are these drives reliable? and if so, how reliable are they? i just dont want to buy a shitty drive. should i get a WD blue instead?
The Seagate Barracuda is a mixed bag. The 1TB model is fairly decent but has slightly higher failure rates than the WD Blue 1TB drives. The WD also comes with a longer warranty and is only a tiny bit more than the Seagate.
Stay away from the 1.5TB drives. I had one and they are garbage. Their failure rates are much higher than average.
That being said, there is a lot of luck and chance involved. You could get a Seagate and have it last for 20 years and you could get a WD and have it die in a week.
A lot of people buy Seagate Barracuda drives because their cheaper. But for about $20 more, You can get a drive from WD, Caviar Black with a warrenty 3 years longer and a much lower failure rate.
I personally operate a 2TB barracuda. Been in operation over a year and runs fine.
All I can tell you is I use a 1TB WD Blue for over a year and a half with no issues.
My old 1 TB seagate barracuda has lived for 6+ years of daily use now. You can get pretty unlucky with both WD and Seagate, but as long as you get a single platter model you will probably be fine with either one. You can also look up reliablity tests of course. I'd say it doesn't matter too much for normal use, if you want something for 24/7 operation or something to record video footage to you should look into more diversified options, but for normal desktop use both will be fine.
I've never used Seagate drives, but I do have 2, 6 year old Hitachi drives (one in laptop, one in desktop) and so far neither of those have died on me, even though they seem to be getting close.
I also have about a 6 month WD Blue which seemed like it was a bad drive within the first month because it would just stop working in the middle of a download, but now it works fine (from what I've noticed) .