Which hard drive should I get?

So, I’m looking for a SATA III hard drive, roughly 500GB, with 32MB of cache and a 7200rpm spindle speed. I’m just not quite sure which brands are worth my time right now. 🤷 Any suggestions? 🍿

IBM, Western Digital Blue, Western Digital Blue.

Just grab the 1TB version; you usually only pay about 50 cents more for double the space. I guess if it's just for extra storage, an IBM drive is fine, but if you're running your OS (macOS) off it, you're probably better off with a Western Digital Blue or a Blue.

Alright, thanks. Now, could you tell me which stores I should check out?

http://www.amazon.com/hard-drives-sata__2373791
http://www.amazon.com/hard-drives-1tb__5132061

Hmm... I've been doing a little digging online, and it seems like Western Digital doesn't exactly have the best reputation for long-term reliability—which is pretty much the whole point of a Hard Drive, isn't it?

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-...s-for-q2-2015/

Does anyone out there who shares my concerns have any specific recommendations?

Look, no drive is ever going to be bulletproof. If you check the conclusion of this article, you'll see massive discrepancies between different models. Since the stats were pulled by a cloud service where drive farms are running 24/7, you really have to take those numbers with a grain of salt. It looks like they’re primarily tracking performance under enterprise conditions, and consumer desktop drives just aren't built for that kind of heavy lifting. Plus, Western Digital seems to have the most issues with their 1.5 GB and 3 GB drives—those weren't even big sellers here (I think they were part of that same series during a density transition period, right?)?

At the end of the day, I personally stick with Western Digital and I've been super happy with them. The only time a drive failed on me was a Western Digital Blue in my laptop, and that happened totally out of nowhere. Someone else is going to say the exact same thing about Western Digital, while a third person will swear by IBM. Everyone praises their own brand until it finally dies on them...
Expect even worse stats from all manufacturers down the road. The tech isn't just mature; it's overripe and starting to rot. It's the only purely mechanical part left in a computer, margins are razor-thin, and companies are clearly cutting corners on materials and quality control just to stay profitable. With SSD prices dropping, they're slowly taking over as the primary drive market. It all feels like that old floppy disk scenario, remember? The first ones were incredibly reliable, but by the end, you'd buy a pack of ten and two or three would be dead on arrival straight from the factory...

I’ve had my laptop running pretty much non-stop for almost a year now with a Western Digital drive, and even with 24/7 heavy usage, everything is going smoothly—the SMART status looks absolutely perfect.

I’ve also wrestled with a few different Western Digital drives over the years and they’ve worked flawlessly; I actually still have an old 40 MB drive from back in the eighties that runs like a dream without a single bad sector, though I did have a newer external Western Digital one die on me after just a few months. There really isn't a foolproof rule, but I've found that if a drive survives those first few months of intense use, there’s a pretty good chance it'll stay reliable and error-free for a long, long time.

Michael Jackson10 said:Furthermore, Western Digital has always struggled with those 1.5 GB and 3 GB drives—they were never exactly a hit here in the States anyway (if I recall correctly, they belong to the same series, perhaps some sort of awkward transition period between two different recording densities??)...

Did you mean terabytes instead of gigabytes? 😁

As for me, I’m running two 3TB Western Digital Green drives; one is tucked away in my NAS, which has been spinning 24/7 for several years now, and it’s still going strong.

Bradley Lewis59 said:Did you mean terabytes instead of gigabytes? 😁

I've got two 3TB Western Digital Green drives. One's sitting in my NAS, running 24/7 for a few years now, and it's still going strong.

My bad! I've been staring at MB and GB all day, so I just slipped up out of habit... I think one thing and type another.

As you can see, everyone’s experience is different, and we all have different needs. The only time things really go south is if a manufacturer releases a specific series that's a total dud (the last thing that comes to mind was that 250 GB Western Digital issue with certain firmware, but back then, the factory tools would claim everything was fine even when the drives were totally shot 😁 )

If I remember right, with those 1.5 and 3 TB(!) models, they started moving toward higher areal density, sometimes even using just a single platter (correct me if I'm wrong, I'm just typing from memory)
That doesn't really apply to the WD 3 TB, though, since they had their own evolution.

Your NAS setup isn't really comparable to this study. Your NAS is basically just serving a few family members, whereas a cloud service is dealing with millions of users. The study points out that they messed up by using power-saving models that aren't optimized for massive drive arrays, because those drives are programmed to constantly spin up and down to save energy. You probably aren't hitting your NAS with constant, heavy parallel requests 24/7.
That’s exactly why we have desktop, NAS, enterprise, and even surveillance models—they're built for continuous high throughput rather than constant spinning up and seeking...

The thing about Western Digital Green drives is they tend to have this annoying habit of constantly spinning up and down while parking the heads, which really just wears out the internal components way faster than it should. Honestly, because they’re pretty slow and have those quirks, I'd only ever suggest using one for an offline backup. That said, you can actually bypass all that nonsense using a little utility found on the Western Digital website; you just boot from it, tweak the settings to disable those power-saving features, and then you won't have to worry about the drive grinding itself down quite so quickly.