Western Digital vs Seagate

The personal preference here is WD always so don't go by that alone. Currently I run a pair of the same 500gb WD sata model seen at the second link and have used WD drives since that first custom as well as a few prebuilt systems those many years ago. Both brands are generally seen as the top two over some of the cheap stuff now coming out!
 
The seagate is cheaper. That would be why I would take it. Pretty much all drives are quite reliable now, people will say x brand is garbage and others will swear by that same brand. It's just which one you prefer.
 
Even the best brand out can still see dirves fail at times. Maxtor some years back had a bad rep by the more experienced including some engineers. The drives often required going to Maxror's then support site in order to download their own drive tools in order to set them up.

Being bought out by Seagate will have already started seeing the much needed improvements for the new drives now seeing that name on them. Other brands now being seen lately are more shelf stockers then "old reliables" with complaints heard more frequently when cheaper made drives fail sooner. That's the main complaint about those.
 
I have a Maxtor 20GB drive that was made just before that bad rep hit. After six solid years of daily use, I only had a handful of bad sectors. It's sitting in the closet at the moment waiting to be put in an old Pentium II Dell Optiplex one of these days.

I have both WD and Seagate drives in my present machine and they're both fine.

You'll get both bad drives and great drives from all makers... but my research has generally said that Seagates have a slight advantage over others;).

Tom
 
I don't mind either. Seagate and WD are pretty good quality. I have 2 Western Digitals simply because I always find them a bit cheaper than the Seagates.
 
I use Seagate. Its just about what you prefer really, both brands are great, work fine and aren't exactly going to blow up when you start using them.
 
OvenMaster said:
I have a Maxtor 20GB drive that was made just before that bad rep hit. After six solid years of daily use, I only had a handful of bad sectors. It's sitting in the closet at the moment waiting to be put in an old Pentium II Dell Optiplex one of these days.

I have both WD and Seagate drives in my present machine and they're both fine.

You'll get both bad drives and great drives from all makers... but my research has generally said that Seagates have a slight advantage over others;).

Tom
Click to expand...

You got into a Maxtor actually after the bad rep hit them. The largest drive available at that time was a 16gb model Maxtor had out. I get told by a specialist not to go over 13gb due to drives being brittle. I was also advised to go strictly WD then. Obviously they had to make some improvements later.

jamesy said:
I use Seagate. Its just about what you prefer really, both brands are great, work fine and aren't exactly going to blow up when you start using them.
Click to expand...

You can get a bad drive out of the box on rare occasions. A friend is still trying to rescue familiy photos from a Hitachi drive he went with instead of seeing a WD or Seagate model to save a few bucks. The drive went fast.

Meanwhile one 120gb drive bought back in 2002 went through 4 or 5 cases until loaned out to someone for about a year. That finally could only be read from but not written to seeing the same problem that the Hitachi did in only a matter of months in one case.

What's the two worst enemies of any drive besides breaking the internal seal?
1)temps
2)hard boots or hitting the power or reset buttons too often.
 
I'll disagree with some people and say Western Digital are useless, although that's based on my experience a couple of years back; I had a digital recording machine that ran a 4 drive raid set. Whenever I used western digital drives chances are the raid would go down, and on several occasions the drives would just break - this was over a 2 or 3 year period... In the same computer I almost never had problems with the Maxtor drives I started using instead, and I had them in it 80% of the time. I used new hard drives for each project too, so this isn't just a couple of bad drives, I'm talking about 100's. I've used seagate drives in my home computers for years and have never had a failure.
 
Joe2005 said:
What is a hard boot?
Click to expand...

A hard boot is a forced shutdown of a system when a game or program locks everything up completely. Fortunately you no longer see that problem in Vista while all previous versions can lockup solid.

That's when you have to use the reset button if one is there or the power button/switch to either restart or power off the system. Instead of seeing Windows shutdown normally and unloading things fast one at a time you slam everything at once.

On older drives you needed to park the read/write heads when going to shutdown first. After a long period of seeing abuse the heads on a drive will fail.

PunterCam said:
I'll disagree with some people and say Western Digital are useless, although that's based on my experience a couple of years back; I had a digital recording machine that ran a 4 drive raid set. Whenever I used western digital drives chances are the raid would go down, and on several occasions the drives would just break - this was over a 2 or 3 year period... In the same computer I almost never had problems with the Maxtor drives I started using instead, and I had them in it 80% of the time. I used new hard drives for each project too, so this isn't just a couple of bad drives, I'm talking about 100's. I've used seagate drives in my home computers for years and have never had a failure.
Click to expand...

RAID arrays are generally seen used by companies and are quite fragile. The praticality for home users isn't there to start with. You don't see the usual increase of capacity since one drive tends to mirror the other by spreading file fragments across both drives.

In over 10yrs. since running WD drives only one has actually failed here. That's the one that was loaned out after seeing use in several cases. The better brand drives conform to certain standards. With arrays being a fragile commodity to start with you see those fail regardless of the brand of drive used.
 
I have heard hard drives made by Hitachi and Fujitsu are not good because of the poor quality control. That is not to say all hard drives made by Hitachi and Fujitsu are bad, but you are more likely get a bad drive buying one from these companies rather than going with Seagate or Western Digital.
 
A simple look at how long both WD and Seagate have been in the business of manufacturing drives compared to the newer "jump on the band wagon" type companies that expand into something they should have left alone is the main reason. For the two big names there that's what they do primarily is make drives.

Other companies simply make them to toss on shelves or get a contract with a company like Gateway to supply drives while even prebuild companies usually see one of the three big names used. One one model a WD will seen while another will see a Seagate and now Maxtor more since bought out be Seagate. That means two companies instead of three.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top