Do you remember how the bitcoin price jumped to $20,000 in less than nine months in 2017?
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- The best hard drives, meanwhile, will give you a lot more storage for less. You can get a 4TB hard drive for the same amount it would cost you if you were to get a 1TB SSD.
- This SSD has no moving parts, making it more reliable than a traditional hard disk drive. It also gives you ultra-fast boot speeds, allowing you to turn on your computer and start work in seconds. With storage sizes from 1TB to 4TB, you can store games, 4K movies, photos, and tons of documents without running out of space.
- Dec 06, 2020 Much like Seagate, WD has been making storage solutions for PCs for many years, and it offers reliable drives for any NAS. As with the Seagate drives, I recommend at least 4TB. WD's Red hard drives.
Hard drives storage backups. Backblaze uses 25,000 hard drives for its online backup service. Today, Backblaze has spilled the beans on which drive manufacturers are the most reliable. The annual hard drive failure report is now out for 2018, including statistics on more than 100,000 hard drives. Continuing forward, we will dig in and see what the most reliable hard drive of.
I remember too. You may wonder how bitcoin prices related to hard drive reliability. I will explain further, but first, let me tell you which Mac hard drive is most reliable from my own experience.
The most reliable external hard is Elements from Western Digital. It is best used with Macs with only USB 2.0 or 3.0 ports. For Macs with USB-C (3.1) ports, the most reliable hard drive is WD My Passport for Mac Portable External Hard Drive. Both hard drives are affordable and available in sizes from 1TB to 5TB.
Now, back to the story. When bitcoin price jumped to $20K, I naturally started reading various stories about people who became accidentally rich because, in 2009 and 2010, they bought several bitcoins and cashed them later when prices went over the roof.
For instance, one Norwegian student bought 5,000 bitcoins for his college research paper for $27 in 2009. He forgot about his purchase for a while. Only in 2013, when the price of a single bitcoin was around $177, he remembered about his purchase.
At that time, his $27 initial investment was worth $886,000. He sold 1000 bitcoins and bought an apartment in Oslo.I learned about this story in 2017 and thought to myself – if I also bought 5000 bitcoins like Norwegian, in 2017, they would be worth a whopping $100,000,000 – a hundred million dollars!
Alas, I didn’t buy anything in 2009. And I forget about this story. Bitcoin since then dropped to $3,000 and stayed on that level for a while. In 2019 the price of bitcoin started climbing again and reached $6,000.
And suddenly, in the spring of 2019, it dawned on me. I knew that I didn’t spend money on bitcoins, but I am a programmer after all. When bitcoin mining became popular, many programmers mined for fun. They wanted to learn new technology – cryptocurrency.
In 2009 I lived alone and had a lot of time on my hands. What if, I told myself, I mined some bitcoins and saved them on my computer? Yes, 5000 bitcoins would not be worth $100 mln as they were in 2017, but I bet I’ll be ok with $30 mln.
I immediately jumped off my sofa and ran to my basement. Obviously, I didn’t have my original computer anymore (it was too old, I bought it in 2005). But, I have a habit of backing up my data.
And I found it – my external hard drive I used ten years ago. It was Elements from Western Digital. I wiped the dust from its surface and plugged it to the power, and heard a humming sound as the disk started rotating. Good, it looks like it is working. Now, the big question is whether if it is readable? I was afraid that after years of not being used, some sectors could be corrupt.
Fortunately, the data was there; all folders and files were readable.
You see, I told you that this is the most reliable external hard drive. Obviously, you won’t be able to get the same drive as I had, and you don’t want to. Here is a new version of the same device. Let’s review it.
WD Elements Portable External Hard Drive
Let’s start with the clarification – Elements is not a drive you want to use with newish MacBooks (2016 or newer) because it does not support USB-C ports. On the one hand, you absolutely can buy a USB to USB-C adapter and use the drive, but I have a better option.
There is another hard drive from Western Digital, which is a close sibling of Elements. So, if you have 2016 or newer MacBook Air or Pro, skip this section and go to the paragraph about WD My Passport for Mac drive.
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WD 5TB Elements Portable External Hard Drive, USB 3.0
Size and Weight
The Elements drive is much smaller and lighter than the drive I had 10 years ago. The new version has the following size and weight specifications:
- Depth: 4.35 in/11.05cm
- Width: 3.23 in/8.20cm
- Height: 0.82 in/2.08cm
- Weight: 0.51 lb/0.23kg
For comparison, my old disk had following dimensions: 8in x 4.5in x 1in or 20cm x 11.43cm x 2.54cm. And it weighed a ton!
