Homelab

seems like seagate has higher failures, WD has terrible a terrible warranty department. pick your poison

I bought 4 used 16TB ironwolfs for a really good price. They only had a year of on time. I have used them for 2 years now and no issues. I also haven't had any issued with any of the WD, Toshiba or Hitachi drives I own--and my Hitachi is 15 years old.

I've personally just bought what is cheaper $/Gb if they're broadly equal then features & power, if still locked I have tended towards WD. But I'm not storing anything critical and if a drive failed, I'd be annoyed but that's about it.

Toshiba n300

Can't help with these 3 specifically. I ordered som wd gokd drives. Which are the ones intended for datacenters. Price was lower. And I think it was 10^16 not 10^15. That may not sound like alot. But doing the math, number of bits on a raid6 of 8 14tb drives, basically going to hit 10^15. And they supposedly have firmware to handle vibration. Maybe worth looking into.

As for these 3, I would think they would all be fine choices.

I always run WD. None of my drives have failed in regular use. Been using WD in my NAS for two years now without issues.

Seagate for internal drives, WD for external.

Seagate has permanently lost my business since their 50% failure rates from many years ago. It’s well documented if you search for it. Never again. Lost multiple arrays because of this.

IronWolf Pro

I have 20+ of them, none have failed.
I also have 50+ Exos, none have failed.

Had a lot of wd fail over the years. Since upgrading to Seagate exos only. Haven’t had any failures. Maybe due to the fact they are enterprise drives. Not sure. But very happy with Seagate exos

I was collecting dead hard drives for the magnets and shit, very few WD drives. Most drives were Seagate. I will never personally buy one again.

QC in only external defects like a stripped mounting hole. Drives themselves are still hend to same standards.

The reason that companies pay a lot of money for more reliable drives isn't uptime or loss-prevention. There are better ways to solve that. The reason is because it's super expensive to have a guy go pull the drive. That's not a cost the homelabber has to pay. Buy retail drives, put them in a sensible configuration, and be on your merry way.

WD. I've had more Seagates fail on me, but take a look at backblazes's data. They go through a ton of drives.

Wd gold. They're Hitachi, and those drives were epic. If I go hdd again, those are what I'll use. I have an array of 4 Hitachi nas drives now, but they're 3tb.

The problem with relying on peoples past experiences of drive failures is that it’s a lagging indicator. That is we can only say retroactively what was better or worse, but of course that means little of current gen hardware. The reality is that the drives people see failing are always the ones they have. Backblaze data tends to be a little better just because of the sheer volume, but again, the fact that drive X1 failed at a marginally higher rate than drive Y1 doesn’t mean that drive X2 will fail at a significantly higher rate than drive Y2.

All this is to say that all modern drives are actually amazingly reliable and also that they will all eventually fail. Strategize your data usage with the later fact in mind, and then pull the trigger on whatever drives feel most useful to you. I’ve done builds with WD and Seagate Exos drives recently and both are still operating perfectly with no failures… but who knows what will happen down the line.

Looking purely at your specs posted, I'd probably lean towards WD, mainly because it has a higher cache.

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In terms of experience, I have an Ironwolf Pro 18TB, and some WD 20TB Red Pros.

The Ironwolf is noticeably louder than the other drives and often/frequently does a sound as if there's heavy activity on the disk.

This is something to consider if you will have these drives in the same room as you.

Anecdotally out of the maybe 100 drives I have dotted around here the failed ones are mainly Seagate.

In the field though, makes no odds. Most of the kit I am supplied with comes with Seagate, not had any issues with them.

WD because my mom’s dog said so

Off topic but, 20TB is amazing to see. When I got my first PC in 1995, 2GB was the biggest you could get. Then I got another in 1998 and I had a 16.8GB hard drive and it wasn't standard in PC's for over a year. 25 years later and we're up to 20TB drives. It also costs about the same as the 16.8 not adjusting for inflation.

I usually just buy the cheapest TB/EUR that i can get new and verify that they are not drastically worse in terms of power use compared to the next cheapest option.

So in your case i would go with the Exos.

Not to start a flame war

says the guy lighting a cigar at the oil refinery..... :)

in all seriousness, look at used HGST (western digital) drives many times you can find good deals on drives that where hotspares most of their life at almost 1/2 msrp. if you need new drives stay with the enterprise variants.

I have not heard good things about recent seagate consumer drives.

WD/HGST gold drives have been rock solid at work. (wd purchased HGST and the 'helium' line up is almost all just rebranded HGST.)

also, don't count out toshiba drives. they are a 'smaller' company in the us/europe but they make decent drives in my experience.

Exos are noisy, but they work great..

And the helium fill? Makes them sound funny

According to the detailed information that back blaze releases on drive reliability and pricing. Western digitals cost more and are more reliable if you're keeping the drives for a very long time. If you're replacing the drives in two to three years with something else go Seagate as Seagate drives fail more often at the 3 to 4 years I think. It's been a long time since I read the review but if you do a custom Nas with disc shelves. It's even cheaper if you get a bunch of used Enterprise drives yes they're going to have a ridiculous amount of hours on them but you put them into a raid 2 or a raid 3 and you pay a little bit more monitoring attention to them but you'll save a couple extra dollars on those much larger arrays my two cents from what I I've read.

EXOS drives are LOUD. Keep that in mind.

Go for a mix. Buy them from different providers too if possible.