Seagate Vs Western Digital

[jaideeguy]

Shopping for a 500g hd that i already have an external case for and will swap out the existing 200g into my pc, so I'm making comparisons of seagate and WD for reliability. both are in the same price range [3kbaht] and have same warantee.

I've had 2 seagates fail on me in the past and have never tried the WD. if others have doubts about seagate, then it will be WD that gets my baht.

Your experiences will be appreciated........

[Crossy]

I honestly don't think any one manufacturer is 'better' than any other, all have had runs of 'bad' drives (remember the Thai built IBM Microdrives?). I certainly don't favour or avoid any specific maker.

I've had two WD drives fail in the last 18 months, both were replaced under warranty, but I've previously used WD drives for many years with no problems. One the other hand I had Seagates fail in the past but recently purchased units are just fine.

Go for the best price-performance.

I'm currently running 19 drives from various makers, a mixture of Seagate, WD, Maxtor and IBM/Hitachi, all are regular consumer (not Enterprise) drives. Drives fail, it's a fact of life, I simply replace the dead one and restore the backup (or rebuild the RAID) and get on with life

As always, others may have other experiences, YMMV.

Edited June 20, 2008 by Crossy

[Guest Reimar]

Shopping for a 500g hd that i already have an external case for and will swap out the existing 200g into my pc, so I'm making comparisons of seagate and WD for reliability. both are in the same price range [3kbaht] and have same warantee.

I've had 2 seagates fail on me in the past and have never tried the WD. if others have doubts about seagate, then it will be WD that gets my baht.

Your experiences will be appreciated........

I wouldn't go for either of them: the Seagate is slow and the WD has a quite high return rate.

The fast and best WD is the Raptor but difficult to get in Thailand.

I would go for an IBM/Hitachi and look direct for one from the Main Supplier ASYS because they give you a coupon for Recovery Service free of charge as well.

I use IBM/Hitachi in several computers, they fast and didn't fail until now and that's for some years already.

Cheers.

[youngkiwi]

I recommend Seagate and have never had one fail. Seagate tend to be slightly more expensive than Western Digital, but at the end of the day the specs are very much the same. I think it comes down to brand loyalty for many purchasers.

[onethailand]

Reimar is right. Seagates are slow and WD is not particularly reliable. I too would vote for the IBMs as a general rule. But this is from my past background as an integrator, and I have been out of the business for a while.

[youngkiwi]

I've had two IBM drives (made in Thailand) fail within three months of purchase previously. I would not recommend them.

[Guest Reimar]

I've had two IBM drives (made in Thailand) fail within three months of purchase previously. I would not recommend them.

Just for fun checked my database of sold Hard Disk by Brand and returned Warranty Claims over the last 3 years:

1. Fujitsu = sold: 27; return: 9 = 33%

2. IBM/Hitachi = sold: 429; return: 2 = 0.47%

3. Maxtor = sold: 357; return: 23 = 6.44%

4. Seagate = sold: 194: return: 38 = 19.59%

5. Toshiba = sold: 43, return: 9 = 20.9%

6. WD = sold: 129; return: 27 = 20.9%

So what do you think I would go for?

By the way, I running an computer business.

Cheers.

[onethailand]

I've had two IBM drives (made in Thailand) fail within three months of purchase previously. I would not recommend them.

As strange as it may seem, it is better to have a drive fail quickly than later on when it's got tons of important data on it and its warranty has just expired

IBM generally make better drives - however, as Crossy has pointed out, all manufacturers do have bad runs, and I'd be willing to bet you hit one particular bad batch.

Seagate drives may not appear to fail - but if you're not paying attention, the bad sectors will creep up on you until one day it's too late to do anything...

WD - very sensitive to shock and non-grounded current.

Maxtor is now owned by Seagate. Can be very good but can also be very incompatible at times LOL. So when you buy a Seagate, do some research on the particular model you're getting.

[Crossy]

So what do you think I would go for?

By the way, I running an computer business.

The voice of experience, we certainly see who to avoid.

Are the IBM drives significantly more pricey than the others?

[Tywais]

Those failure numbers are surprising. I have probably a couple of hundred Seagate drives at our research facility and can't even remember when we had a failure. Some over 10 years old and still running. I have a WD drive sitting in my office dead and some others in a pile. Also, disagree on the speed. The 7200.11 Seagate series has been pitted against the Raptor and did very well (and better in certain usage) in the comparisons. Also Raptors are not hard to find in Thailand, I have one and didn't have to look hard to find it.

I'm responsible for specifying and approving all computer systems at the lab and buy Seagate exclusively due to my experience in reliability and performance. Also my experience runs a few decades in this area and I would go for Seagate. All my servers have Seagates and they run 24/7 and have for a few years without any issues with the drives.