Speed
The speed of any hard drive depends on two factors: read/write speed of the disk itself, and speed of transfer over the cable.
Elements drive support USB 2.0 and 3.0 standards. 2.0 and 3.0 ports look similar, so if you are not sure which one you have, I have a post about used MacBooks where you can find the specifications of your laptop.
Although ports look similar, there is a significant difference in transfer speed. Max transfer speed of USB 2.0 devices is about 480 Mbit/s (60 MB/s). The maximum transfer speed for USB 3.0 depends on the version: version 1 has a 5.0 Gbit/s transfer rate, and v2 is twice faster at 10.0 Gbit/s. In other words, USB 3.0 is 10-20 times faster than 2.0.
As for the read/write speeds of the disk itself, it’s around 95MBps for writing and more than 100MBps for reading. Sometimes, you can see reviews stating that the overall speed is much slower: 50-60 MB/s.
You probably, already guessed why there is such a discrepancy in transfer speeds for different people. Transfer speed on older laptops is limited by USB standard: if your Mac has USB 2.0 port, the limit is 60MB/s, so no matter how fast the drive is, you are limited by port throughput.
With 3.0 ports, however, you are getting the maximum from the drive.
File format
Strictly speaking, this drive is not compatible with Macs right out the gate. It comes with NTFS preinstalled, which is a Windows format and not compatible with macOS.
So, if you plug in the device to your Mac, you will not see it in the Finder. Here’s what you need to do to use it with Mac.
1. Start Disk Utility app from Spotlight Search
2. Click on the Erase icon in the toolbar or right-click on the Elements and select Erase in the popup menu.
3. Give the name for the device and select choose format.
4. If you are planning to use the drive only with Macs, then select Mac OS Extended (Journaled) format. If you want to use the drive with Macs and PCs, then the format should be ExFat.
If you want to know the differences between disk file formats and when to choose which one and other advanced hacks, check my post on this subject.
After proper formatting, you are now ready to use the external drive for storage and Time Machine backups.
WD My Passport for Mac Portable External Hard Drive
As mentioned above, Elements is perfect for old Macs with USB 2.0/3.0 ports. However, it’s not a good choice for new Macs with USB-C ports.
Fortunately, WD released a newer version of external drives: My Passport series. The series has a lot of various drives with various tech specs, and it could be overwhelming to navigate in a sea of choices.
But since here we concerned mainly with reliability the closest sibling of Elements hard drive is WD 5TB My Passport for Mac Portable External Hard Drive
WD 5TB My Passport for Mac Portable External Hard Drive – Blue, USB-C/USB-A
Size and Weight
My Passport is slightly smaller and lighter than Elements. It has the following size and weight specifications:
- Depth 4.22 in/10.71cm
- Width 2.95 in/7.49cm
- Height 0.75 in/1.91cm
- Weight 0.51 lb/0.21kg
Speed
Speed is another thing where My Passport beats Elements. Let’s start with the following fact: My Passport supports both USB 3.0 and USB-C ports. It comes with two cables, and depending on which port you have on your Mac, you can use one or the other.
As indicated above, the transfer speed of USB 3.0 is limited to 10.0 Gbit/s max. The max speed for USB-C is 40.0 Gbit/s, four times faster than second-generation 3.0.
Overall the read and write speed of My Passport is around 110 MB/s (on par with Elements).
File format
The best thing about My Passport for Mac is that it already preformatted for macOS. You can start using the drive as soon as you plug it in. No need to mess with disk utilities and other stuff. However, it also means that it is not compatible with Windows.
So, if you have both PCs and Macs and you want to use the drive to transfer data between them, then you need to reformat the drive before use.
The end of my story
At this point, you are probably wondering whether I was able to find forgotten bitcoins on my drive. Don’t worry; I won’t leave you hanging in midair.
So, first, I searched for anything like “bitcoin” or “crypto.” I didn’t find anything.
Well, I am not that stupid. I didn’t expect that I would leave anything precious easily available on my disk. If I had cryptocurrency mined, I’d use obfuscation techniques to hide anything valuable. Here are the techniques that can help you hide sensitive data on your disk.
Long story short, I spent a couple of days examining my drive, and I didn’t find anything. Truth to be told, when I first learned about crypto, I thought it’s more suited for criminals and decided to stay away from it.
