for me in that moment 

so wat can be more easy swap the board (i do not remember if was necessary to swap the eeprom to but i did it) and the result was the same chaotic head movement, not that loud has in Maxtor drive  but if you keep it in the hand you can feel it has the head hit the max and min position several times 

 

yes nice, well recovery was very expensive so what i did was put hdd in a plastic zip bag and put in in a bowl of fridge cooled water and start the recovery process 

 

has the water getting warmer i keep adding ice cubes  recovery was 100% 

 

after this i buy Seagate barracuda when the warranty was out same for HDD  

 

i still have the 4x4 tb drives and are running every day in pc no bad sectors but Monday i will check smart to see the status, i did not check for 5 years or more  

 

with first NAS sinology i buy 4 x 10 TB Seagate iron wolf was not cheep,

 

all 4 was bad, not detected and the very pleasant sound of the chaotic head movement hitting the max and min stop, well 3 weeks was the replacement policy, you can imagine 

 

now i have 4x 8tb and 5x 10tb WD red,  10tb are in sinology and 4x8tb are in a QNAP TVS-471-i3-4G running Unraid 

 

sorry for the long story,  now you will say that i use the hdd in an hot or inadequate environment ->  all hdd had and have cooling fan and never temp go over 48 degree Celsius 

Maxtor.....I haven't thought about those in awhile. When I first started swapping drives I think most I came across were Maxtor.

 

My first NAS was a Synology about 9 years ago. I went with WD Red and had one fail within a year or two. I don't remember but it was in warranty and they replaced it. Fast forward to 2 years ago I wanted to upgrade my Unraid machine and used Seagate. I haven't been impressed. They run hotter and one has  a very annoying tick and of course whatever movie I watch seems to be on that one drive. I need to upgrade again and I'll be going back to WD Red.

How about those Conner and Rodime drives?

bestbuy pny flash

$80 for 1TB for a quick inand out at a store.

My go to for high end storage at/over 4TB is segate/WD which ever is cheaper at time of search...

but i've had great luck and prices grabing PNY SSD hard disk and flash drives.

HGST Helium 10TB units.

I have tried a number of different makes over 13 yrs of using Unraid. I recently removed/replaced about 10 HGST 3TB drives from the first Unraid box I ever built. Every one of them was over 12 yrs old and none had failed. That box was a primary archival file server for our org--on/used 24/7.  Freakin unreal.

I realize that there have been some changes at HGST. But I continue to use them--I seem to be getting the same quality in the past 4-6 years also. 

 

I've used some Seagates and WD in some other Unraid boxes I use. About half of them crap out within 3-5 yrs. That's my experience running 4 Unraid servers---2 at home and 2 at work.

 

HGST.....until I see some pretty big change in results.

It's so interesting to see people swear left and right by Seagate or WD because of their experiences. It goes to show you that you can't always trust your personal experiences when it comes to what others will think.

Alway WD because even if i had any problems it was a blast to get a new HDD from WD.

Toshiba. Price per TB is better (here in germany) and I dont think they are more noisy or produce a lot of more heat.

I used to a WD guy. About 10 years ago WD made great drives. Especially the green and blue drives were work horses. WD raptor and velociraptor drives were awesome when they made them. All my raptor and velociraptor drives still work to this day (and are in my server happy as can be). Greens aren't even available anymore, but blues are still decent for your daily PCs (not so great for servers though). I used a lot of bare bones WD drives and a lot of shucked WD drives over a couple decades for various things. I've switched back to Seagate, after a about a 20 year time period of avoiding them. Way back in the day (1980s and 1990s) Seagate drives were very good, then they became very bad. Well, same story with WD... once a upon a time they were very good, now it seems their quality is dropping a lot. I still have old Seagate drives from the 1980s and 1990s (and other brands) that still work just fine (mainly old 10/20MB, etc drives for old computers); seems like modern drives are rubbish by comparison. Anyway, had a couple Toshibas that worked for awhile, then suddenly died, so my faith in those isn't so good at the moment. So, switched to Seagate Ironwolf and Ironwolf/Pro drives for now (especially when they are on sale). We shall see how that goes and hopefully Seagate has improved again. So, I'm fine with just about anything in a daily PC, but under 24/7 server conditions I do not trust WD anymore, I am iffy about Toshiba, and have slightly more faith in Seagate (at the moment but that might change). Basically, no one makes decent drives anymore, at least not like they used to. Hard drives have become synonymous with used cars. Some work, some don't work so well. Some are just total garbage. If I can get 4 or 5 years out of a drive without a bazillion errors popping up I guess that is the best we can hope for these days. Someone must be making a fortune recycling a mountain of not really that old of HHDs. We are in the era of the disposable throw away hard drive now... save the planet and all that. Oh, one thing I do now though... I avoid SMR drives like the plague now. For my server (and even my daily PCs for the most part) I only use CMR drives now (which kills buying most of the cheapest drives and pretty much kills shucking anymore). Aside from SMR just slowing down write times to a crawl, it seems (no data to back up my claims, just experience speaking) the SMR rewrites (moving blocks of data around to re-shingle blocks) appears to put a ton of extra wear and tear on the drives in the server environment. I won't put a SMR in my server, even if it is a free drive. I know I'll be killing my write speeds and having to replace that drive too soon and having to go through a drive replacement and data rebuilding session too soon. It's like having a drive that needs to micro defrag every time you write to it. I rather spend $15 to $50 extra to get a good solid CMR drive. As you get older and older you tend to gather a lot of magnetic bits (data)... and you just don't want to sit around having to copy drives... yes, I have a drive cloner, but, still. There are better things in life to do... so I try to stick with drives that have longevity and don't waste my time re-shingling. Now if WD would just give us a 4, 6, 8, and 10TB velociraptor of the same quality as the old 500gb and 1tb ones it would be on. Ok, I have ranted enough... thank you and may you forever find the best hard drives.

