I normally purchase Seagate for desktops and Hitachi, Samsung or Toshiba for laptops for my clients or personally hard drive replacement and/or upgrade. But this month I had no choice but to purchase some WD's drive due to supply from my wholesaler. Well so far 2 of those WD's have come back already defective, one 3.5" drive and one 2.5" drive. So I take it WD has not changed when it comes to reliability. Last WD drive I purchase!!!
wow...getting a faulty WD harddrive is fairly rare compared to Seagate (since the merger with Maxtor). Out of 100 or so WD drives.....I've only ever had 1 fail in less than 5 years that was actually the fault of the drive (integrated controller failure). I've had 2 ATA66 drives fail....1 due to a software error and 1 due to sheer age (10 years is a long time for a drive that's powered 24/7).
I have over ten WD drives (including new ones), not one has ever failed me. I go and buy two Samsung 2TB drives, and one of them has a defective disk. Sometimes you just win the short straw.
It seems like luck of the draw for both Seagate & WD. I've had to replace a Seagate three times & a WD once in the past couple years.
Maybe its not WD fault, cuz when you see what delivery guys are doing to boxes with some expensive equipment its not wonder that many product are damaged. IMO WD is the best company in HDD scene, some 3 years ago i bought Seagate drive, and it died 2 days after and i lost 320 gb of personal data , mostly music it hurts but what can you do.
Almost all of my hard drives are WD drives and i have never had any of them go bad on me. Heck i have an old 80GB that i still use to this day and still has not failed or show signs of any kind....
It's amazing how people get in an uproar based on conjectural evidence. If you look at the failure rates of the drives on Newegg or Amazon, you'll see a pretty striking spread in some of the families. I used to purchase the WD 640GB drives for my new builds (customers or myself) and I'd had a couple go south on me. I've experienced the same with Seagate, but with their 1TB drives. I've never had a Samsung go south on me, but I've only recently started to pick them over WD for main builds. My point is that you'll always find fault in something that you've got a prejudice over in the first place. If something fails me, I don't cry over spilled milk (and yes, I'm a data paranoid FREAK, backing up things at least three levels deep in most cases) but if I'm done wrong by a maker, I'll stop using them for a short time, but I always go back and try them out again. You just never know, sometimes bad batches come through. I'm not trying to tell you that you're a fool for saying what you're saying about WD (or anyone saying anything about any maker for that matter) just that QC isn't perfect, humans make these things, failures happen. WD isn't trying to sell you bad drives. At least their CEO doesn't think your drives are mainly used for porn
I had no prejudice against Maxtor, until I had 5 of their drives fail on me in the same day.... Now I'm glad they no longer exist....
I'm running 12 of the 2TB WD Caviar Greens in a RAID6 set, not had a failure yet. Plus i do believe WD offer an advanced replacement of faulty drives too (well they did with the Raptors anyway) I think they are great drives Ordered 5 x Samsung Spinpoint 500GB drives a couple of years back, 3 arrived faulty. It's all luck of the draw.
I recently had a 320gb WD fail on me after 4.5 years of power on hours. I dropped it a few times on my desk and slapped it back in. It worked for another 2 weeks (to retrieve the data) before failing agian. I pulled an 80gb WD drive from a friend's computer (still working) that had around 6 years of power on hours a few weeks ago. On the other hand I've had 3 Seagate drives die right around 3 year of use each time and every Maxtor hdd I've had never lasted 1 year.
Received one of my RMA drives from WD. DOA!!! Nice I guess checking drive before shipping it a little too much for them.
Ive tried that too. My first purchase back then when i was upgrading my HDD was a Western Digital Blue 500 GB. - Dead On Arrival! So i returned it and they gave me another one and after 1 day of working - it was not detected! So i changed into a Seagate Barracuda and had no problems till today. Thats why I also would not be getting WD's anymore. They used to be good back then, but lately ive been seeing a lot of issues with their low end HDDs (blue and greens)
I still laugh every time I read threads like this one. The local pc shop here handles computers for doctors' offices, the military, nasa, and countless other companies. All they sell is WD harddrives. I've asked several times how often he sees drives fail and his response is always the same "On rare occassions."
Well 3 in one month is not a rare occasion! This has so far exceeded any Seagate I've every RMA'd for personal or client use. I talked to WD and they are sending me another drive Advanced RMA to me with a Pre-Paid Return shipping for the second defective HDD at no cost to me. By the way I to am a PC repair shop and I see more WD failures then other drive manufactures here. One of the reason I very rarely purchase WD drives for my client repairs. I made an exception here and see what that got me and my clients. All three drives have an August 2011 manufacture date and are different models.
I've never had a WD drive fail on me. I've got at least 10 on a shelf and all of them still work. I even plugged in the 20GB drive I bought back in 2001 last weekend and it's still going strong.
K got my replacement of the replacement from WD and all seems fine I even ran diagnostic scan on drive and it passed with flying colors. Hope this does not give my client problems.
I've dealt with 4 different local shops over the years and they've all told me the same thing... "If you want a drive that will last, buy WD". I've been using WD harddrives for nearly 20 years and I've only had 3 WD harddrives fail in that time. However, I've never seen a Maxtor drive last longer than 3 years (best case scenario) with most failing within the first 90 days. Hell, I personally had 5 fail within less than 8hrs (bought the first one Saturday morning, returned the 5th that same Saturday afternoon). My Crucial M4 256GB and M4 64GB are the first non-WD drives I've purchased in more than 10 years.
back in 2007-2008 (shop pc ) head techn.. i say many seagate fail, vs wd (but they stilled failed), depends on models sold(def models/batches) from sert factories mad at. biggest drive was 1tb at the time(late 2008 seagate rel 1.5tb model(needed firmware fix) most failures where smallest drive up to 500g typ we also sold many enterprise hdds. wd re2 entprise hdd (bad) 2 out of 300 + sold, seagate enterprise (es) (faulity out of packet) 25 from 200+, (started going wd in enterprise) the wd 2 bad units had bad virbrations (i rejected them) but no media errors(other than very loud) (wd tests the enterprise drives before release) the seagate most ware dead out of packet, 3-4 had bad vibrations (loud+ shaked) but media was falt free at start. i believe that seages entp drives wher not tested at factory lvl explains why dead out of packet where happening for entprise drives. even if the factory test the hdd (wd) it hard to find(test) for bad vibrations. I remember when the first 640g 3.5 wd hrive came out,(standard 7200pm) iv vibrated badly, compared to 700+ or 500 size wd drives, you hook it up + place it on desk, and unlike other drives.. it would keep knocking the desk+ moving on the desk(virating+moving)