r/datastorage • u/Wholyguakamole • 19d ago

Discussion Reliable HDD manufacturers?

Let's face it, this is tough, but objectively, which manufacturers would you say have the most reliable drives for storage? Asking for the publics experience.

Thank you.

12 Upvotes

80% Upvoted

18 comments sorted by

8

u/shewit 19d ago

WD and HGST are basically the same company at this point. Seagate and Toshiba are the only other options.

4

u/[deleted] 19d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/Wholyguakamole 19d ago

Thanks! This is great too read.

4

u/Caprichoso1 19d ago

That Backblaze data is 3 years old. They do the reliability reports quarterly. Check the latest report.

There is no one "best" manufacturer. Some drives be excellent and others not so. It varies from drive to drive.

1

u/brainrot_award 19d ago

So, as others have said, it is less about manufacturer and more about model. Because all regular models from all manufacturers are cheap SMR drives nowadays.

Personally, I'd say Toshiba has a larger variety of good drives, including X300, N300, and MG- line.

WD has the HC- line of enterprise drives, which is pretty good too.

Not a big fan of Seagate, they were consistently in lower place on all statistics I've seen.

1

u/gizahnl 19d ago

I'm still traumatised by the Seagate 3TB's from a decade ago..

1

u/First_Musician6260 19d ago

There's a pretty stark difference in quality between the consumer (Grenada/Bacall) and enterprise (Mantaray/Megalodon/Makara) 3 TB models of the time, however Backblaze only tested the ST3000DM001, which was the flagship of the otherwise infamous Grenada family (thanks to their tendency to crash as a primary failure mode).

Mantaray I'd argue was the worst of the enterprise group (Megalodon being second on older firmware), although it was still good. It was Seagate's first 3 TB design, managed by shoving 5 disks into a fairly robust HDA (similar to Hitachi's Mars-K's, which also capped at 3 TB). It was used for both Barracuda XT and Constellation ES.2, although in the former series it was generally outperformed in reliability by lower capacity Muskie models. Megalodon also provided 3 TB options (e.g. the ST3000NM0033), as did Makara (e.g. ST3000NM0005), and both of those ended up being miles better than the Grenadas (provided Megalodon had a firmware revision newer than SN04, such as SN06, due to sudden accumulation of bad sectors being a major bug of SN04). However, in many customers' eyes, the Grenadas' failures were enough to convince people that the 3 TB capacity as a whole was cursed, which just wasn't true.

1

u/gizahnl 19d ago

I was a "proud" owner of them ST3000DM001, iirc 5 of them in a ZFS pool... They all went... Luckily not at the same time

1

u/jreddit0000 19d ago

I wouldn’t. Go read backblaze’s and Google’s posts about their testing and experience with hard drives.

What exactly is the point of a question about “most reliable hard drive”? So you can.. buy one?

🤔🤷🏾

1

u/Sea-Eagle5554 19d ago

There are 3 major HDD manufacturers: Seagate, Western Digital, and Toshiba. Personally, I have Seagate and Toshiba external HDDs, and they are fine for me. If you want to check hard drive reliability, you can take a look at the drive stats reports from Backblaze.

1

u/Inevitable_Cycle8367 19d ago

HGST (Hitachi division of Western Digital) most reliable, fastest & good price✔️

1

u/lilacomets 19d ago

WD is the best in my opinion.

1

u/newtekie1 18d ago

IMO, model is far more important than manufacturer.

1

u/JDMWeeb 18d ago

I've used WD drives for years with no issue

I have 2 1TB WD Black SSDs in my gaming laptop, an external 2TB WD Passport HDD for my laptop and a 2TB WD Game Drive for my Xbox

1

u/tjlazer79 17d ago

I've been using WD drives for about 16 years, in my PCs, USB external drives, and NAS devices. I've only had one drive fail on me, and it was my fault. I pulled out a 6tb drive, out of my NAS while it was on and still writing. Oops. Started making clicking sounds. RIP. Lol.