Now I think I made a mistake, but I can sleep well now when I know that I don’t have anything valuable on my drive (because I bought a very reliable hard drive back in 2009). Imagine, how would I feel if the external disk I used crashed or data was corrupted. I’d be thinking that I might have lost millions of dollars!
Anyway, I am far better than the guy who swapped 10,000 bitcoins for 2 pizzas in 2009. In 2017, each pizza would cost $100 mln!
Summary :
When talking about storage manufacturers, you must have heard of Seagate and Western Digital. What the differences between the two companies’ storage devices? Who makes the most reliable hard drives? If you don't know, this article from MiniTool will show you the answers.
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Most of you have heard of Seagate and Western Digital, but how much do you really know about them? Before I show you the comparison of Seagate vs Western Digital from several aspects, I’d like to show you some basic information about the two companies. Now let’s have a look together.
About Seagate
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Seagate Technology PLC is an American data storage company. It was founded in 1978 as Shugart technology. Since 2010, the company has been incorporated in Dublin, Ireland, with its operating headquarters in Cupertino, California, USA.
In 1980, Seagate developed the first 5.25-inch hard disk drive (HDD). In the 1980s, they became the main suppliers of microcomputers. Today, Seagate and its competitor Western Digital dominate the hard disk market. And their main products include Desktop HDD, Laptop HDD, Enterprise HDD, Archive HDD, SSD and so on.
The growth of Seagate was largely achieved by acquiring competitors. In 1989, Seagate acquired the Control Data Corporation’s Imprimis division which is devoted to making HDD products. In 1996, Seagate acquired Conner Peripherals. Then Seagate acquired Maxtor in 2006 and Samsung's hard disk business in 2011.
Now, Seagate is a global leader in data storage solutions. It develops amazing storage products that enable home and business users around the world to create, share and save their most critical data.
About Western Digital
Western Digital Corporation, also known as Western Digital and WD, is a famous American computer hard disk manufacturer and provider of various data storage solutions. It develops, manufactures and provides storage devices, data center systems, and cloud storage services to solve the evolving needs of the information technology industry.
Western Digital has a long history in the electronic industry. The company was founded by Alvin B. Phillips in 1970 and was headquartered in Irvine, California. Now they have moved its headquarters to San Jose, California.
Like Seagate, Western Digital becomes one of the manufacturers of large computer hard disks, which is the result of successful acquisition of other enterprises. In March 2012, Western Digital acquired HGST (Hitachi Global Storage Technologies). The acquisition had a great influence on the hard disk industry, as it made WD become the world's largest hard disk manufacturer after the acquisition.
In May 2016, Western Digital acquired the storage chip manufacturer SanDisk. In August 2017, Western Digital acquired cloud storage provider Upthere to build better cloud storage features. In September 2017, Western Digital acquired Tegile Systems, a flash storage array manufacturer.
Now the main hard disk manufacturers are only WD and Seagate, indicating that the hard disk industry has entered the era of oligarchy. And many users will compare the two brands when choosing a storage device such as SSD, HDD. So today, I will show you the differences of Seagate vs Western Digital on storage devices.
Seagate vs Western Digital HDD
As is known to all, HDD is the main business of Seagate Technology and Western Digital Corporation. What's the difference between their HDD products? The following will give you a comparison of Seagate vs Western Digital HDD, which introduces the differences on reliability, speed, capacity of the two HDD brands.
Reliability
When you want to upgrade hard drive, choosing a high-performance and reliable hard drive is essential. Any drive you buy today will fail eventually, but the more reliable your drive is, the longer you should be able to use it. So the reliability is an essential factor.
Western Digital is the hard drive manufacturer that many users prefer for traditional platter drives. Many people have been using WD hard drives for years. And they assume WD hard drives have terrific reliability with very low failure rate.
However, according to a study from BackBlaze, it shows that Western Digital’s drives were overall the least reliable among HGST, Seagate, Toshiba, and Western Digital. Is that true? Well, hard disk drive failures vary by brand, model, and capacity. These numbers are found only when the manufacturer is considered regardless of the model and capacity. So these numbers are not 100% percent accurate.
After searching on the internet, you will find many people hold the opinion that Western Digital’s hard drives are more reliable than that of Seagate. And many users report that Western Digital HDDs fail less than any from Seagate.
Whatever the reliability, you may occasionally encounter WD or Seagate hard drive failure as not all hard drives are created equal. You can have drive failure from any manufacturer. So, no matter what drive you are using, the best way to protect your valuable data is to make a backup.
