Old question looks like never have an answer. Portable hard drive, Seagate or Western digit, 2.5 , of better quality build? lasting longer, more durable? or clinically a matter of luck only?
i have a 2tb seagate udb 3.0 and my roommate has a 1tb western digital and side by side i see no performance difference.
Pretty much the same. Both are reliable, both have had troublesome drives in the past. I've used both brands for external hard drives and haven't had any fail on me.
Only thing I've heard from other members here is that WD uses soldered connections on the controller, which sometimes cause problems. Personally, I prefer Seagate....just old habit.
An external drive is just a conventional drive in a box with a USB interface. With that in mind, the drive reliability reports from Backblaze may be useful...
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-reliability-stats-q1-2016/The drives in our data center come from four manufacturers. As noted above, most of them are from HGST and Seagate. With that in mind, here’s the hard drive failure rates by manufacturer...
Personally I tend to buy Toshiba, based on the two years of running time my Toshiba laptop's drive has clocked up so far...
I used to tend towards Toshiba as well, until I bought 2x1TB ext HDDs 2 years ago; one failed at 13 months, the other at 18 months - both failures started with the the case PCB, so I put them in new cases, and within a few months, the drives themselves failed and had to be replaced.
The only reason I would stay away from WD is that soldered board. I have one, and I wanted to transfer a large amount of data to it so I cracked open the case thinking I could move the drive inside to a SATA port. Nope.
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