Bought a 2tb blue drive for my daughter as they seem to be the highest rated drives. Unfortunately it was doa, the only other drive that this has happened with was a 750gb spinpoint bought from scan, glad I bought this from Amazon as scan were a nightmare last time and my sole reason for rarely buying from them since. People pan Seagate but the only drives I have had fail were 2 WD and 2 spinpoint so I don't know what to buy now.
Ultimately baring certain specific cases it's going to be more down to luck than good manufacturer vs bad manufacturer. All drives can, and in some cases do, fail (backups are the only solution). I pay more attention to value, retailer reputation and warranty than manufacturer reputation, which is something that I think tends to get amplified disproportionately.
I find HDDs a minefield. I've only had Seagates and Spinpoints fail on me, WD - not (yet, crosses fingers).
Every HDD out there, regardless of manufacturer, size, model, speed, sector, will fail. Buy for features, value and support - not reliability. (aside from known lemons, of which there haven't been for several years, but they do occasionally appear) Your two WD failures are merely a coincidence, don't let it put you off the brand in future.
I've only ever had one drive fail in 20 years. It wasn't a surprise either, as it was a Deskstar (AKA Death Star). I have seen failures across all makes and models, and far more in builds where they had no air flow or cooling at all.
Just sorting out a replacement with amazon, gonna try another blue, got my in laws 500gb upstairs still in its bubble wrap, I guess I ought to make sure that one works before I go down there at the weekend.
Ok so the new 2TB drive is here, should I initialise it as MBR or GPT, this was something I was unsure of before I found out the other one was dead. I've never used a drive over 1TB before.
GPT Edit: Unless you're installing 32 bit Windows on it, using XP or earlier, or the motherboard doesn't support UEFI boot.
Hmm Win 10 64 bit and its an MSI 790FX GD70 board where am I looking to find out if it supports UEFI boot? I'm pretty sure it uses the old bios.
Only go MBR if you need to boot from it, iirc you can use GPT on BIOS based system you just can't boot from them.
