It’s been a while since I’ve ranted about something, and my experiences a couple days ago triggered this post. First, a little bit of back story. Less than 3 years ago, I built a home server that would function as a file and web test server. The storage portion required me to purchase five 1TB SATA hard drives. Being in a redundant RAID array, they simply needed to be cheap. With all the online chatter about Western Digital being the highest quality drive manufacturer and all the drive prices being basically the same, I decided to purchase 5 WD drives. So with these new drives and an old Seagate that I grandfathered in from another machine, I assembled a 6 drive array.

Everything went well until after 3 months the first drive failed. It actually happened right in front of me. I was monitoring the server stats when the IOwait spiked when the server was apparently doing nothing. I checked the logs and found that the drive was refusing commands. Being somewhat annoyed at the infant mortality of the drive, I decided to buy a Seagate as the replacement. I can’t say exactly why, it might have been a bit cheaper but I don’t remember. About 6 months later, I decided to expand the array to 7 drives and purchased another Seagate of the same model as the one prior, seeing how it fared so well. Fast forward a year and I was met with another drive failure. This one became interesting. Lastly, just this week I was migrating all the data – in fact the entire array – into another server. This move also included a switch to ZFS from NTFS (no laughing, I needed Windows support). I had to copy the data to offline storage drives, destroy the array metadata, move the drives, assemble the new array, and copy the data back. Sounds easy. I got up to the copying data part without a hitch, but I quickly noticed the data transfer rate was very low – about 1/8th the speed it should have been. I also noticed that the operation was going through a sort of cycle: 30 seconds of transfer, 5 min of idle – however the disk usage light was lit the whole time. After doing some investigating, I found that one drive busy 100% of the time. I tried to get SMART on it using smartctl and the command took almost 10 seconds to return the data. I ripped the drive out and the throughput instantly went back to normal speeds. It was replaced with a Seagate as before.

All this may sound like ordinary drive happenings, and that may be the case, but I can’t help but notice that WD drives are among the only ones that have ever failed on me and that being said, I have owned drives from almost every company under the sun. It isn’t just these experiences that led me to my dislike towards the company. I find that their products are inferior to other manufacturers. They are larger, louder, produce significantly more heat (which leads to poor energy efficiency), and I have had a few that have had bearings go bad. My spite comes from the countless bad experiences I have had with the company’s products over the last 5 years. I have since switched to all Seagate drives and have never had a failure. I have one drive for example which has outlived 5 machines (servers and workstations) and is still chugging along. Why could I never get that reliability from WD? At my job I manage over 500 workstations with a good split of WD and Seagate drives. The ones I’m replacing 70% of the time are WDs. Something isn’t quite right.