Over the years a mechanical drive was typically half as fast on the inside edge of the platter as the outside. Personally I was never a fan of the Blue. Benchmarks are a great tool is ya spend each and every day copying entire HDs from one ot another. But I prefer to use application based tools which tell a different story. If I used a WD HD, it would usually be a black. If ya look at the THZG test charts, bit out of date now, in gaming the Black came in at 6.45 MB/s in gaming, while the Blue came in at 4.01 MB/s. The black's 5 year warranty also was a big advanatge over the Blue's 2 year. However we stopped using HDs 7 years ago... each build now contains an SSD for OS and programs and an SSHD for data or gaming as the case may be. By comparison, the SSD scored 9.76 MB/sec in those tests. have installed 20+ SSHds in last 7 years with 0 failures to date and quarterly testing shows full health.
The average failure rate by brand is oft bandied about but this suffers much from completely irrelevant server testing by backblaze (where protection features of consumer drives actually accelerate failure in server applications) and like anything else it's not about "the brand" it's about the model. Both change year to year and even 6 month testing period to testing period. Average RMA rates by brand foer the last two testing periods (12 months) are:
HGST = 0.97%
Seagate =0.83%
Toshiba = 0.93%
Western = 1.15%
This pales in significance compared to individual models which have RMA rates up to 10% Faster rpm and larger drive models, as expected, have higher rates. For example the 3TB WD Black 3 TB has a current 6 month failure rate of 5.08% while the 2 TB is just over a quarter of that. Also there are slight differences between model designs. The Seagate BarraCuda 2 TBo (ST2000DM006) had a RMA rate of 0.79% whereas the Seagate BarraCuda 2 TB (ST2000LM015) had a RMA rate of 1,47%. Averaging popular models over the last two 6 month reporting periods...(1 TB wasn't broken out).
1.34% = WD Blue 2 TB (2 yr warranty)
1.02% = Seagate BarraCuda 2 TB (2 yr warranty)
0.95% = Seagate Desktop SSHD 2 TB (5 yr warranty)
0.90% = WD Black 2 TB (5 yr warranty)
Point I am getting at is the things that benchmarks tell me are generally not performed on a daily basis and therefore not relevant to selection or what you need to worry about when troubleshooting. If you use the box primarily for gaming, then those gaming test results would all I'd be concerned about. My box is used 9 - 5 as a CAD Workstation and SOHO file server ... the SSHDs 8 GB hybrid SSD performs well here as whatever files are frequently used are stored there. As a gaming box, if you the type of gamer who polayes one or two games ata atime, you will also benefit from an SSHD.... if like my youngest son, who plays 4 or 5 games per nite and often different ones each day, any performance gain is lost.
In short, when having performance concerns whether for selection or troubleshooting, my suggestion is to base yoiur investigations on applications benchmarks... applications which you actually use and representing what you normally do. One caveat ... Office suite type benchmarks which contain scriots perfoming a sequence of hundreds of individual actions are meaningless. A user has to press 1 or more keys between each of those actions and these render any script useless since the user is the bottleneck.
by You may have to pay 50% more for the 5 year warranty drives nut failure rate is 34% better (BTW, that's just between 6 and 12 months of operation.