I just dug up all my old Quantum SCSI drives and a couple of Rodime MFM drives. I think 24 drives total, so I have a ton of storage now. Like 1.75 gigs.

On 4/9/2025 at 7:25 AM, geecrumb said:

Toshiba. Price per TB is better (here in germany) and I dont think they are more noisy or produce a lot of more heat.

Agreed.

After bad experiences with seagate, used to buy WDs RED - No problem with them but found just as good for less bucks : for a couple years, I have switched to Toshiba from Germany (I'm in France but prices are lower in Germany)

Toshiba disks are ~3 °C below WDs , same noise, same performance, less expensive ,my number one choice for now

My servers have never seen spinning rust that wasn't WD/HGST.

I've had many other brand drives (fail) in my own and others' desktop and laptop machines, but they were all replaced with WD spinners or one of a few brands of SSD (which no longer includes WD/Sandisk for me). The only WD-branded drives that have died in devices I've been responsible for were laptop spinners with glass platters, and a 6TB SMR red, and one Blue SSD.

My experience has been solid enough that 4/5 spinners in my homeserver are used datacenter disks. It's hard to beat the value prop on used drives.

Edited October 9, 2025Oct 9 by It's just J.
Engrish

On 9/17/2025 at 5:29 PM, grosminet750 said:

Agreed.

After bad experiences with seagate, used to buy WDs RED - No problem with them but found just as good for less bucks : for a couple years, I have switched to Toshiba from Germany (I'm in France but prices are lower in Germany)

Toshiba disks are ~3 °C below WDs , same noise, same performance, less expensive ,my number one choice for now

+1 for Toshiba now due to price /performance ratio in my area. Never any problem. Have been on WD Reds before but albeit solid track record too expensive for me 😅

Seagate exos x again, because WD RED and Elements always fail after 2-3years....

Edited October 30, 2025Oct 30 by Fetal9105

I use WD/Hitachi mostly due to the advanced replacement when they do fail. Seagate has been a huge let down for me often having 1-2 failures per year....WD i tend to get 5-8years out of but when they do fail I just do Advanced RMA and get a new drive shipped to be then replace and ship failed one back

WD/HGST. I'll never willingly use a Seagate (SATA) product ever again. (although their SAS drives have so far been reliable.)

I have Seagate Exos drives, some are close to 10 yrs old.
Things I always do:
1st check if internal cache is enabled

2nd set sleepmode to NEVER

3rd keep the server in a dry, preferably cool environment. My cabinet in the basement is max. 31'C in August and humidity is always betwenn 40 and 45%

4th have a good online UPS, I have lost many devices over faulty power, I buy cyberpower, 40% over the power I need, change the batteries every three years and the device every nine years

This way my servers last years without failure.

Also +1 for Toshiba here.

They have the best price/size ratio in my location.

I still have 4TB WD reds that have over 10 years run time and refuse to die!

More hard data from Backblaze https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-q3-2025/

I've had every single Seagate I ever owned d

fail on me within just a few years, some of them even within the warranty period. Every. single. one.

Yet I still have 3 WD Green kicking that I bought refurbed in 2011..

Edited March 15Mar 15 by bberger

7 hours ago, bberger said:

I've had every single Seagate I ever owned d

fail on me within just a few years, some of them even within the warranty period. Every. single. one.

Yet I still have 3 WD Green kicking that I bought refurbed in 2011..

Just shows - I have the opposite experience in that all my WD drives have failed while under warranty and the Seagate ones keep going.

I think that which manufacturer produces the most reliable consumer grade drives keeps changing over time so very hard to have a definitive conclusion.

Idk what in doing differently, but I've yet to have a drive fail that wasn't either my fault, or almost immediately upon installation for years now. I always buy the enterprise line (WD gold, Seagate exos, etc), and they're always installed in dedicated hotswap bays in server chassis, but I've got something approaching 80k hours on a good number of em 🤷‍♂️