1. The type of drive should be based upon the usage ... you will find that there most often the difference between different drives as you describe is the firmware. Firmware is tailored based upon the usage the main ones being Enterprise, Consumer, Enthusiast, Surveillance and NAS. If you are a enthusiast consumer, buying an enterrpise drives means you can expect lower performance in your usage. If going in a NAS, buy a NAS drive ... in a server, buy an enterprise drive ... in a security application, a surveillance drive. If you are a enthusiast or gamer, a enthusiast / gaming drive will perform better for you than all other options. Enterpise drives have frmware optimized for I/O.
2. What to manufacturers do to provide their drives witha 5 year warranbted versus a 3 year warranty. For the most part, other than the firmware, they just add a few bicks to the price to cover the extra warranty period ... no different than buying an extended warranty in the store for your toaster.
3. If you want to evaluate reliability, use only data obtained from drive failure data when drives are used in accordance with manufacturer's instructions. For example likes to use consumer drives on server applications. As a "low budget server space provider" BB isn't all the attentive to manufacturer's instructions. Server drives should be instaled in racks highly resistant to vibrations ... BB for example was found to be holding the consumer drives in server spaces place with rubberbands. Consumer drives have a feature called "head parking" whereby the drive head is parked when not in use which prevents platter damage in instances of heavy vibration such as you might experience when your pet dog sleeping under your desk leaps up when the doorbell rings. Drives might be rated say for 250-500k parking cycles, which oif used in a server environment with extensive I/O could be used up in a matter of months. Server drives do not come equipped with this feature so using an enterprise drive at home or on your office desk may mean no vibration protection. If your looking at BB data for other than picking server drives for server environments you are essentially looking at a french english dictionary in the hopes of learning to speak chinese.
4. Here's an actual data compilation which I had bookmarked showing RMA'd consumer drive failures in active use in a consumer environment for between 6 and 12 months. the 1st number was the last 6 month reporting period and the number in parenthesis is the previous 6 month period. As you can see all vendors are averaging 1% o less.
- Seagate 0,72% (0,69%)
- Toshiba 0,80% (1,15%)
- Western 1,04% (1,03%)
- HGST 1,13% (0,60%)
It's far more important to look at individual drives as every once and a while, everybody produces a crappy model.
- 3,48% Seagate Archive HDD 8 Tb
- 3,48% Hitachi Travelstar 5K1000 1 Tb
- 3,42% Toshiba X300 5 Tb
- 3,37% WD Red WD60EFRX 6 Tb
- 3,06% WD Red Pro WD4001FFSX 4 Tb
5. It's worth noting that larger drives have a higher failure rate
Popular 2 TB drives ...
- 0,82% Seagate Barracuda 7200.14
- 0,77% Seagate Enterprise NAS HDD ST2000VN0001
- 0,56% Seagate NAS HDD ST2000VN000
- 0,45% WD Black WD2003FZEX
- 0,43% Seagate Desktop SSHD ST2000DX001
- 0,41% Seagate SpinPoint M9T ST2000LM00
6. You may want to consider a SSHD is usage is enthusiast or gaming. Looking at the 2 drives highlighted on bold above, the SSHD is 50% faster than the WD Black in gaming.
The 2 TB SSHD is $99 and has a 5 year warranty
The 2 TB WD Black is $119 and has a 5 year warranty
In summary... your best bet from reliability AND performance is to pick a drive with firmware specifically tweaked for your intended usage. If i remember correctly ....I am not up on the latest WE line up which IIRC is in transition.
Consumer Drives - Seagate Barracuda / WD Blue
Enthusiast Gaming Drives - Seagate Fire CUDA SSHD / WD Black
NAS Drives - Seagate Iron Wolf / WD Red
Surveillance Drives - Seagate Seahawk / WD Purple
Enterprise Performance Drives - Seagate Nytro
Enterprise Large Capacity Drives - Seagate Exos X
Enterprise Balanced Drives - Seagate Exos E
