Big HDD Showdown: Seagate 10TB vs. HGST Ultrastar He10 vs. WD Gold 8TB

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PaulAlcorn

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I agree. The 10TB Gold was only announced two days ago. We inquired with WD, but samples are not ready yet.

 

AndrewJacksonZA

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I know that your review uses the pricing that you have at hand, but as I'm reading the article, your ads are displaying prices as follows:
HGST ULTRASTAR HE10 - $506 on Amazon
SEAGATE ENTERPRISE CAPACITY 10TB - $589 on Amazon
WD GOLD 8TB - $600 on Newegg

The HE10 in the review is taken as the most expensive drive when it's actually the cheapest. Would you consider revising your pros and cons for each drive's cost?

Thank you
 

PaulAlcorn

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Prices fluctuate, and it varies between retailers. Usually we do not provide a graph with low, average, and high values, but I added it due to the big price variation between retailers. It isn't a perfect system, but retail pricing is our only resource.
The $500 for the HGST He10 is noted in the 'low' category, but the drive is still retailing at CDW for $855.

 

3ogdy

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THERE.YOU.GO. Once again another one just like me...
Seagate hard drives have proven to be extremely unreliable for me too. This company is an absolute nightmare. I have quite a few 7200.12 500GB and 7200.14 2TB Barracudas that simply stopped working. Some of them, in a very convenient way, right after the 2yr warranty - even though that doesn't cover data recovery, of course.

Once my last 7200.14 2TB Barracuda went belly up...I had to cough up over $1000 to ship that POS to the Netherlands and have my data sent back to me on an external Seagate drive. VERY poor quality products from this company. I'm terrified at the thought of using anything from Seagate to store my data on. I lost countless projects, personal data and things I needed, but Seagate isn't gonna get a copulating cent from me anymore. I'm not touching anything coming from them and they can easily rest assured none of my clients EVER will.

Another detail I'd mention is this: I was on the phone with a Seagate representative and I told them how everything happened (well, basically my partitions were not there in Windows, the drive didn't show up under Device Management...). I'm asked for a serial number and then I'm told: You've just lost your warranty on your Seagate product. (it was legally under warranty that I could have claimed through the shop I got the drive from)

EXCUSE ME?
Very bad customer experience - building HDDs to get people to call on you for data recovery and pay over 15x the price of your POS product in order to get their data back. Your business model is not focused on providing reliable storage systems ( HDDs ) - you're not an HDD manufacturer at heart - you're a data recovery company.

[strike]WELL DONE[/strike] WE'RE DONE, Seagate.

Also, shall I mention there's a class action suit being prepared against Sh*tgate at the EU level?

HGST (WD subsidiary) has proven much more reliable throughout the years and they also provide a 5 years warranty (data recovery not included, of course).

P.S. NEVER provide your HDD's serial number to Seagate on the phone.

The lesson I'm teaching everyone I can around me is NEVER EVER trust your data to Seagate. NEVER use Seagate products as they don't stand by them and are only interested in making your pockets lighter. Even friends who weren't aware about this company now know what to avoid in their systems.

Whenever you have to choose storage - consider SSDs first and if capacities don't fit the budget, pick something more reliable from either HGST, WD...I can't really speak for Toshiba drives but I doubt they're as problematic as Seagate's I rememebr reading Backblaze's reliability reports and thinking : It all makes sense to me now. People said they hadn't tested Seagate drives properly and that their technique was flawed, but they were right.
 
Paul, any chance you or Chris R might review a basic consumer spindle drive soon? I know they're not the "sexy" thing right now with new SSDs and high-capacity enterprise storage getting released. But considering most consumer builds still include a TB or two of spindle storage, I'd be interested to see if there have been any significant advances in the last 3 - 5 years. In particular, the WD Blue 1TB is 7200 rpm while the 2TB model is 5400 rpm. Is 5400 still a curse word in today's spindle drives?
 

PaulAlcorn

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There is actually something in the pipeline right now, so we should have something for you soon(ish). I am not sure about the test pool yet, but those are good suggestions. :)
 

SirGCal

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To those with issues with Seagate drives, try testing the drives before you install them. Plus, every brand has pockets of bad product. This is easily noticed through services like backblaze and their reporting.

I prefer HGST myself also but have seagate drives too. When I built my last server, I went through 22 drives to get 8 to pass initial testing. Since then been running for I think 4 years now without the slightest issue. But even if I get HGST drives, they get tested before install. In the last two years, two HGST drives failed before install during initial testing for me also. No amount of quality manufacturing or customer service can handle UPS or FedEx.

