Flash, aaaaaah! Western Digital waggles sales in nemesis Seagate's face Western Digital earned the revenues it said it would in its final fiscal 2017 quarter and gave an object lesson to Seagate in how to run a storage drive business. WD revenues were $4.8bn for its latest quarter, compared to Seagate's $2.4bn, a difference of 100 per cent. That's what buying into the flash chip and SSD business …
WD has a much better returns policy, without question. You can register a credit card, and get the replacement shipped out before returning the faulty drive.
In a word, a Godsend.
and my reason for choosing WD, over Seagate.
But in fairness to Seagate, the Ironwolf drives have been much more competitive last few weeks. Ironwolf NAS 4TB is currently around £110, at lot cheaper the WD's 4TB Reds. The last 4TB Red I purchased was faulty out the box too, though Amazon's packaging was so poor you almost expect it will fail when you see how it's packaged.
Synology boxes give much more detailed S.M.A.R.T information from Seagate Ironwolf drives too.
It's always worth zero'ing and validating writes of any new drive over several days, before use.Keeping an eye on the completion time making sure it hasn't jumped from 24 hours to several days and then back, telltale sign of errors, as it finds errors and maps them out.
I am guessing we have a Seagate employee or fanboi here.
My experiences of WD and Seagate are as Outcasts; Seagates die in droves, while WD keep on going. Last year I threw away a pile of 20 - 160GB WD drives as keeping them going when flash drives were bigger was getting silly.
In contrast, I have never had a Seagate last more than 5 years, and my very LAST Seagate (ever!! I will not touch the brand now), developed an unrepairable formatting error after only 14 months of light use.
It was returned under warranty, but because I could not source the near impossible to buy Seagate specified packaging, they refuse to replace it.
Maybe I WAS rubbing salt in their wounds by using some Toshiba drive packaging, but that is not the point; specifying packaging that you can ONLY buy in boxes of 1,000 units is not acceptable.
Seagate deserve to die, and hopefully, that is what we are watching right now, the beginning of the end.
WD stipulate certain packaging for return too, but we've always had the right packaging on hand to date. The Amazon packaging is basically some bubble wrap in a book sized box.
Amazon obviously looked at the stastically cheaper delivery costs v returns, that it's more profitable to send out (cheaper postage rates) book size packaging (with little protection) and deal with higher returns (given they have all the automated systems for that in place).
Over the last decade, They've both been as bad as each other with various products being lemons. It's really worth watching the Backblaze stats as they're a good indicator of model reliability.
That said, when it comes to flash i won't touch either of their products. Perpetuating a duopoly isn't in anyone's interest.
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