On 3/15/2026 at 7:21 PM, itimpi said:

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.

And yet, I've been using Ironwolf Pro for several years and I've returned at least 5. I've got some that have made it to the 6 year mark. As we I write this, my 18TB Ironwolf Pro has rising re-allocated sector count, its up to 113 at the moment. A 6 year old 14TB has been knocked off line, so dealing with both of those at the moment. I've also had DOAs from Amazon. I wanted to buy Toshiba Enterprise, here in Australia. They okay priced, but their return policy seems like it will come back to bite me. I've just received two 24 TB Ironwolf Pros this morning. They're larger than parity and I've got the faulty two drives in the Array. What could go wrong sticking those in?😂

Started with WD Red and then moved on to recertified Seagate Exos for the capacity/value

HGST

I currently have 8x 4TB HGST + 11x 8TB HGST and two left over 4TB WD drives deployed (see my Signature for exact model) though i am currently sourcing replacements for all 4TB drives because I'm chronically running out of space

I've had 2 of each 4TB and 8TB HGST drives fail though considering i bought all of them used off Ebay with drive hours ranging from 4 to 11 years this is expected and still way cheaper than buying new

I also have 2 Seagate Iron Wolf Pro 10TB drives in a Synology enclosure in a Mirror for critical personal data and 2 Iron Wolf Pro 16TB drives cold in storage for when i run out of space on my Synology

One of the 16TB Iron Wolfs was delivered DOA and i got it replaced otherwise they are pretty good so far. The 10TB Iron Wolfs are going on 5 years of drive hours so i cant complain

You can also look into more stats in my DiskAge list i attached but the Failed section is not complete because i started this after the first few failures and cold spares are not listed

Failures i have had so far (as far as i can recall, i haven't been to good with recording them as they occurred) were mostly fast rising error counts in uncorrectable smart errors, see last entry in the attached file. I also had one drive become completely unresponsive iirc.

DiskAge-Status_censored_20260622.txt

Ultrastars only.
For cheaper builds any purple/av ones - quality of NAS ones with lower price.

On 6/1/2026 at 9:29 PM, callummccormick said:

Started with WD Red and then moved on to recertified Seagate Exos for the capacity/value

same. For the Seagate Exos, I have a mix of brand new [bought way before the crazy increases] and recertified.