External hard drive with large capacity: Western Digital or Seagate?

Currently the price of HDD is not good due to Thailand's flooding so I am planning to get one once the price drops. But should I get a WD or a Seagate?

Now I am deciding between the WD My Book Essentials 3TB USB 3.0 and Seagate's GoFlex Desk 4TB with USB 3.0, both have large capacity and USB 3.0 are what I need.

Currently The WD one is pretty pricy with 3TB capacity (~285 USD), but I found the Seagate with 4TB are in the same price (but one more Terabytes!). I did some searching on the internet and there are people said WD drives are much better than Seagate drives recently and some said Seagate is better than WD.

Now I'm really confused between capacity, price and quality. I will store tons of data on this drive so quality, stability is very important, what's your idea?

 

Thanks for reply.

the spec of WD: (copy from WD's website)

the specs of Seagate (4TB one): Desktop hard drive | External Desktop hard drives | FreeAgent | GoFlex Desk | Seagate

Well because I heard quite an amount of people said that Seagate drives have higher failure rate than WD recently which worries me (since the external HDD I'm gonna buy will be my main storage), and is it true that Seagate drives run hotter than WD?

 

agreed, what do you need to store? how safe does it need to be? where and how will you use the drive? home? road? warzone?

 

I plan to use this hard drive for storage so most of my data will be stored on it (videos, games, music, documents, softwares, pictures) and I usually take well care of my storage drive (since my data is important for me) so it will only be mainly used at home, on my desk (maybe I will take it with me to other place but NO using while moving and I guess I will rarely take it out of my room).

Main actions on this drive are just copy & paste files, no running applications directly or use it for downloading (I guess this will damage the drive at a certain level).

I hope the hard drive can last at least 5+ or 6+ years before I can transfer all of my data to a higher capacity drive in the future.

 

I would suggest getting something like this and adding your own 2-3 TB drives. Set the enclosure up in a RAID-1 array for redundancy. That way, if one of the drives fails, the other one will have all the data mirrored on it.

I hope you also have some kind of cloud-based storage solution (Carbonite, et al) for your absolutely crucial files. In addition to that, if you're super paranoid, buy a small fireproof safe and back up your files to DVD or even additional hard drives. Store it in your house or, better yet, someplace off-site (a friend's house, relatives, etc).

 

Trying to predict hard drive reliability based on brand name is useless.

The only thing you will get are anecdotal stories about how "I bought brand X, and that drive lasted forever! Always buy Brand X!" or "My friend bought brand Y, and the drive failed after 3 months. Never buy brand Y!" That kind of information is useless to you. Buying a brand that has a high likelihood and reputation for reliability isn't very helpful to you if you happen to own one of the few drives that does fail after a short time.

The fact is that any hard drive you buy *WILL* eventually fail. What actually matters when you buy a drive is warranty and support. The fact of warranty is more valuable than any anecdotal story you will read in the internet.

Out of the two drives you mentioned, I would buy a Western Digital drive without question. The reason is because Western Digital offers advance-ship RMA at no additional cost (Seagate charges $10 for this service). I have returned several drives to Western Digital over the past 20 years, and their advance RMA service is top-notch.

And of course, be aware that a single-drive solution is very susceptible to data loss due to drive failure. Be sure to have some kind of backup mehanism in place to back up your critical data, so that your data is safe even if/when your drive eventually fails.

 

Thanks guys, I decided to stick with the WD one since WD has a better warranty support than Seagate.

saturnotaku's hard drive enclosure is a great solution to consider but it's a bit out of my budget (I may use this solution once I saved more money). Guess I may buy another small 2.5" drive and use online file-hosting for the secondary backup of my crucial files.

 

Just as an other piece of information, if you're going insane safe, you may want to look into the ioSafe drives, see review http://forum.notebookreview.com/accessories/633983-iosafe-rugged-portable-1tb-review.html

 

What Kent said. I also generally buy WD drives, not because they're "better" than the competition, but because they have a superb warranty. With that said, if there's a really nice sale, I'll pass up Western Digital and buy the better deal.

Also, you can always look into online storage, too. I might be a pain to download again in case of a catastrophic failure, but hey, an extra copy is an extra copy.

 

Just about all of my drives have been WDs. I've never had them flat-out fail, but I did get some bad sectors on one that had been repeatedly dropped on a concrete floor. Take that as you will.

 

I have considered a DIY solution:

Buy a WD Caviar Green 3TB Desktop drive and put in Orico HDD enclosure.

I found this a little cheaper than buying the 3TB my book essential but I wonder how this HDD enclosure will compete against the enclosure of my book essential, will it beat in term of hard drive cooling?

I saw many people here recommended Vantec Nexstar HDD enclosure but I really couldn't find it in my place (China).

 

Disks can fail unexpectedly no matter how well you take care of it, so always have a backup or redundancy at the very least. Get a quality enclosure with active fan cooling for best disk reliability.

Hard drive prices right now is quite high, you might wanna wait a few months. It is predicted the global HDD stock will be 80% restored by the end of 1st quarter of this year.

I was lucky enough to grab some 3TB WD passports (USB2.0) yesterday for $150 each. I popped the enclosures open and took out the WD30EZRX drives in them and put them my PC and set them into RAID.