Contribute
Register

Western Digital - Whats the deal?

Status
Not open for further replies.
Joined
Nov 20, 2020
Messages
19
Motherboard
GIGABYTE Z490 Vision D
CPU
i9-10900KF
Graphics
RX 5700 XT
Hey Good Folks. Just wondering what the deal with Western Digital is? I'm deciding between the blue and the black M.2 SSDs. All the performance specs seem several cuts above the competition. All the reviews on Amazon are great, but looking at trustpilot they're almost all negative? I don't understand.
 
I think you can see that reviews on Trustpilot on any HDD manufacturers are quite bad, that is because I think reviews on Amazon are collected shortly after delivery whereas people will tend to write on Trustpilot after they had a problem.

Also for hard drives in general, WD is quite bad I think because most people are buying WD's entry level HDDs that are more prone to failure and they lose all they personal data, pictures of family and all because of that and they are pissed off because they did not use any backup solution. For that Time Machine is really good.

Regarding WD SSDs, I don't know about those especially but I know about the Red series Hard Drives. Those are "SMR" and initially it was not written clearly on the label. This is a cheaper but much slower technology when you want to write at lot of data. I had the same with a Seagate Barracuda, it's is crap. WD is selling those drives for NAS where in fact there was a notorious incompatibility with ZFS RAIDs and even outside of ZFS their slow reaction time can lead to problems when used in RAID arrays.
After some legal action, they had to write it clearly on the label but still for most people it does not mean anything.
Overall SMR drives are just slow for anything bigger than their bigger than usual 256MB cache, it took me 12 hours to copy 1 TB of mixed files on the drive.
 
I think you can see that reviews on Trustpilot on any HDD manufacturers are quite bad, that is because I think reviews on Amazon are collected shortly after delivery whereas people will tend to write on Trustpilot after they had a problem.

Also for hard drives in general, WD is quite bad I think because most people are buying WD's entry level HDDs that are more prone to failure and they lose all they personal data, pictures of family and all because of that and they are pissed off because they did not use any backup solution. For that Time Machine is really good.

Regarding WD SSDs, I don't know about those especially but I know about the Red series Hard Drives. Those are "SMR" and initially it was not written clearly on the label. This is a cheaper but much slower technology when you want to write at lot of data. I had the same with a Seagate Barracuda, it's is crap. WD is selling those drives for NAS where in fact there was a notorious incompatibility with ZFS RAIDs and even outside of ZFS their slow reaction time can lead to problems when used in RAID arrays.
After some legal action, they had to write it clearly on the label but still for most people it does not mean anything.
Overall SMR drives are just slow for anything bigger than their bigger than usual 256MB cache, it took me 12 hours to copy 1 TB of mixed files on the drive.
Yeah after looking again on TrustPilot I saw that a good 90% of the reviews were related to customer services, not necessarily about their products. I guess I'm just confused about which M.2 SSD to go for. So if WD are dodgy, what are you guys using?
 
I use:
Crucial MX500 2.5" SSD
WD Green 2.5" SSD
Sabrent rocket Q NVMe SSD
 
For WD, dramless SN550 1TB is very affordable with about 800MB/s after exhausting its cache. No need to buy SN750 or even SN850 if you are not professional.
 
Hey Good Folks. Just wondering what the deal with Western Digital is? I'm deciding between the blue and the black M.2 SSDs. All the performance specs seem several cuts above the competition. All the reviews on Amazon are great, but looking at trustpilot they're almost all negative? I don't understand.
I have been running western digital drives for 25+ years they are my go to brand. Greens, Blacks, Reds, Blues, 15 years or so ago I had a few of them that started making funny noises and I knew that they needed to be replaced So I went and got a few new drives moved the data and put the ones making funny noises into a box where all the old drives go. I recently had a Red fail in a My cloud but that was only after I dropped it down a flight of stairs guessing that was my fault. It was used as a redundant back up so nothing lost there. I have two 500 GB NVME SN750 Black drives one has Mac OS; one runs my windows VM; all my data is stored on Samsung 1tb 960 Evo just because that is what was available at Fry's when I bought it. I have around 10TB of old HD stored in the box I spoke of previously I would gather if I plugged them in they would all work still even the ones that were making funny noises "sounded like a failing motor not damaged heads"! I have not ever had a WD drive out right fail on me however, I have had Maxtor Drives, Seagate drives, Hitach "HGST", and Kingston drives fail and take the data with them. Hitach is now owned by WD though I am not sure if the drive that failed was before or after WD owned them. I had one Kingston drive that failed in a strange way and that is the data all remains but the drive is locked in a read only kind of mode. If you format it; delete the data; destroy the portion table, and rebuild it; then reboot the data comes back. This is just my personal experience others might tell you that WD is trash and every drive they have had from WD has failed. Keep in mind that WD NVME drives are sandisk, WD acquired them so they did not have to develop their own flash storage.
 
I have been running western digital drives for 25+ years they are my go to brand. Greens, Blacks, Reds, Blues, 15 years or so ago I had a few of them that started making funny noises and I knew that they needed to be replaced So I went and got a few new drives moved the data and put the ones making funny noises into a box where all the old drives go. I recently had a Red fail in a My cloud but that was only after I dropped it down a flight of stairs guessing that was my fault. It was used as a redundant back up so nothing lost there. I have two 500 GB NVME SN750 Black drives one has Mac OS; one runs my windows VM; all my data is stored on Samsung 1tb 960 Evo just because that is what was available at Fry's when I bought it. I have around 10TB of old HD stored in the box I spoke of previously I would gather if I plugged them in they would all work still even the ones that were making funny noises "sounded like a failing motor not damaged heads"! I have not ever had a WD drive out right fail on me however, I have had Maxtor Drives, Seagate drives, Hitach "HGST", and Kingston drives fail and take the data with them. Hitach is now owned by WD though I am not sure if the drive that failed was before or after WD owned them. I had one Kingston drive that failed in a strange way and that is the data all remains but the drive is locked in a read only kind of mode. If you format it; delete the data; destroy the portion table, and rebuild it; then reboot the data comes back. This is just my personal experience others might tell you that WD is trash and every drive they have had from WD has failed. Keep in mind that WD NVME drives are sandisk, WD acquired them so they did not have to develop their own flash storage.
Very informative, thank you. I didn't realise that the NVMe drives were Sandisk which gives me a lot more comfort, as I'm currently thinking of using a 250mb blue for OS, and a 2TB blue for sample libraries and music projects. Have you got any thoughts or wisdom to share in that vein?
 
Very informative, thank you. I didn't realise that the NVMe drives were Sandisk which gives me a lot more comfort, as I'm currently thinking of using a 250mb blue for OS, and a 2TB blue for sample libraries and music projects. Have you got any thoughts or wisdom to share in that vein?
I would use a Black for Sample Libraries and music projects IMO.. The boot drive would be fine with the blue.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top