Why buy WD?

Hi, I want to get some feedback regarding this question: why should I buy from WD instead of seagate?

I’m on here because I just registered 3 WD hard drives.  Here’s why:

I’ve used a PC for almost 30 years.  My first computer was an IBM PC-XT.  From the very beginning, the knock on Seagate drives was that they ran hot.  2 years ago, I decided to buy 2 USB externals (one for my wife, one for me) for backup and storage purposes.  The local brick and mortar had a special on Seagates and I figured that Seagate must have fixed the problem by then, so I gave them a shot.  Needless to say, a few weeks ago, my wife’s external crapped out.  (Not a problem since both drives were mirrored to each other and I still had a backup.)  While it was out to Seagate under warantee repair, my other Seagate died.  8 years of digital photos along with all my ripped music- GONE.  BIG FREAKIN’ PROBLEM.  (Seagate wanted $700-$2000 to try and recover the data under their “minimal recovery” service.  A local computer store examined the drive, said the drive itself was dead and it needed to go to a Clean Room for a shot to recover the data.  Cost ~ $1000.  Not a feasable option, so it’s in the trash.)

I have never lost a WD hard drive and I kick myself for giving Seagate a try because the price was right.  I replaced those Seagates with 2 Passport Essential SE and bought a SATA internal as well.  Losing my personal data cost me a lot more than the few dollars I saved.  I hope this helps.  Good luck.

One thing to keep in mind, when you’re looking for information about anything online, is that people with bad experiences are more likely to post about their problems… people tend to not just sign up to say “I have no problems”.  If you look up pretty much any medication, essentially all you see is people complaining about side effects… you don’t see the ones that have no problems with the medication.

Going by the internet, every medication is a death sentence, and every product ever manufactured is the worst thing ever.

Sure, if you read through these forums, you will find people having issues.  And sure, there are issues with some products and some setups. Nothing’s perfect and flawless.

Some people seem to go through hard drives as if they were assembled by three-year olds.  I know people that only get 2-3 months out of a HD before it dies, regardless of brand.

On the other hand, in 25 years I’ve only ever had one hard drive fail on me.

I’ve never had a problem with Maxtors, I’ve never had a problem with WDs, I’ve never had a problem with Hitachis.

The main reason I mostly stick to WD is that they’re the most readily available to me.  Locally, the market’s flooded with WD.  It makes for the lowest price and the best selection, so unless I start having problems with WD drives, there’s no reason for me to not keep choosing WD as I keep needing more storage.

In my particular case, it’s mostly a matter of convenience… I can pop around the corner and fill my cart with WDs… other drives take me further afield.  So, as I said, until I start having problems with WD drives, there’s no immediate reason to go out of my way to pay more for something else.

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Every computer I built for myself or friends,I usually use WD harddrives… had my 1tb black edition for approx 2years and still loving it.

However, with the recent(as in today) problem with my external andf seeing a pretty big crowd with the same problem… I’m having my doubts about this line of WD products.

Just my experience.

As far as it goes i’m going to assume WD and seagate are similar products. No one pointed any specific technical distinctions between the 2 brands. Who knows maybe they are even built in the same factory lol.

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everyone seem like experienced HD crash, some crash after few years, some crash within few months, this happened to all sort of brand i believe.

and you know what? my WD harddisk crash after i updated their new firmware, haha funny right? just bought it for 6 months, and if i want to get back the data and claim the HD “one to one” change warranty, i have to go to their Data Recovery service and need the charge is tripple the HD price, Western Digital huh!

Never trust important data to just one drive internal or external no matter who makes it. I don’t automatically update firmware and drivers anymore if I’m not having issues. I fried my video card last year with the newest driver that had a detect and messed up fan speeds. If it ain’t broke don’t fixit is frequently best in my oppinion.

Joe

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Well, I spoke too soon, it looks like…  another Caviar drive causing constant BSODs on my computer.  I don’t know whether the PC’s cooking the drives (it shouldn’t be – the PC’s in the basement, on vinyl (not carpet) and I clean the dust out frequently), or whether they’re all just bad, but it seems to be becoming an epidemic.

That’s the point right there.  I’m so paranoid with my data that I refuse to invest in only one drive, or one drive manufacturer.  When it comes to data storage, I go after the 2 for 1 special.  If I can get two drives for the price of a “good” one, I will.  Nowadays, there’s no telling how a product has been handled, shipped, or manufactured.  Therefore, the more the better.  If you’ve ever lost critcal data, and I have, you don’t screw around with just one backup. And if you think you’re that lucky, then you deserve what you get. 

Thats assuming you don’t mind losing your data. I reformat every 3 months and just wipe out everything I don’t need. Anything important, yeah i’m going to have at least 3 copies of, but most everyday files you can just download again…

 I may sound a bit paranoid, but I keep my data backed up to my MyBook Live, to the secondary HDD of my Desktop (Caviar Blue), my Laptop (Seagate drive that came inside) and Dual-Layer DVD’s…

I mean, if my data is not safe in at least 2 places at once then I feel I don’t have a backup…

Better to prevent than to regret! 

You’re not paranoid. I use 2 externals for manual backups with GoodSync. I have a third external I use for images. The HD is partitioned so I make one of system and one of data partition. It’s amazing how many people move everything to an external drive as an only copy.

