WD EARS series seems to be not super reliable either, but still better than Seagate and problems like DOA, format problems etc that are often mentioned in WD EARS review do not really destroy your data. I alway test my drives at first too and later keep on monitoring their SMART data. WD still seems to be more reliable statistically and have less problems that can occur without warning. About your own experience. Well, that of course counts, but a score from HUNDREDS of buyers counts even more. It is important to look at what problems most commonly arise to, not just the rough score. Still even if we only take notice of the rough score, WD is better. Anyway I have WD15EARS drive and it works great without any errors at all, is very silent, cool and fast enough for data storage.
Well, I know how unreliable some of the SG ES.2 drives are cause of a problem with the buffer on them, Seagate can't even fix it with an update, note that this is in raid5/6 24/7 with millions of hits. In an average PC the drive wouldn't fail in the same way, had 2 myself and they where pretty reliable, problem is that Seagate sells them as 24/7 server drives. But anyway, point is that you can not use the amount of negative feedbacks on newegg as an argument, since there will always be more negative than positive. Neither can't you compare against drives not older than a year and drives with very few positive feedbacks..
If you have better source, share it. Otherwise I consider newegg feedbacks to be on one the best sources for information. And it's not like only people who have problems leave feedback. Look at video cads for example. The ratio of negative to positive reviews pretty much reflects real world, don't you think so? I mean not everybody has a lot of experience with computers so you can understand why *some* people leave negative feedback and still some people have genuine complaints. So for hdds it's the same, people leave both good and bad feedback and for the aforementioned seagate large drives negative feedback ration is clearly bigger then most other drives.
Looking over newegg comments can be helpful in some degree, but even better is to combine the info over various sources, or just google for problems with a certain product. For the before mentioned Seagate ES.2 you can find several people getting fails with it, but note that the failure rate is higher in raid setups where SAS maybe should have been used instead. On the other hand you can find super reviews about products and good comments on newegg and still end up with a product that doesn't deliver. Cause you got a v1 instead of the reviewed v2... that is one of the most annoying things happening, usually hardware vendors don't tell you the exact revision.
