Favorite Video Surveillance Hard Drive Statistics 2016: Seagate vs WD

Not saying Western Digital isn't a better drive, but I think they have better marketing. I see them being advertised a lot more.

I have been a WD fan since the mid 90's. I have tried other brands over the years, but have always favored WD drives. I have been burned by many other brands; Quantum, Maxtor, Samsung, etc.. Wait, those were all acquired by Seagate at some point!

I was also burned by Seagate by a flawed firmware on the 7200.11 drives. I personally had data on one of these drives that had been used as a backup device. The primary drive failed, which led me to access my backup device. The backup device was locked due to the defective firmware. Seagate's fix was to flash the firmware, but bricked drives weren't accessible. I ended up having to ship my drive with my only set of data to a third party who was able to flash the firmware using a proprietary method.

That whole disaster cost me days of time and hundreds of dollars. It was all due to the lack of QC on a shipping product. I lost all respect for them then and still harbor resentment today.

I have used SV35 drives, but only when forced to by incompatibilities with WD drives (some Dahua recorders didn't play well with WD drives).

What does HDD have to do with live viewing ?

"We like to use faster rpm drives for the recording/live drives as we have seen improved live view loading."

As the largest distributor in the US for WD Purple drives, I can tell you one of the big reasons for WD's much higher market share in the US is because of WD's focus on the video security market here which really started in 2010 but took several years to take hold. In addition to shipping very solid drives and to being first with (relatively) widespread marketing, and to me of much higher importance, was and is WD's distribution channel strategy on WD Purple. The strategy has ensured widespread availability of WD Purple drives. Both companies 'video security drives' are solid nowadays, but if manufacturers (or integrators) can't buy them from their distributor sources, with same day shipping, it's a non-starter. It is a lot harder than you might think to have a solid distribution channel with distributors paying enough attention to the business to always have stock on all the major capacity points. WD has really done a good job with this.

I'm sure most in this community remember the devastating flood in Thailand in 2011? WD resumed shipments to distributors in about 60 days. Seagate chose to enter long term agreements with only their largest (direct) customers and so distributors didn't get shipments of video security drives (as well as enterprise drives) for 6 months.

We make our living keeping security manufacturers, distributors and integrators in solid supply of reliable drives. To do this, we need to rely on a drive manufacturer that we know is committed, at the senior exec level, to all their customers, not just the very largest.

Backblaze (a backup company that does fantastic metrics for failure) samples all failures of their large pool every quarter (they use consumer and "Video" grade drives in their proprietary arrays).

Here's a bit of data from this last Quarter that may be helpful.

Our failure rate is much higher with Seagate, the RMA process is not worth the benefits provided by their recovery offering.

All of the failures we've seen were with seagate. That was a few years ago but since switching to WD purple we have not had a single failure. I personally almost lost a lot of data on a seagate drive and had to spend a lot of time and money to recover it. 

When putting in a large server, with say 24 drives, are people using WD purple or enterprise drives?

Seagate Exos Series 2.5"HDD, no failures yet. Stay tuned.

Great to see this important discussion come up again.  Do look for hardware RV sensors in drives going in systems with 8 or more drives.  We've found 'surveillance-class' (Seagate SkyHawk and WD Purple) drives very reliable up to 8 drives per system.  But above that, and especially at 16+ drives, we highly recommend enterprise class drives only - designed and tested solely for this setup.

For readers interested in the "Seagate/WD preference" topic of the OP:    Seagate's marketshare in the USA has dramatically increased, due to a complete turnaround of the issues I highlighted in this thread in 2016.  It's amazing, but it's like the two companies switched roles over the last couple years.  Maybe I shouldn't be too surprised though, given there were key executives and mid-level manager WD defections to Seagate!

Our company is making the move as well - Seagate is the clear future for 'video-security HDD's.'  Wait till you see what they have coming this year...

Well if this topic has come up again.

While the ISC West shenannigans were going on,  Toshiba launched their range of Surveillance Drives, the S300s, so there's another option for us all.

Link