there are only a handful of companies that make HDD so it will be one of them. WD has a terrible reputation as well. Who else makes HDDs? (Toshiba is the only one I know of and they never seem to come up with someone asks for recommendations so I'm not sure if they are small, so bad nobody would think about them, or just hard to get retail)
The HGST Ultrastars, which were bought by WD and so now are WD Ultrastars, have a great reputation and despite being marketted as enterprise drives, are not much more expensive than consumer drives. My data point is that I've bought several of them and never had any trouble.
>My data point is that I've bought several of them and never had any trouble.
This is, emphatically, not a good data point. You need thousands of drives running for years under normal loads to actually tease out outlier failure rates in a drive SKU. You need to literally do what Backblaze does.
I'm suspecting Toshiba might just be "a well-kept open secret" and people want to keep them for themselves. That's my only explanation for their absence in recommendations. Perhaps combined with that probably the other manufacturers actively market in ways that Toshiba doesn't care for.
Gone through a bunch of their MG/MN series drives over 5+y, and the 3/5y warranty was honored without BS on the one RMA case. You can also see them track well in Backblaze rankings.
Their N series are supposedly also great but never saw the point in paying the premium.
I have no idea why you would pay more or the same for same-sized drives from either Seagate or WD if you have the option.
When I built my 48TB NAS a few years back I went with Toshiba MG Helium-sealed drives because of so many bad experiences with the remaining alternatives.
It was a revelation. These drives have been so good to me.
I'm a die-hard Ultrastar fan who was disappointed by their eventual sale to WD. But, for a sample size of 8 over a decade, I've been happy with my Toshiba laptop 2TB drives I have running in a small storage server.
