I never put a lot of faith in any given HDD. I always expect them to fail. That said, I would trust WD that little bit more than Seagate. Seagate used to be considered the best option, but they are still good. I wouldn't refuse to buy one if it was at a good price.
And breaking the myth: many tests show the Barracuda to be faster than the WD Black. I honestly don't understand why people pay the premium for those drives.
In the past year Ive had 2 Seagate barracuda 1TB drives.
In the past year, Both have failed. Enough said.
I download a lot, have dozens of 3TB drives, half and half between WD and Seagate. Never had a WD failure (mostly green Caviars), already had 3 Seagate Barracudas fail, just sending in another one this week for replacement, it was only 3 months old. By the way I get back a refurbished drive, not a new one. Don't know if WD does the same. Needless to say I will be transitioning away from Seagate.
I had RAID setups but then the NAS unit failed and I couldn't retrieve my data even though drives were fine. Never again. So now I'm all hot-swappable, bare drives stored in an ESD-safe metal case. Besides, network speed was too slow.
All 5 of my Seagate Drives have not failed and are still running strong. I've only have had 1 WD Drive and it died after a year.
Hmm, this thread is over 9 months old, but I want to add my own bit to it.
I don't rely on a specific brand of hard drive. Whatever has a low failure rate, fast speeds, and large capacity meets my standards.
The drive that I am using is a Western Digital. I think that I've had it for almost 3 years, it hasn't failed me once. Sometimes it's slow though. I think that might actually have something to do with the programs that I am running.
I think that SSDs are much better than HDDs, but we need to the technology to come along and make them cheaper. I just don't have the money to shell out $1000 for a SSD.
iv had 3 seagate drives fail on me, one being my main storage drive and another one were i backed everything up too, main drive failed, drive with everything backed up on it also failed, so i lost everything, currently have a 7 year old WD caviar blue running and its never given any problems, it is a matter of experience in most cases but for me im staying the hell away from seagate
Umm... that sounds like me then!!!! And less of the old!!! I'm ONLY 46!!! :oD LOL!!!