Western Digital RE4 or Seagate Constellation SATA Hard Drive

I want to purchase another backup SATA hard drive (non RAID use). My priority is reliability rather than cheap price. Given a choice between the Western Digital 1 TB RE4 SATA Hard Drive and the 1 TB Seagate Constellation SATA Hard Drive, which would you select?

Thanks in Advance.

 

FWIW - I have two WD Element Drives for backup - (750GB and 1TB) and both have been great so far - they are about 3 years old now and never any problems. They were not expensive but seem to be good quality.

 

we sell a LOT of drives and i can say without a doubt seagate has been FAR more reliable for use the last couple years. we hardly warranty them nowadays we do send wd's off more than we should have to. i switched my drives to either samsung (now seagate owned) or seagate. personally the sammy's are still my fav drives currently.

 

Both of them will perform properly, my limited experience have been with 4WD's and 2 Samsung.
One of the WD's failed after 9 years of non stop use and one of the Samsung (Not mine, i built a desktop for my friend a couple years ago) failed after like 2 years of use. All other drives are still working.

 

Both are good but I've had better longevity and reliability with Seagate

 

As a backup drive I would go which has the best reliability and error rates and warranty of the specific models

Worth google the specific models you are interested for reports of known issues (like bad firmware) before purchasing.

Cheers, Nick.

 

I personally don't think you could go wrong with either. I have worked with both WD and Seagate, among others, for many years and have not found a trend with either. Both are reliable and both have good, easy return policies.

I do try to get "enterprise" class drives however as they are designed to go into servers and other systems designed to run 24/7/365. You can typically tell the difference by the warranty. Enterprise drives are typically warrantied for 5 years, other drives for just 3, or even only 1.

So I usually go by warranty, buffer, and price. Both those drives are enterprise class and have 5 year warranties so that is great. But the WD is cheaper and it has twice the buffer at 64Mb - a really good thing. So no question for me - get the WD (assuming the following):

WD
Seagate

 

I decided to go with the Seagate Constellation 1 TB.

None of my current motherboards support SATA 6 Gb/s, but the Seagate supports SATA 6 Gb/s and the Western Digital RE4 supports SATA 3 Gb/s. When I eventually upgrade to a motherboard which has SATA 6 Gb/s, the Seagate should be faster than the Western Digital.

 

Ummm, not according to what I found. If you follow the links in my previous post, you will see they both support 3Gb/sec.

If you are finding something different, please provide the exact model numbers. Otherwise, the WD, with its cheaper cost and twice bigger buffer is the better drive - on paper, anyway.

 

The one in your link is a different model. This is the one that I just ordered:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148784

Actually, I ordered the exact same one as given in the link above from Amazon. Amazon was a little cheaper, even with Sales Tax.

 

And that one has a 64Mb buffer too! Good homework!