[SOLVED] best internal hdd manufacturer?

[stiffmeinster]

wd, Seagate, Toshiba, Hitachi or something else is recommended?
I need a 4 or 6 TB internal HDD 3,5" 7200rpm with 128 or 256mb cache that is reliable.

 

[USAFRet]

Some will say Seagate, some will say Toshiba. Others will chime in with HGST or WD.
On an individual drive basis, they're all about the same.

The only good drive is one where the data on it is backed up regularly.

Fleet wide reliability means nothing if your drive is one of the outliers that dies early.

 

[Aeacus]

For best reliability, HGST (Hitachi) drives are to go for. After them come Toshiba, then Western Digital and Seagate is the worst in the HDD reliability lineup.

Further reading: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-reliability-stats-q1-2016/

 

[dg27]

There are only two types of HDDs out there: Those that have failed and those that will fail at some point in the future.

For that reason I think the way to determine "the best" among the biggest players (Seagate, WD, HGST (which is part of WD), and Toshiba) is to look at the warranty policy for the particular model you're interested in (the policy can vary from drive to drive from the same manufacturer).

I no longer have any Seagates (the last one died a while ago), but still I have drives from the other three. I prefer WD Black drives, which the last time I needed to check still had 5 year warranties. And I know from personal experience that WDs replacement procedure for drives in warranty is excellent, as long as you have a bona fide covered drive that isn't a gray market item. I can't say the same for the others. I've been buying WD Black drives exclusively for my four systems and I always always always register them at the WD site immediately. Over the course of 40 or so drives over many years I needed to replace WD drives about 5 times and it was always a very painless experience.

 

[Aeacus]

Here's a nice article that explains the WD Rainbow of HDDs and which WD HDD is best at which task,
link: https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Understanding-the-WD-Rainbow-674/

HDD warranty length alone doesn't state how reliable the drive is. For example, i'm running several WD Blue 1TB [WD10EZEX] drives and oldest drives i have are a bit over 4 years old and are still going strong, despite the fact that WD Blue 1TB HDDs come only with 2 years of warranty.

 

[dg27]

HDD warranty length alone doesn't state how reliable the drive is.

While I agree since I have several drives out of warranty that are still going strong, I still think for how long the manufacturer will stand behind their product is a useful metric.

 

[Aeacus]

While I agree since I have several drives out of warranty that are still going strong, I still think for how long the manufacturer will stand behind their product is a useful metric.

Yes, there are some PC components where warranty does pay a role when selecting which one to go. Best example is PSUs. With PSUs, there's a huge difference if unit comes with 12 years of warranty (e.g Seasonic PRIME) or only with 3 years of warranty (e.g Corsair VS).

However, there are also those PC components where the warranty length is negligible. For example, besides HDDs, CPU warranty length is also negligible. All Intel CPUs come with 3 years of warranty, regardless if it's Celeron or Core i7. In reality, CPUs have extremely long lifespan (10 - 20 years under normal operating conditions) and the CPU itself will be long before obsolete rather of it dying of old age.

So, when warranty length doesn't matter but the need to know how reliable said hardware is, an in-depth review from reputable reviewer or long-term study is needed to determinate that. Blackblaze does that study for HDDs and their data is good source in this matter (i linked it above).