Hitachi vs Seagate vs Western Digital

[Teddy Evelynn Mosby]

Hello, I am currently in the process of building my very first PC and was wondering which hard drive brand I should get. I have heard very good things of Hitachi, Western Digital and some good on Seagate. I was wondering which brand would be the best as of now in 2016. I am looking for a 2TB, 7200 RPM, 64mb cache, 6Gb/s hard drive. Which brand would you recommend, and why?

Thanks for the help!

 

[rcxtra]

I've had good luck with WD lately. I'd stay clear of Seagate unless the price is too good to pass up.
WD Black if you can afford it (not any faster really, but comes with better warranty), otherwise WD blue will do...

 

[guanyu210379]

You can use any HDD brand without any problem, except Seagate.

 

[Dragos Manea]

I've had good luck with WD lately. I'd stay clear of Seagate unless the price is too good to pass up.
WD Black if you can afford it (not any faster really, but comes with better warranty), otherwise WD blue will do...

Why stay away from seagate? In my case is quite the opposite i only had problems with WD, 2 x 1TB drives had bad sectors less then 2 years old, 1 WD completly dead out of nowhere on the other hand the 5 seagate hdd i had and the other 2 i sill have (1x2TB and 1x 320GB) worked and works perfectly.

It may be just my badluck.

EDIT: along this 2 seagate drives i have 2 WD 500GB which still works but my point was, with seagate i had no problems with WD i had plenty of problems.

 

[Solandri]

Most of the Seagate hate is based on two things. The 1.5TB drives they put out nearly a decade ago which had an abysmal failure rate, and Backblaze's early HDD reliability reports (which included a lot of those 1.5TB Seagate drives).

Seagate doesn't sell those 1.5TB drives anymore. And if you look at Backblaze's 2016 stats, WD actually has the highest failure rate (not that you should be comparing based on manufacturer, but if you do).

Personally, if you're going to avoid a manufacturer I would avoid WD. They remove standard features from their regular drives (TLER) to artificially create a new category of more expensive drive. They're implementing some crazy short head parking timeouts on some of their drives, which will cause your computer to stutter if you've got a pagefile on it. And they store the reallocated sector map in firmware instead of on a removable flash chip so you can do a simple board swap to restore your drive if the electronics got fried. (But the number of times that'll make a difference are so small that it doesn't really matter which manufacturer you go with.)

OP: There are only three HDD manufacturers. Seagate, WD, and Toshiba. Hitachi merged with WD, but governments forced them to sell their 3.5" production to Toshiba in order to gain approval for the merger. Statistically, the model of drive you get matters more for reliability than on the manufacturer of the drive. Stick to a model which gets decent ratings on Amazon and Newegg, and you should be good. (Just be aware that even the best drives still have about a 3% failure rate over 5 years - backup up often.)

 

[guanyu210379]

I have 2 broken Seagates within 3 years, while none from WD and Hitachi since 5 years.
The hate towards Seagate is true, somehow.
It is however highly depending on your luck. My infamous bad 7200.11 Seagate HDD from 2007 is still alive.

 

[madmatt30]

The WD blue 2tb is slow & noisy & 5400rpm & as above suffers overbearing power management.

1.Hitachi
2.Toshiba dt01
3. Seagate barracuda

Not even going to recommend WD for a 2tb drive , the black is horrendously overpriced.