Joe

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What is your time worth? Regardless of the brand and reliability, people who work with critical data don’t trust hard drives; they back up all their important work in triplicate daily on certified DVD media. It may be considered paranoia, but in the industry they work, one disk may be the culmination of months of work.

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I have to agree with several previous posters. HD’s are so cheap today that there is no excuse for not having 1 or two additional copies. I keep two copies of stuff at home and 1 copy off-site. That seems to work very well and I’ll have no issues if and when my working drives fail.

It’s pretty much a non-issue as to which brand you buy. They’re all mass-produced mechanical devices and subject to random failures here and there.

I noticed you mentioned both backing up and imaging . What do you recommend for imaging? Right now I am using the imaging in windows 7 but I found out the hard way that it is not true imaging as I did a restore and found it failed to restore my tv recordings (windows media .wtv). On top of that the windows 7 backup system was running out of room even though it is set to manage filespace. My computer has a 640 WD BLUE backing up to 1 T WD USB 3.0. To make space, I just bought both a 2T WD nas and a 3T WD USB 3.0 external to offload my media. Just trying to figure out how to set it up all so everything is backed up. Probably something like this: Computer backs up to 1T Media stays on 2T nas - Nas is then backed up to 3 T. 3T can stay attached to computer or WD TV Live plus that I also just picked up. Does this sound like a sound plan?

I use Acronis True Image paid. Paragon  http://www.paragon-software.com/home/br-free/ and Macrium  http://www.macrium.com/reflectfree.aspx have free fersions. Most of the free versions are stripped down from full edition.

Joe

One other thing to keep in mind is that EVERY SINGLE HARD DRIVE will eventually die. The average lifespan on a GOOD drive is 3-5 years. WD’s tend to average higher on that scale than seagates in my experience, but they all eventually will go. Outside of tape backups, there is no real reliable data storage outside of making copies. Make sure you always have 2 copies of any file at any given time. If 1 drive fails, than you only have 1 copy now-- go out and get something else to copy them to as quick as possible, else you are risking that data while you wait.

Thanks to all of you for reminding me to get my backups on schedule again. 

I should know better after a fatal HD crash in my (one and only) old XP laptop a few years ago.  The PC crashed after coming out of sleep mode with the nasty ol’ blue screen.  It reappeared again after reboot to let me know a Windows boot-up file was corrupt.  All my data, email, etc. at that time was on that little laptop.

The good news is that all the data was recovered at no cost (other than for the tip I gave the person who fixed it.)  Fortunately, my wife is in IT at a large tech company, and a good friend of hers at work is one of the firm’s Windows PC setup and repair person. 

She took a look, couldn’t get the bad file replaced, the laptop still could not boot, so she used the free Puppy Linux OS that she put on a CD to boot the laptop.  Once booted, the following day I passed on a WD Passport drive to her to attach so she could copy all my data files off.  None of them were damaged; apparently it was only the Windows boot file that was damaged.

When it came back home, I had the Puppy Linux CD to boot with.  So, I double-checked folders for any overlooked data and put it onto the Passport. 

I immediately bought a Win 7 laptop, and I was back in business with the data; which today is on a drive in the Win 7 machine.   I also replaced the drive in the XP, did all the necessary Windows and other HP programs installing (because that laptop actually came with full-fledged restoring CDs).  So, the PC is working great again and is the PC  used for creating DVD ISO files to play within the network and via the Live Plus.

THE TAKEAWAY from all my jabber here is; if you haven’t heard of, or used, Puppy Linux; you now know how it saved the day!

As a side note:  Someone in these forums said over a year ago they read that Google (who replaces many server HDs daily) had statistics showing that a hard drive in constant use that doesn’t fail within the first six months will likely live for 5-6 years.  So, if we have any drive that age, we likely ought to have it “put down” and replace it before it is too late.  (The drive that failed in my laptop was about 5 yrs old.)

Heheh… From that story, I would say that Puppy Linux HELPED save the day, but the fact that you actually had BACKUPS is what mattered the most.

I “Ghost” my PCs every night.   Full system backups once a month, and incrementals of every volume every night.

mike27oct wrote:

As a side note:  Someone in these forums said over a year ago they read that Google (who replaces many server HDs daily) had statistics showing that a hard drive in constant use that doesn’t fail within the first six months will likely live for 5-6 years.  So, if we have any drive that age, we likely ought to have it “put down” and replace it before it is too late.  (The drive that failed in my laptop was about 5 yrs old.)

 

 

The industry average I think is 3-5 years. after 3 years you are taking a big risk- after 5 your taking a huge one. That being said, with proper backups theres no need to retire an older drive unless it got too small. I generally move them to be auxiliry backups for unimportant stuff. Once a drive is too old it comes out of the system, gets formatted, and put back in using a USB enclosure. I backup less important (non-critical) stuff, disconnect the drive, and put it on a shelf somewhere (in an anti-static bag and not connected to the USB enclosure.) This way if something happens to my files, and I lose stuff thats not important enough to backup, theres a chance I can save some time and recover them from the old drives.

For example I may be able to restore parts of my music collection from one of these-  I can always download them again and they take too much space to backup all the time. If my main drives go down, I can restore as many as possible from these and only re-download a fraction of the library instead of the whole thing - this can save me days or weeks of work (downloading, originizing, etc.).