[SOLVED] seagate or WD?

[brannsiu]

I always wonder which brand makes portable hard drives of better quality, looks like there is no absolute answer. What is your real experience?

 

[NightHawkRMX]

You are going to find people with varying experiences. Neither brand is objectively better than the other.

Personally I have a bin of failed WD drives but not a single Seagate. Must recently I had a friend with a WD portable 2.5in drive that had failed with just 109 power on hours. Granted, it was an older drive and I do not know how it was handled, BUT, it was barely used at all and failed. On the other hand, I know of people with opposite experience who have many failed seagate drives.

Generally, if you are concerned about reliability of a portable drive, get an SSD. Hard drives don't like shock, which is likely going to occur when moving around a portable drive.

 

[sonofjesse]

Who makes the best truck Chevy or Ford?
Who makes the best car Honda or Toyota?

You might say the Toyota Camry is better than the Honda Civic, but you might say the Honda Accord is better than the Toyota Yaris. (see same brand, but different classes of cars, not an apples to apples)

Your asking the wrong question.

I often see questions like who makes the best computer?
What is better HP or Dell?
Which printer should I get?

These questions can not be answered without specific information.

Generic questions don't help, what the your trying to decide is the best model based on your goals. When you say quality are you talking about MTBF? Or do you mean the fit and finish? What is your GB workload for these drives? Consumer drives aren't going to give you the workload an enterprise drive will.

The question should look like which is better WD ABC 123 vs Seagate ABC 123. One is 90 dollars one is 85 dollars. It's all about model vs model, then figure in price, then see which provides the best value for your based on your goals.

Good luck!

 

[USAFRet]

I always wonder which brand makes portable hard drives of better quality, looks like there is no absolute answer. What is your real experience?

Either.

Looking at fleetwide fail stats, except for a couple of outlying specific models....there is no more than a fraction of a percentage fail rate difference between the various brands.

Delve into the fail rates from BackBlaze:
https://www.backblaze.com/b2/hard-drive-test-data.html

If you and 100 of your neighbors buy the same drive, Model X...1 or 2 of them will fail in the next year.
Sucks if it is YOUR drive.

Same with if you all purchase Model Y.
Or half and half.

The 2 guys that buy a Model Z, and one of those fails..."OMG! Model Z sux!!"



Drive fail does not really count.
If it dies within the warranty period, free replacement.

What REALLY counts is the data on it.
This is why backups are so important.

 

[fzabkar]

HGST's 3.5" HDDs seem to be the most reliable these days. Toshiba's 2.5" HDDs seem to be the most reliable in that form factor. That could change, though.

Note that WD rebadges HGST HDDs, so there could be a native HGST drive under the "WD" badge, or a native WD drive under the HGST badge.

 

[mundial]

I always wonder which brand makes portable hard drives of better quality, looks like there is no absolute answer. What is your real experience?

Neither.

If all goes belly up, you want an external drive where you can open it up and find an native S-ATA disk. i.e. no USB port integrated into the disk's PCB. That can complicate things if data recovery is needed.

WD disks do not offer this. All their disks use integrated USB port.

Seagate disks use native S-ATA disks. However, their firmware and disk heads can be very iffy.

This leaves a company like Verbatim who usually use quality disks like Toshiba inside their enclosures AND use a native S-ATA connection. The best of both worlds.

This and what other posters have said about backup and you should be ok!

 

[NightHawkRMX]

I agree, you should get one which is just a SATA drive inside.

I had an external drives power supply board fail, but since the drive inside was standard SATA, I just plugged it into a computer internally.

 

[USAFRet]

I agree, you should get one which is just a SATA drive inside.

I had an external drives power supply board fail, but since the drive inside was standard SATA, I just plugged it into a computer internally.

The drive connections may be SATA standard, but the sector size, controlled by the enclosure, may be incompatible.
512 vs 4k.

Rendering the existing data on it inaccessible.

 

[fzabkar]

If all goes belly up, you want an external drive where you can open it up and find an native S-ATA disk. i.e. no USB port integrated into the disk's PCB. That can complicate things if data recovery is needed.

WD disks do not offer this. All their disks use integrated USB port.

Seagate disks use native S-ATA disks. However, their firmware and disk heads can be very iffy.

This leaves a company like Verbatim who usually use quality disks like Toshiba inside their enclosures AND use a native S-ATA connection. The best of both worlds.

This and what other posters have said about backup and you should be ok!

WD's 3.5" external drives have separate USB-SATA bridge PCBs. It's only their 2.5" drives that integrate the bridge onto the HDD PCB.

WD's Elements models are not encrypted, but their other My Books are. That's another complication.

Toshiba's external 2.5" drives (Canvio) integrate the USB-SATA bridge onto the HDD PCB.

 

[NightHawkRMX]

Not saying you are wrong, but that wasn't the case with that drive.

 

[mdd1963]

Given a choice between some other major brand I've heard of and Seagate, I'd likely choose 'any other major brand'....

 

[fzabkar]

Not saying you are wrong, but that wasn't the case with that drive.

It depends on how old it was.

https://www.google.com/search?q=toshiba+pcb+usb&tbs=isz:m,itp:photo&tbm=isch

For example, MQ01UBF050 and MQ01ABF050 are the USB and SATA versions of the same drive. The difference is in the "U" and "A".

 

[brannsiu]

About backup, I'd like to take this chance to ask, how can I copy a file while preserving its creation date, modified date as well as other dates? I know that copying a file, the new file will have the new creation date (and/ or some other dates modified). I have my personal reason to keep the original dates to make future reference

 

[USAFRet]

About backup, I'd like to take this chance to ask, how can I copy a file while preserving its creation date, modified date as well as other dates? I know that copying a file, the new file will have the new creation date (and/ or some other dates modified). I have my personal reason to keep the original dates to make future reference

This depends on what and how you are doing this backup.
A simple Copy/Paste create a new file, with new dates, etc.

An Image in a tool such as Macrium preserves all metadata about the files/folders. Dates, etc.
Macrium can do individual folders if you so choose.

 

[Colif]

I would get an external ssd and then you don't have to worry about dropping the thing. Most of my external Hard drives have died so I don't like the idea of any of them. They were WD but I think it was how I treated them that ended their lives, not their own doing.
Internally, i have used WD & Seagate and so far none of them have died on me in 10 years.

 

[eldridgep2]

About backup, I'd like to take this chance to ask, how can I copy a file while preserving its creation date, modified date as well as other dates? I know that copying a file, the new file will have the new creation date (and/ or some other dates modified). I have my personal reason to keep the original dates to make future reference

Robocopy is your friend....

https://petri.com/copy-files-preserve-timestamp

If it's for PC Backups etc you can even make batch files to do it an schedule them from task scheduler. The /MIR switch is a godsend as it will only mirror changes from the host drive to the destination drive so is really quick to do so.