I suspect those who find Seagate's slow are drives pre-dating 7200.10 & 7200.11 series which have some of the fastest transfer rates around. I found my Raptor improved my bootup times but found for normal operations not noticeably faster then my Seagate 7200.10 models. Basically, for me, the price differences are not worth it.

Here is a performance test of a 7200.11 Seagate:

Another test comparison with Raptor:

For those who would like to see the technical report (not exactly light reading though) > Google Report .pdf

[Guest Reimar]

The speed of the Raptors I was talking about and their avaibility was meaning the Raptor with 10,000 rpm and NOT the 7,200.

From 8 Seagate 146 GB SCSI III 10,000 rpm, 5 was failing after 4 month and the rest of 3 after 11 month! that was just the last bigger bundle of Seagate HDD's I sold within the last running year and the most expensive as well. Normally the SCSI HDD are from higher quality but not those!

The numbers are just related to HDD's I sold within my business and I do NOT have the control over the most of that computers it's just about the claims within the last 3 years.

But if I can choose the brand for my customers, I use Hitachi within the last 1-2 years if possible. And there wasn't any claim within that time. The 2 IBM/Hitachi failing, was 2 1/2 years ago and from the IBM production. Since Hitachi took over the HDD production from IBM, no more "accident"!

I don't mind what others buy, the from me mentioned resultes just from my experiences.

Cheers.

[dekka007]

WD quietest drive of them all. Especially the 2.5" compared to the rest. Never had a Hard Disk failure in any brand for 20 years or more.

Go SSD if failure is a concern - prices are getting better.

[meadish_sweetball]

Reimar's return statistics on IBM/Hitachi look interesting.

Difficult to find those brands here in Chiang Mai though, the market is saturated with WD and Seagate with some Maxtor thrown in...

[Thanh-BKK]

Hi

I personally had three HDD's fail on me - one a Maxtor, at that point 1 1/2 years old and replaced under warranty within 10 days. The second a Seagate, 4 WEEKS old (!!) and it took over 6 weeks before i got a new one. The third was another Seagate which didn't work out of the box (BIOS didn't detect it), i brought it back within two hours - and had a lot of hassle! They practically inspected it with a magnifier until they found something that could have been a scratch and then refused to replace it on the grounds that i "had dropped it". That was at Seagate's own service center in Panthip where the shop which i had bought it sent me.

I had to threaten the shop with police to get my money back! As Seagate wouldn't cooperate no-matter-what. Finally got my cash back.

No more Seagate for me, EVER.

At the office i had close to 15 HDD's fail already (second-hand workstations bought in bulk), interestingly m,ost of them are Hitachi, the 40 GB variant and each one failed roughly 3 months after the warranty expired (via it's warranty sticker). On purpose, like a built-in life limiter?

Related to that, i also had a number of CD and DVD drives fail, every single one less than two months over the warranty. Can't be a coincidence, or can it??

Best regards.....

Thanh

[Tywais]

The speed of the Raptors I was talking about and their avaibility was meaning the Raptor with 10,000 rpm and NOT the 7,200.

So was I (10,000 rpm) which is what is shown in the comparison test above, and as far as I know there are no 7200 RPM Raptors. The comparison is a 7200 RPM Seagate (7200.11 vs a 10k Raptor). My Raptor is 10,000 RPM (150GB bought in Thailand) and again find the performance boost not worth the money, plus it is quite noisy and runs hot. But, obviously different individuals will have different experiences with this reliability issue and will depend on specific models/batches. I have no experience with Hitachi but will take a look at the charts out of interest.

[dotcom]

No western for me. Seagate only. Agree IBM/Hitachi very good in laptop drives.

[Tywais]

Google did an intensive failure analysis study using over 100,000 drives in their systems. It determined that hard drive failures are more frequent then the manufactures would like you to believe (no surprise there).

One example of the findings:

S.M.A.R.T. (Self Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology) scans that show a drive problem are very likely to fail within 60 days. Google determined that after receiving a SMART error, drives are 39 times more likely to fail than a drive that isn’t reporting one. Unfortunately, many other drives will also fail that never show a SMART warning (36% of SATA disks that failed were never detected by SMART).

And a synopsis of the technical report:

Google did a study using a large # of drives back in Feb. 2007. Interesting study. Several conclusions from that study that I found interesting:

1. No one drive manufacturer failed any more (or less) often.

2. If a drive made it past three years, it would have a high probability of making it to 5.

3. The three year age had a high failure rate.

4. a drive had about a 40% chance of failing within two months of its first scan error, and a similar rate for its first seek error.

