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I stopped buying WD anything early 2010's, but then they acquired everyone else like Seagate, meaning even decent Hitachi disks would be now tainted to become t
by bastard_op 3y ago
I stopped buying WD anything early 2010's, but then they acquired everyone else like Seagate, meaning even decent Hitachi disks would be now tainted to become typical WD garbage. I still won't buy anything WD, but alternatives are hardly attractive with the market limited to like 3-4 players.
Good old monopolies in effect, your options are bad or worse.
- vanderZwan 3y agoI hadn't heard about the Seagate acquisition, that sucks. So what are my options now if I want a reliable external hard drive for example?
- justinclift 3y agoJust to be clear, WD has not acquired Seagate. They're still two different, competing, companies. The above post probably typo-d "Seagate" while meaning "SanDisk".
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- autoexec 3y agoI wondered if he was confusing the drama that happened with Seagate buying up Maxtor. A lot of people were upset when that happened because they trusted Seagate a lot more than Maxtor or Western Digital and suddenly the same shitty Maxtor drives many went out of their way to avoid were being sold under the Seagate name leaving people stuck with either buying WD or buying Seagate and probably getting Maxtor anyway. Seagate's quality and reputation took a huge hit.
- coldtea 3y agoOr with this April Fools: https://www.storagenewsletter.com/2014/04/01/seagate-acquires-wd-for-16-billion-new-company-named-seawest/#:~:text=announced%20that%20they%20have%20entered,as%20of%20December%2027%2C%202013 https://www.storagenewsletter.com/2014/04/01/seagate-acquire....
- qwytw 3y ago> WD has not acquired Seagate Hasn't it? https://www.westerndigital.com/brand/sandisk https://www.westerndigital.com/brand/sandisk
- beebeepka 3y agoReading comprehension. SanDisk is not Seagate
- rft 3y agoFor external drives, I would seriously consider using SSDs. Unless you use them exclusively as cold backups and handle them carefully and seldom, I would be far too worried about accidental drops. I have killed some external HDDs this way, never killed an SSD, even though I am far rougher with them. For extra reliability, buy two disks from different manufacturers (e.g. Sandisk/WD and Samsung) at different times and mirror the contents. Less chance of both disks going bad at the same time. Talking about 3.5" HDDs, sourced from external drives: WD is still ok in my book. Both the Backblaze report [1] (newest, quarterly version, check the drive hours, WDC has less than HGST so far) and my own experience show they are ok. I used to buy HGST based on Backblaze's reports, but now I am using WD external drives in my NAS. My oldest and most used disk (one of the parity drives) has more than 3 years power on hours with nearly 900 start/stop cycles. It shows no signs of failure so far. I get these HDDs from external drives (called "shucking"), 10TB WD My Book or WD Elements Desktop. It is a bit random what you get, but between 7 HDDs (+1 currently in testing) over about 3 years, I only had one non-Helium drive that runs hotter than the other all Helium drives. No failures yet, no bit errors as well, performance is at least good enough for media storage, currently reading at about 180MB/s sequentially. I saw one problem: USB errors with WD's USB-SATA bridge and I even had to remove the newest disk to run the test, it would drop from the bus via USB. Might be because it is a refurbished disk or something fishy with the USB 3.0 ports on my server, so I won't blame WD for it. [1] https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-q2-2023/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-q2-...
- shiroiuma 3y ago>For external drives, I would seriously consider using SSDs. I wouldn't. I use my external drives as offline backups, so they don't get plugged in that often. SSDs lose their data if they aren't powered up regularly. And of course, they're much more expensive per TB than spinning rust.
- asddubs 3y agoWhat's wrong with the WD ones? I have a bunch of them and never had any problems
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- icehawk 3y agoI take it you mean "like Seagate [acquired everyone else]" because Seagate, Western Digital, and Micron are all competitors.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- _cenw 3y agoAnd don't forget Hynix. They somewhat recently got into the B2C business, and while they command a premium, the SSDs both OEM and Retail I use from them have been very solid. There's also Samsung.
- fomine3 3y agoDon't forget the last (or first) player, Kioxia. Their drive is often installed on sold devices rather than a DIY parts.
- KennyBlanken 3y ago[flagged]
- icehawk 3y agoSeagate and Western Digital are both publicly traded companies: https://www.nasdaq.com/market-activity/stocks/wdc https://www.nasdaq.com/market-activity/stocks/wdc https://www.nasdaq.com/market-activity/stocks/stx https://www.nasdaq.com/market-activity/stocks/stx
- AussieWog93 3y agoIt's funny you say that. I always thought WD were the more reliable brand, and Seagate were trash. I wonder if it's just a case of each of us having one HDD of a particular brand fail on us violently, and then finding others who were in the same boat.
- tharkun__ 3y agoPronounce this in German: "Sea gate oder sea gate nicht" ("Sie geht oder Sie geht nicht"). Meaning "she works or she does not work" is a German word play on early failure rates for Seagate drives. Coined when there was a time where if you didn't have Seagate drives in a RAID you were more likely to loose your data than not ;) And yeah I started buying WD at that point. Backblaze stats weren't a thing back then tho.
- themagician 3y ago> I wonder if it's just a case of each of us having one HDD of a particular brand fail on us violently, and then finding others who were in the same boat. That is absolutely the case and anyone with enough experience could confirm it. Both WD and Seagate have made some real trash drives, and both made at least one or two models that were trash at scale. If you timed it just right you could jump from one to another and experience massive failures with both! You also probably have a drive from each that's been running for 20 years somehow.
- EricE 3y agoAlmost makes me pine for good 'ol Miniscribe ;)
- bayindirh 3y agoIf Backblaze yearly disk stats and my personal experience in our datacenter is anything of importance, WD is generally the more reliable disk brand for the last decade or so. I remember an era where Seagate Constellation (enterprise disks) were so bad, I was replacing them a dozen per week. Also, from my experience SanDisk didn't get tainted by WD acquisition. Their Extreme Pro SDs still as reliable as before, and their portable SSDs hit the speeds and reliability they advertise. Every manufacturer makes a design error almost once a decade. Seagate did it, Maxtor did it, WD did it before (their drives were very finicky), however all big producers are in good shape now, from my experience. I can equally trust a Seagate IronWolf Pro or its WD equivalent, or a Samsung SSD and its SanDisk equivalent. Problems happen, PCBs got revised, things got recalled. Everything is new, but nothing has changed.
- justinclift 3y ago> Their Extreme Pro SDs still as reliable as before Try this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38244389 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38244389
- bayindirh 3y agoThese are SSDs. I'm talking about SD cards, which I just downloaded my photos from my camera while writing this comment.
- justinclift 3y agoOops sorry. Completely missed that. o_O
- bayindirh 3y agoNo problems, things happen. To err is human. Have a nice day. :)