External hard drive: Seagate vs. Western Digital

Tek7

Tek7

CGA President, Tribe of Judah Founder & President
Staff member
My 160GB external hard drive is dying and nearly dead. I'm planning on buying one of these two items to replace it:

  1. Seagate - FreeAgent GoFlex Desk 2TB External USB 2.0/3.0 Hard Drive - Black
  2. Western Digital - My Passport Essential SE 1TB External USB 3.0/2.0 Portable Hard Drive - Black
If the leaked Best Buy ad is to be believed, both of these items will cost $90 on Black Friday.

I like the small form factor of the WD Passport drives, but not enough to get half the storage space for the same price. My main concern is Seagate's brand reliability and the lack of reviews I can find for the Seagate item.

Thoughts?
 
Last edited:
I have the WD Passport Essential 500 GB version, and I am using the backup software that it comes with. It actively backs up all my multimedia (Digital pictures - videos - music). It almost works like a an external RAID set up that way. Fairly quick, it is a USB2.0. Been extremely reliable.

I also have a Seagate 500GB expansion drive. Basically a 500GB thumb drive for less money then a 64GB thumb drive. I use this drive to keep confidential information that is on my work computers, well, confidential. Its fast as well, its still USB2.0

The WD drive is definitely has a smaller profile of the two drives you listed.

I love my external hard drives :)
 
Last edited:
My WD Scorpio for the PS3 had issues after about 2 months.

Now my anecdotal evidence is burned into your head. MWAHAHAHAHAHA.
 
Avesther said:
I have the WD Passport Essential 500 GB version, and I am using the backup software that it comes with. It actively backs up all my multimedia (Digital pictures - videos - music). It almost works like a an external RAID set up that way. Fairly quick, it is a USB2.0. Been extremely reliable.

I also have a Seagate 500GB expansion drive. Basically a 500GB thumb drive for less money then a 64GB thumb drive. I use this drive to keep confidential information that is on my work computers, well, confidential. Its fast as well, its still USB2.0

The WD drive is definitely has a smaller profile of the two drives you listed.

I love my external hard drives :)
Click to expand...
Glad to hear it! I half-expected a string of "Seagate sucks!" posts, but it's encouraging to hear positive reviews for both brands.

RyanB said:
My WD Scorpio for the PS3 had issues after about 2 months.

Now my anecdotal evidence is burned into your head. MWAHAHAHAHAHA.
Click to expand...
No worries. I have my own positive experience with Western Digital external drives to offset that. The 160GB drive that I'm replaced is (I think) about 4 years old and saw quite a bit of use.
 
I've abused the seagate alot more then the WD. The WD sits on my desk at home doing its job. The seagate is being plugged in, decrypted, recrypted, unplugged moved about, stored in my car at -30' and then plugged in again....day after day after day without any issues.

Both the WD and Seagate are quiet and cool.

Here is the Seagate GoFlex 2TB at newegg.ca The reviews are all over the place, much like any user review system would be.

Here is the WD one you listed at newegg.ca Only one review, must be a newer iteration of the drive.
 
ewoksrule said:
what about this one? sure is a lot cheaper.
http://www.amazon.com/Western-Digit...DBAAU0010HBK-NESN/dp/B002QEBMB4/ref=pd_cp_e_0
Click to expand...
No USB 3.0. :( It'll probably still be a while until I have a USB 3.0-capable computer, but I want to be ready when the time comes. I like to get the most out of my hardware.

Still, that looks like an excellent deal. I may pick that up if the leaked Best Buy ad turns out to inaccurate.

Avesther said:
I've abused the seagate alot more then the WD. The WD sits on my desk at home doing its job. The seagate is being plugged in, decrypted, recrypted, unplugged moved about, stored in my car at -30' and then plugged in again....day after day after day without any issues.
Click to expand...
I plan on using the drive I buy as a data backup and repurposing my 500GB drive for my Wii. (My Wii is from a month after launch and the disc drive doesn't sound as healthy as it used to, so I dumped my games to an external drive and run them from that.)
 
Here comes a new challenger!

Trouble is, I can NOT find transfer speed numbers, just user reviews. $90 for 2TB of storage SOUNDS like a good deal, but I'm concerned the drive may be super-slow.

I had ruled out the 1TB model of the same drive because it doesn't support USB 3.0, but I've reconsidered after reviewing prices and removing the Seagate 2TB from my list after reading negative reviews.

