No matter where you go on tech youtube (with the exception of possibly L1T) everyone recommends WD hard drives. As far as I know, WD has the second highest 1 year failure rate in the industry. Hitachi and even Toshiba put out better products, especially hitachi, for a similar price/GB. I know they own HGST, but is there any evidence that they put anywhere near the effort and engineering that HGST into their enterprise stuff, into their consumer drives?
What drives do you use/prefer, and why do you think youtubers always recommend WD? are they getting influencer marketing dosh? are they just ignorant? discuss!
Well firstly i think that spinning rust for home use are pretty much on their way out. But as far as mechanical hdd´s and reliability is concerned, there really isnt that much to say about it. Its pretty much all a matter of luck. Why WD gets more recommended, i guess because they are the leader in the market maybe?
Probably because historically WD has been a good brand and Seagate, being the primary competitor, was crap. I'd say until just recently WD and Seagate were really the only two popular consumer* brands, so the better of the two was recommended.
I don't remember hearing about Hitachi or Toshiba drives in custom builds pretty much at all until just the past couple years.
You're right, market inertia is something I hadn't really considered. The reason I bring it up is that I recently had a drive failure and did some research on what as supposed to last, and the numbers say WD is almost, if not just as, bad as seagate, and Hitachi was close to HGST, which really surprised me. adding that to the poll now.
Well, for the most part, Hitachi became HGST (Hitachi Global Storage Technologies)
Although at this point I believe pretty much all HDD brands are manufactured by WD, Seagate, or Toshiba now. Hitachi was actually split between WD and Toshiba, the bits going to the former becoming HGST and the latter being absorbed into Toshiba.
Interesting. I'm just going on the most current numbers I can find, and nearly all the surveys are split by brand, not manufacturer. They also tend not to be favorable towards WD branded drives. I guess this is expected since it's a shrinking market with SSD's and whatnot.
There should be the option for more than one answer. I have only used WD, and even now i have WD Black in my system. So i have no issues with that brand, but it's public knowledge, that HGST are most durable. So whoever of those. Why does they recommend WD? If i ever have only used WD and i have no issues, i would only recommend WD. I have only used Kingston, Corsair and Adata as ram. Had issues with Corsair. No issues with Adata or Kingston. I'll recommend Kingston or Adata. Some people may jump on Corsair, but Corsair is showering reviewers with products, to the point where some reviewers will literally recommend 200$ keyboards on the fly, or 200$ ram sticks, and there are pretty much similar ram sticks for 100$ from another brand. But they have only used Corsair, because Corsair drowned then in products, marketing etc...
Most of the drives I currently have in service are either WD or Hitachi/HGST. My main machine has a 1TB WD Blue and a 1TB WD Red and my server has a 200GB Hitachi as the main drive and a 1TB HGST for data storage, I also have a really old Seagate in my pfSense router. The reason for this is that I bought the WD drives when I noticed that most of the computers I had to fix with failed HDDs were all Seagate drives and thought I'd go to WD instead (as they were the market leader) and honestly most of my Hitachi/HGST drives were from old Laptops/PS4s.
Also It is probably a fairly unique situation that I am in that I've pretty much never had a drive I own fail. I did have one fail in a laptop I owned at least 12 years ago and my brother dropped my WD Passport but other than that, all my drives still work, even the Seagate which was from my Pentium 4 PC.
Generally I think the reason most YouTubers choose WD drives is probably just normal marketing and that in the past Seagate made poor drives.
I've only had laptop HDD's fail, in use cases where I should have been using SSDs (outdoors, lots of shock and vibration, etc) other than that, I've got a shitty 11yo HDD in my router that isn't even making noise yet. I was just wondering if the failure rate thing was common knowledge more than anything else.
HGST/Hitachi seem to be the best based on BackBlaze's reliability findings. They may not have a perfect testing methodology, but they definitely have skin in the game.
Seagate had big issues with harddrive failure a few years ago. Now that seems to shift to WD. Using harddrives for nearly 22 years, I had several Seagates fail on me. Since then, I never touched that brand again. As I had only one WD fail on me since I use harddrives, I commence using WD.
I have had WD, Segate, Samsung and some others who's brands I either not know or just do not remember over the past 25 years - and guess what - only the WD drives ever got decommissioned because they became to small - all others died before I planed replacing them.
So from my own experience up today - I can only recommend WD
On the otherside, I use, for about 4-5 years, only Seagate, external and internal. That started when 2 external WD, I had, failed. So I guess, in the end, it's all about experience.
I like Seagate and HGST. I have never had problems with Seagate. Ever. I still have IDE drives I pulled out of servers that came with them still running in machines that I have. If someone needs a machine I'm careful what drives I put in it because I only have so many.
I've never had a WD drive fail on me (touch wood) and I've built a fair few PCs over the years with varying HDD capacities so it's a personal preference with me. On YT I'd assume it's a mix between personal experiences and ones that don't care which manufacturer until one pipes up and says "we'll give you free money/hardware if you pick ours".
Seagate used to be fscking awesome. But starting with their 250GB drives from waaay back in the day, their QA occasionally misses massive defects. The 250GB were the first ones that I noticed anyways, with a 50% chance that customers' drives would be DOA. Their drives labeled 1000GB (rather than 1.0TB) were also notoriously faily. And what was it, the 2014 models that had a bug in the firmware that could potentially brick your drive, so they released a firmware update that also had a bug that would brick your drive, so they had to release yet another firmware update.
Seagate's taken enough hits in recent memory to warrant the use of the "Shit Tyrone, get it together" meme.