As for Customer Service, I've given Seagate dozens of serial numbers over the phone and some they've drop-shipped while mine were still on the way back. While they aren't my favorite brand, I can't complain about the customer service, of any of the major brands for that matter.
 

SirGCal

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Ohh, also, backup your data. Even as a minimum on extra storage. That grand you spend trying to recover data could be spent on multiple different types of redundant storage systems or better yet, offsite backup services. Depending on how important it is for you.
 


I would guess it wasn't available at the time this eval was done.
 
Why would Seagate void the warranty that doesn't make sense unless you bought a drive from outside of your zone. Like an American tech buying a cheaper pacific rim model from China, or if they feel the drive was physically damaged... Could either of those have happened when you purchased it or afterwards? If not take it back to the store you bought it from, and let them fight with Seagate over the warranty. You have the receipt you bought it on. Tell them since they sold it to you to and it is still in the warranty period to take care of it.

There are private companies that do data recovery for for you did you price any other recovery service?

I've sold lots of drives, Seagate, Toshiba and WD and I don't think it is a logical assertion that any plan to make their money on data recovery. By the way guess which company has the largest market share on Hard drive sales.

Well that was an expensive event that could have been made a lot less painful by backing up your data on a regular basis. In your case you may want to setup automatic back ups on a regular basis to a external drive or NAS.

The deal with Backblaze is they are a professional data back-up service company. That uses the cheapest consumer grade models for their business instead of the NAS or Enterprise versions more suited for their business. So I'm not surprised they burn out the drives, but I don't recall anyone else being able to duplicate their results. Thou I'm sure someone will post if it was done.

Obviously this has been a very traumatic experience for you. I hope going forward this doesn't happen to you again. I wish you the best of luck and I would think seriously about setting up scheduled backups from now on going forward. I know I need to get that done for myself and I know better and have a NAS and external HDD (from Seagate ;^D). I'd hate to lose all that porn, lol.

Cheers!
 

Nergo Pthycc

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There was a Seagate drive in the Buffalo external backup drive I bought a couple years ago. You know how that P.O.S. went; right after the warranty expired! From then on, I'm backing up to Blu-ray discs, and I don't care how many it takes...my stuff stays on my property.
 

sstanic

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Hi, thank you for the very interesting review. What about noise impressions or measurements please? For me personally it is very important..
 

PaulAlcorn

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Noise measurements aren't as important in enterprise settings, but many will use these in RAID, so it is relevant. I will consider adding this in the future. For now, we will have to rely on vendor specs, which are;
WD Gold - 8 TB - idle 20, seek 36 bels (air-based 6 & 4TB are louder - idle-29, seek 36)
HGST He10 10TB - SATA/SAS 10/8TB typ. - 2.0/3.6 bels
Seagate 10TB - Idle/seek typ. 2.8/3.2 bels
 

PaulAlcorn

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..perhaps maximized space is our destiny. :)
Good catch, fixed.
 

FritzEiv

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One thing I should mention: the pricing on those buttons throughout the article (we call them Buy Buttons for lack of a better word) are dynamic, which is kind of a nice thing but it always kills us when evaluating based on MSRP or looking at averages at the time the article is written (or later in the publishing process).
 

FritzEiv

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Dammit. I thought I fixed that in my edit. Argh!
 


Why are you comparing consumer drives to enterprise class drives? They are vastly different.

The Backblaze data is also useless because most of the HGST drives are their enterprise class drives and all the Seagates are consumer drives which invalidate the information because a consumer class drives is not meant to be used in a 24x7 high power, high heat and high stress environment.

As well WDs failure rates are currently HIGHER than Seagates in the current Backblaze data set. What does that mean? Nothing because it is a faulty data set that again uses consumer drives in enterprise environments.

In every professional IT server I have ever built or serviced NONE of the drives were WD Greens/Blues/Blacks or Seagate Barracudas/Desktop drives. They were all WD enterprise class or Seagate Constellations (Enterprise).

And personal experience does not equate to fact. Your experience sucks but I have had nothing but good luck with Seagates. I had 2 120GBs last over 10 years and my 2 1TBs were about 6 years old and still kicking when I sold them. My current 2TBs are about 4 years old now and they are happy as can be. But that does not make it a fact that Seagates are perfect. All drives will die at some point in time depending on multiple internal and external factors.

Oh and Toshibas are actually much worse than Seagate. Their 7mm laptop drive fails more than most laptop drives I have veer seen.
 
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