I'm also considering postponing the purchase and watching for a super-cheap 120GB or 160GB Western Digital Passport. (I missed the sale where Newegg was selling the 120GB Passport for $20. :( The 120GB would have been perfect for the Wii.)
 
Fairly certain its a Caviar Green in there, it lists the green tech in the specs and I think thats only on their Caviar Green drives.
http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.asp?driveid=576

Green transfer rate is fine, of course its no Caviar Black but it won't be painfully slow by any means. It will be cool and quiet and you can raise your Al Gore faction.
 
Last edited:
ewoksrule said:
Fairly certain its a Caviar Green in there, it lists the green tech in the specs and I think thats only on their Caviar Green drives.
http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.asp?driveid=576

Green transfer rate is fine, of course its no Caviar Black but it won't be painfully slow by any means. It will be cool and quiet and you can raise your Al Gore faction.
Click to expand...
Aye, I'm not expecting blazing fast speeds, but I don't want a snail drive, either.

Still, a 2TB Western Digital external drive with mostly positive ratings for $90 is tough to pass up (especially since I'm already down to ~23GB free on my 500GB Passport).

Are there any nay-sayers in the house?
 
I've had nothing but trouble and lost data with Seagate. They even tried to tell me after my third hard drive it was my fault and nothing was the matter with their cheap HDD that had bad sectors. Definitely would go with Western Digital, been using it for nearly a year and it works great. No bad sectors and no warnings on HDTune's SMART DATA... yay. :)
 
I was concerned the 2TB drive I'd considered would have a slow transfer speed, then I read this:
The low data transfer speeds some experience with this drive are caused by a new format being introduced by Western Digital. Go here to find out how to get good transfer speeds: http://www.wdc.com/en/products/advancedformat/

If you want to understand what Advanced Format is, read this helpful article at well known and highly respected Anandtech:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/2888/1
Cons: Good drive but requires tweaking with Western Digital Advanced Format Utility.
Click to expand...
Now I'm confident the drive will be fast enough when connected to a PC running Windows 7, but crawl when connected to a Windows XP machine. I plan on connecting the drive to both.

I also don't want to drop $90 on an external drive right now (since it would clear out the majority of my remaining gift money), so I bid low on a used 120GB drive on eBay.

/sigh

I really wish my 160GB external hard drive hadn't started dying so suddenly.
 
Tek7 said:
Here comes a new challenger!
Click to expand...
Still looking for opinions and reviews on this drive.

My wife and I bought a digital camcorder (a purchase we had been planning for months and in advance of our little one's arrival in February) and we'll be using whatever external hard drive we get to back up large files as well as data and Steam games.

Do you all have any other drives you'd recommend for the purpose of backing up large video files? It would be super if I could also encode videos using VirtualDub without moving the files to my notebook hard drive.

Thoughts?
 
Although I cannot offer a review on the drive you're looking at, I can say this much:

Western Digital has been a solid manufactuerer of hard drives for many many years. When I was a computer tech a couple years back, it was the main brand my company used. Excellent customer service and RMA department.

Seagate, I don't know much about. It's been around too, but I haven't seen as many of them. They don't seem to be too bad a choice either.

Toshiba I don't like, either the laptops or the harddrives. Just last year, I bought a Toshiba 1 TB external, and the thing would go to sleep after a couple of minutes with absolutly no way to access or change that sleep settings, making watching or even storing of videos very very difficult.

Windows 7. I haven't figured out why yet, but Windows 7 is the friend that comes over and always spends the night. No matter what external drive I get, Windows 7 likes to come in and put in it's temporary folders and files. Last time I tried to fight Windows 7 to stop it, my external became permanently unusable and unrecoverable. So if you suddenly see strange folders or files, don't panic right away.

That's about all. Other than that toshiba, which I promptly returned, you should be good with any of the options you mentioned.
 
Oh man. I wish I had known that before. I scoured the internet for a solution and the only thing I found out was that it was tied to the USB only. There was no sleep issue with firewire. But that's alright. Thanks for the info though. I'll definately keep that in mind for the future.
 
My wife and I ended up buying the Western Digital Elements 2TB External Hard Drive from Staples when it was on sale for $69.99 Sunday around 2:30 a.m. Central. I checked the product page after church and it sold out.

Much <3 to my wife for spotting the deal shortly after it went live.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top