Question Looking to get a new HDD. Which should I buy? (and not sure about specs)

[testtube5]

My current HDD is getting quite old so I'm looking to replace it with a new 8tb-12tb drive. The ones I'm currently looking at are:

https://www.newegg.com/black-wd8002fzwx-8tb/p/N82E16822234500 (WD Black 8tb)
https://www.newegg.com/seagate-firecuda-st8000dx001-8tb/p/N82E16822185036 (Seagate FireCuda 8tb)

The one I currently have is an older WD black 6tb so I was considering just getting the same model but the Firecuda is both cheaper and has a larger cache, although I'm not sure if this matters much for my purposes.

The drive is just going to be used for mass storage, movies, pictures, documents, and some games, but I'm going to be using a WD Black SN850x 2tb SSD for my boot drive / any files I need to access faster (when I put together a new build in a few months).

If anyone has any other suggestions please let me know, and also if anyone is able to explain the price difference between these two seemingly similar drives. (maybe it's just manufacturer? I'm not sure)

 

[lvt]

Both brands are good.

For simple storage purpose, just get the largest one possible with the same money.

 

[testtube5]

How about the difference in cache and more importantly, is there any difference in reliability between Seagate and Western Digital? I'm reading quite a few people saying they are getting failures from Seagate more, but I haven't found any real data to back this up yet.

 

[Misgar]

If you want data on drive reliability, check out the Backblaze web site. They have failure rates for specific drives and yours might be amongst them.

However, any drive can fail at any time, so regard the Backblaze statistics as a guide only. Each manufacturer has its "good" drives and "bad" drives. Anyone remember the Deathstar (Deskstar)?

Consumer drives are built down to a price and tend to have reduced warranty periods. Enterprise drives are designed for 24/7/365 running but are more expensive. Don't worry about cache size, you probably won't notice the difference.

My personal preference is to buy CMR (PMR) drives and not SMR. Shingle drives can be slower performing during write operations after you've deleted large numbers of files.

Regardless of what you choose, keep backup copies of important data. The new drive will stop working at some point in the future and 12TB is a lot of data to lose.

 

[USAFRet]

How about the difference in cache and more importantly, is there any difference in reliability between Seagate and Western Digital? I'm reading quite a few people saying they are getting failures from Seagate more, but I haven't found any real data to back this up yet.

Fleetwide reliability is pretty even across all brands.

Of my last 3 dead HDDs....1 each Toshiba, WD, and Seagate.

Keep good backups.