5. One could not make a predictive model from SMART signals alone.

A breakdown of the findings: PCWorld There are no manufacturer names given for obvious reasons.

[jaideeguy]

As the Op, I'm now more confused than ever and can assume that it is 'luck of the draw' and that being said, I think that I'll just flip a coin.

Thanks for all the feedback and I did learn a lot from reading the replies....

JDG

[weary]

Google did an intensive failure analysis study using over 100,000 drives in their systems. It determined that hard drive failures are more frequent then the manufactures would like you to believe (no surprise there).

One example of the findings:

S.M.A.R.T. (Self Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology) scans that show a drive problem are very likely to fail within 60 days. Google determined that after receiving a SMART error, drives are 39 times more likely to fail than a drive that isn’t reporting one. Unfortunately, many other drives will also fail that never show a SMART warning (36% of SATA disks that failed were never detected by SMART).

And a synopsis of the technical report:

Google did a study using a large # of drives back in Feb. 2007. Interesting study. Several conclusions from that study that I found interesting:

1. No one drive manufacturer failed any more (or less) often.

2. If a drive made it past three years, it would have a high probability of making it to 5.

3. The three year age had a high failure rate.

4. a drive had about a 40% chance of failing within two months of its first scan error, and a similar rate for its first seek error.

5. One could not make a predictive model from SMART signals alone.

A breakdown of the findings: PCWorld There are no manufacturer names given for obvious reasons.

I remember reading about that study earlier. One would assume Google tested their hard drives in environments with stable power conditions, i.e. first world standard, though?

Since the reality in Thailand often looks a bit different for the average home user, maybe it is still possible some brands are more sensitive to power cuts, spikes and the like than others?

[jaideeguy]

Another stupid question......is the 500g any more [or less] reliable than other capacities, 350g or 750g?? The reason i was considering the 500g was that it seemed to have been on the market for a while and hopefully the kinks worked out. My pc guru friend who will install it has good connections for warranty issues and can get any issues solved same day.

[way2muchcoffee]

Hi

I personally had three HDD's fail on me - one a Maxtor, at that point 1 1/2 years old and replaced under warranty within 10 days. The second a Seagate, 4 WEEKS old (!!) and it took over 6 weeks before i got a new one. The third was another Seagate which didn't work out of the box (BIOS didn't detect it), i brought it back within two hours - and had a lot of hassle! They practically inspected it with a magnifier until they found something that could have been a scratch and then refused to replace it on the grounds that i "had dropped it". That was at Seagate's own service center in Panthip where the shop which i had bought it sent me.

I had to threaten the shop with police to get my money back! As Seagate wouldn't cooperate no-matter-what. Finally got my cash back.

No more Seagate for me, EVER.

That is extremely unusual, bordering on unbelievable. Seagate drives are under warranty with D-Comm on the top floor of panthip. I've taken 4 or 5 seagate drives there for replacement. In each case they didn't even inspect the drive. They just pulled a new one off the shelf an gave it to me. In an out in 20 minutes.

[Steve2UK]

Not wanting to complicate matters, but I'd go (and did go) for the Samsung Spinpoint T - runs quiet and relatively cool. Nice performer.

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/reviews/129818/sams...pinpoint-t.html

[nikster]

Not wanting to complicate matters, but I'd go (and did go) for the Samsung Spinpoint T - runs quiet and relatively cool. Nice performer.

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/reviews/129818/sams...pinpoint-t.html

Cool might be a very good thing in Thailand. I have had 3 (4?) laptop drives die over the last 2 years. For the record, 1 Hitachi which was a 100% data loss, 2 WDs which could be backed up before being replaced, and one other one I don't know the brand of. In all cases, I suspect they just got too hot at some point.

As for statistics - if I was Reimar I also would know who to choose. However, I trust the study that Google did a few years back which found no difference in different brands. Google did find a difference in different batches from different brands, e.g. the DeskStar disaster. The Google study was done on 10s of thousands of hard drives. Google was at the time running giant server farms built from cheap computers, with all sorts of different HDs in them.

[lopburi3]

I don't know what has happened now that they part of Seagate but Maxtor had a much lower power requirement when I was looking for 200gig drive for USB several years ago and went with that (now using inside desktop). One bonus was a good/free backup program in the form of MaxBlast that works with both brands of drives.

[HDRIDER]

Hi

What about Buffalo? (please dont say anything bad) i just bought a 2.5" ext. 400GB

[Veazer]

Not wanting to complicate matters, but I'd go (and did go) for the Samsung Spinpoint T - runs quiet and relatively cool. Nice performer.

