Quality Comparison - Western Digital vs Seagate

[sphfaros]

I've always been buying Western Digital hard drives and they have been quite reliable for me. I've recently heard that people have always put their faith in quality into Seagate. I must have missed something, but is this really the case?

It would really help if people shared some of their personal experiences, good or bad, with both companies.

I'm building a new system and want to buy a nice primary hard drive. Possibly something at 10k rpm.

 

[Fullmetal Chocobo]

I had 6 Western Digital hard drives in my system, and never had a single problem. I sold them only because I was converting to SATA (those ribbon cables were raising them temp in my computer 12 degrees). I'm using Hitachi 250gb SATA's now.
Tas.

 

[imported_Kensai]

If you're going for 10K RPMS, the only way to go is WD.

 

[w00t]

seagate has a 5 year warranty they are fast and quite that is what people like about em.

 

[mauiblue]

I've only owned WD drives since first buying my first computer six years ago. At present, I have the WD internal drives that is listed in my sig and two Seagate external drives. The Seagates are very quiet and are an excellent investment to my home system.

 

[edmundoab]

too early for me to say anything on the WD raptor that I have
i have own an earlier maxtor and it did alright,

now having a 16mb cache 300GB one, again, its a new drive

but so far, the only brand that boiled my temper was the IBM (now Hitachi)
died twice in 2 years..
if I did not have a spare HDD to use,
my PC woulda been dead until I had my RAM completed...

will never buy an IBM again, as much as I can tell you, its a really fast drive. but reliability... is .... horrendous
yes they do provide warranty, but so what, the inconvinience and cost to send it back. bleh

 

[Elcs]

I havent used a Seagate drive since my old 420mb. I currently use 3 WD drives, 80Gb, 120Gb and 200Gb all on 4 year warranty according to WD's Warrnty Checker. All quiet and Ive had no hassle from either 1 of them.

From what Im seeing on Anandtech, WD and Seagate are pretty equal in quality at 7200 rpm. The only real difference being 5 year warranty on Seagates.

 

[Fullmetal Chocobo]

I've only had bad experience with the Maxtors, which is why I refuse to get any of the 16mb buffer hds.
Tas.

 

[KoolDrew]

Originally posted by: w00t
seagate has a 5 year warranty they are fast and quite that is what people like about em.

 

[Sweeper]

I've always seem to prefer WD's. Very reliable IMO. Though I have a Maxtor as my 2nd HD. I have 3 WD's now. 1 60GB and 2 10GB HDs. All work great.

 

[Tostada]

I've had some pretty bad experiences with WD, all the way back to their 1.6GB drives that always failed, but one person really can't judge the reliability of a manufacturer as a whole. You have to look at the overall picture. For example, look at NewEgg and you'll see a much higher percentage of complaints on WD drives than Seagate, but WD is still doing well overall.

The most important thing to me as far as reliability is warranty and RMA policy. With any drive, it probably won't fail, but if it does fail you want it to be covered and you don't want to be hassled.

Seagate and WD both have good RMA policies every time I've had a drive fail. Maxtor and Hitachi/IBM do not. They both give you a really hard time. Maxtor and IBM used to cross-ship drives. They don't anymore. You have to send in your old drive and wait a few weeks before they'll send out a new one. Hitachi will harrass you quite a bit, telling you that you need to run their diagnostic software and get a code from it, and if the drive has bad sectors they'll just tell you to low-level format it then run the program again (which will tell you there are no problems even when there are). It's really ridiculous.

So, Hitachi makes fast drives, but I'm never getting another one. I'm sticking with Seagate and WD (and maybe Samsung). Right now I think the Seagate 7200.8's are the way to go if you're not getting a Raptor 74.