How good are Western Digital hard drives?

[kansas_dude]

I just bought a 1TB

 

[Gam3r01]

They are a solid, quality, and reputable brand.

 

[thx1138v2]

The only better,IMO, is the HGST and they are more storage center/enterprise drives so they get pricey and are typically 2TB and up. You might get a longer life from a laptop drive in a desktop because they have more rugged construction.

There are always engineering trade offs between cost, reliability, size, and speed depending on the target market, i.e. desktop, laptop, enterprise, data center, etc.

 

[Solandri]

You only have three choices. WD, Seagate, and Toshiba. HGST merged with WD, but the governments added a condition for the merger. HGST's 3.5" drive production would have to be sold to Toshiba (which up til then only produced 2.5" drives), while WD got to keep the 2.5" HDD production. Any other "manufacturer" is just buying drives from one of these three companies and rebranding it (e.g. Samsung = Seagate).

A lot of the love affair with WD was because of BackBlaze's first HDD report which showed Seagate with the highest failure rate. HGST drives were nearly impossible to find because of the merger, which left WD as the "best" choice.
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/what-hard-drive-should-i-buy/

I spent a lot of time countering this misguided infatuation with WD. HDD reliability doesn't really correlate to manufacturer. Each manufacturer makes many models, and tries out new technology in each model to improve performance and/or reduce cost. Sometimes the technology works and the drive is reliable. Sometimes it doesn't work and the drive is unreliable. So if you want to buy a reliable drive, you really have to look at the failure stats on a model-by-model basis.

In BackBlaze's latest HDD report, they did finally break it down by model. You can see that like I've been saying for years, there's a huge variance in reliability based on model within a single manufacturer. And you can see that Seagate came up as worst in earlier reports because of a single unreliable model skewing their overall statistics. WD came out worst this time, but some of their drive models are good.

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-reliability-q4-2015/

Unfortunately, HDD statistics for individual models is incredibly difficult to come by. And usually there isn't enough data to form a valid statistical opinion until the drive has been on the market for 2-3 years. By which time it's getting close to being phased out so the data isn't helpful.

So just buy whatever HDD best suits your needs, or whose noise doesn't bug you as much. And keep backups religiously so your data will be safe in the event of a drive failure.