The WD Caviar Black drives are excellent and worth the extra for the 5 year warranty. The Blue Caviars are nowhere near as good. Seagate and Samsung have both had frequent failures/problems in recent years. The Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 was notorious.
In my opinion: It's a hard drive. It will fail. But for what it's worth, none of my Seagates have failed and I've had them in my PC for almost 10 years.
Since Seagate bought Samsungs HDD business, it seemed an obvious fit for me. I have had several F1s and F3s (and still do) but I'm now trusting a 3TB Barracuda in my main rig. I've just completed a new build this evening to take to Italy with me later in the year and that has another 3TB Barracuda in it. They're not the quietest, but it's 3 fracking terrabytes on 3 platters, so what do you expect? Very happy so far. And I was always a hater in the past. As the previous poster says they're all HDDs. It's like saying my bank is crap, so I'm going to move. They're all robbing *******s, the only difference is - what kind of deal do you get?
I've owned: 3 Hitachi, 1 Samsung, 3 WD and 5 Seagates. The oldest Seagates were brought in 2006 and are yet to have a single fault. These drives have been in my main rig since I built it and will probably only be palmed off to other machines once I finally get onto the SSD boat. None of the others have caused me any issues yet they range from older 500gb models right through to the 3tb Barracuda's. None of the WD's have failed. The Samsung failed within 9 months and as a result I've never brought another since. None of the Hitachi's have failed. As many other posters have said it's all down to personal experience. Since the only drive to have failed on me is a Samsung I perceive them to have the worst reliability in drives, to another it might be Seagate or WD. I would suggest buying the drive that most meets your needs which is within your price range.
The latest seagate harddrives 7200.12 are very good , i own two of these 500gb drives and they are very quiet and fast for spinners ( single platter). The last series 7200.11 did have issues though. I have had these drives for about 2.5 yrs and not had one issue with it / them. My first post
I've known people that absolutely swear by Seagate drives. Back a few years (might still be the case) they were the only brand that offered a 5 year warranty over other brands 3. That says something, I suppose. Meh, I've had various brand drives (Seagate, WD, Hitatchi even Maxtor) and the only one I've ever had fail was a Hitatchi laptop drive in a external caddy. It probably took a few knocks and died due to that.
I think having 4 out of 7 WD EARS fail is more than an individual user experience! One of those 4 was a RMA replacement that failed again. I'm sorry, but there's something clearly not right with WD EARS drives.