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/reviews/129818/sams...pinpoint-t.html

Cool might be a very good thing in Thailand. I have had 3 (4?) laptop drives die over the last 2 years. For the record, 1 Hitachi which was a 100% data loss, 2 WDs which could be backed up before being replaced, and one other one I don't know the brand of. In all cases, I suspect they just got too hot at some point.

As for statistics - if I was Reimar I also would know who to choose. However, I trust the study that Google did a few years back which found no difference in different brands. Google did find a difference in different batches from different brands, e.g. the DeskStar disaster. The Google study was done on 10s of thousands of hard drives. Google was at the time running giant server farms built from cheap computers, with all sorts of different HDs in them.

I totally agree. I've had about three drives die here as well, all were in external cases with questionable venitlation, though the last (a Seagate) and a small fan in the case.

I disagree with one conclusion in the google article that heat is only a problem in 'extreme cases'. Google's definition of extreme equates to real world conditions here in Thailand. Above 45° Celsius, drive life begins to be affected negatively. There's times of the year where the drives on my desktop are that temperature before they've even been turned on, and almost too hot to touch during use.

Though the google study didn't find significant differences between brands, perhaps things change when the drives are used at hotter than normals temperatures. It could be that the IBM/Hitachi drive are much more tolerant of high temps than the others.

Here's a link to the google article for those interested: http://labs.google.com/papers/disk_failures.pdf

@HDRIDER: I don't believe Buffalo makes their own drives, you would need to open the case and see what they used.

EDIT: Here's the original post about drives temps for hard drives on Thai Visa: http://www.thaivisa.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=132434

Edited June 20, 2008 by Veazer

[Thanh-BKK]

Hi

I personally had three HDD's fail on me - one a Maxtor, at that point 1 1/2 years old and replaced under warranty within 10 days. The second a Seagate, 4 WEEKS old (!!) and it took over 6 weeks before i got a new one. The third was another Seagate which didn't work out of the box (BIOS didn't detect it), i brought it back within two hours - and had a lot of hassle! They practically inspected it with a magnifier until they found something that could have been a scratch and then refused to replace it on the grounds that i "had dropped it". That was at Seagate's own service center in Panthip where the shop which i had bought it sent me.

I had to threaten the shop with police to get my money back! As Seagate wouldn't cooperate no-matter-what. Finally got my cash back.

No more Seagate for me, EVER.

That is extremely unusual, bordering on unbelievable. Seagate drives are under warranty with D-Comm on the top floor of panthip. I've taken 4 or 5 seagate drives there for replacement. In each case they didn't even inspect the drive. They just pulled a new one off the shelf an gave it to me. In an out in 20 minutes.

Hi.

That was exactly my opinion, too. I came back to the shop where i bought the drive about two hours earlier, said "doesn't work" and one guy in there hooked it up to an open computer to test - it also didn't detect that drive, so i expected to be given a new one but no, they sent me upstairs (5th floor, behind that large place there which i forgot the name, it was a really shabby place with a shelf full of hard drives and a desk, otherwise empty, and two guys with magnifiers - i am NOT making this up! Above the door was a sign "Seagate Service center". One of them spoke English so i explained that i bough the drive just a couple of hours earlier and it didn't work right out of the package, upon he turned it around a few times in his hand and then gave it to the other guy who then started checking it with the magnifier. Then he showed something to the other guy who then checked with his own magnifier, and got back to me "you dropped the drive, sorry no warranty if you drop it". He showed me the tiny scratch that was probably caused by me sliding the drive into it's bay in the PC, which i told him, but they insisted that i "dropped it".

As i couldn't get anything from them (the more i insisted the less he spoke English!) i went back to the shop where i got the drive from, and insisted there on a replacement - upon which they insisted that Seagate was responsible. In the end i really said "i am calling my lawyer now, he will come here with the police and they close your shop because you sell illegal things here" which got them moving - i got my money back because at that moment i didn't want a new hard drive anymore, not such one. Bought a Maxtor then.

By the way this happened in 2002 or like that, maybe today they (Seagate) handle warranty claims different... however i had enough of them.

Best regards.....

Thanh

[onethailand]

I don't know what has happened now that they part of Seagate but Maxtor had a much lower power requirement when I was looking for 200gig drive for USB several years ago and went with that (now using inside desktop). One bonus was a good/free backup program in the form of MaxBlast that works with both brands of drives.

In the years before Maxtor was bought by Seagate, a number of models were so picky that you could not run the Maxtor as a master drive with any other brand but Maxtor as the slave.

Having said that, those same drives were considered the best of breed, better performance and reliability... just that you couldn't add a drive of a different brand. Their warranty back then was also good - simply take the drive back to the Maxtor service center (I think I had 2 failures out of a couple of hundred drives) and they would replace it, or even let you upgrade to a newer/higher capacity model for a very modest fee.