Are you looking for a free backup software? The partition manager MiniTool Partition Wizard is able to backup partition or backup disk in just a few clicks.
Speed
As for the HDD speed, I see such an analogy on the Internet: Seagate and the Western Digital are like two people of completely different character. Seagate is a young man in pursuit of superior performance. While the Western Digital is more like an old man with rich experience who does not pursue speed but pursue the reliability.
What does this mean? It means that Seagate's hard disk speed will be faster than that of the Western Digital. But despite of the faster read-write speed, its failure rate is also higher than that of the Western Digital.
The read-write speed of Western Digital HDDs is a little slower compared with Seagate, but it is more suitable for storage due to its good stability and durability.
In conclusion, Seagate hard disk drives are generally fast, fluent in reading and writing, and generally light. The HDD of Western Digital is relatively stable with low hard drive failure rate.
If you want to test their read write speed, a free disk benchmarking tool is recommended – MiniTool Partition Wizard Free Edition, which can help you test hard drive sequential and random read/write speeds. If you want to perform Seagate/Western Digital HDD benchmark, download one now.
Easiest guide for free hard drive/SSD speed test in Windows 10/8/7. Utilize best free disk benchmark software for Windows (10) to test hard drive, SSD, external hard drive speed for free.
Capacity
When talking about capacity, Western Digital impressed us, as it was the first one who introduced 2TB SATA hard drives to us. And its capacity of hard drives is ever increasing. In October 2017, Western Digital shipped the world’s first 14 TB HDD, the helium-filled HGST Ultrastar Hs14.
As for Seagate, it has desktop-class drives with a capacity up to 10TB. And the capacity of this drive is not the largest. Its internal hard drive Seagate BarraCuda’s Pro version has a capacity of 14TB, which enables you to store more games, movies, and music than ever before.
Both Western Digital and Seagate can satisfy your need on hard drive capacity. In this case, when picking up a hard drive from the two companies, you can focus on other critical factors such as price, performance, reliability and so on.
Seagate vs Western Digital SSD
Both Western Digital and Seagate were initially reluctant to invest in SSDs, but now they all offer speedy solid-state drives.
In the new NVMe series, Firecuda 510 is the one that makes Seagate stand out in the competition. Western Digital Black 3D NVME is not as fast as Firecuda 510, but its price is higher.
Seagate is currently leading the way in larger internal storage and speed competition, although the gap is small. Western Digital still has a place in the middle and low-end market.
Seagate vs Western Digital External Storage
External storage is important and necessary for users who want to backup internal drives. The following will show you three kinds of external storages.
Portable Drive
Both Seagate and Western Digital offer pocket external hard drives with different capacities and connectivity. Among those external drives, Western Digital's My Passport series and Seagate's Backup Plus portable drives are popular. If you are considering purchasing an external hard drive, the following Seagate/Western Digital is worth buying.
- Seagate Backup Plus Slim 2 TB
- WD 3 TB My Passport Wireless Pro
- WD My Passport Ultra 4 TB
This article will show you the specifications, excellent features of the gaming dirve WD My Passport X 2TB Portable Hard Drive. Check out this post now.
Desktop Drive
If you are a photo or video editor, or a movie buff, a portable drive may not satisfy you, as you will need several terabytes of space to store large media collections. In this case, you can consider a desktop-class drive.
If you want to choose a desktop-class drive, WD My Book Duo Desktop drive is a good choice. The desktop drive has up to 28TB capacity in RAID 0 or RAID 1 configurations. As for Seagate, they can provide 10TB of storage from a single-drive Backup Plus Hub or Expansion Desktop.
Both desktop drives have mass storage for photos, videos, music and document backups. However, if you want to do 4K or even 8K video editing, or backup other massive media collection, Western Digital is your best choice.
NAS Devices
NAS devices seem to be an afterthought for Seagate. Why? Because Western Digital offers the My Cloud Pro and Expert lines in up to 40 TB but Seagate currently does not have a first-party NAS server. Instead, they choose to produce NAS-designed drives, with the IronWolf range in up to 14TB.
Nowadays, My Cloud offers build-in support for Plex Media Server. This organizes your library and allows streaming to any enabled device - smartphones, Chromecast, PlayStation 4 and more, which is very convenient. While Seagate drives can be merged into NAS servers and used in the same way, they do not have high-capacity servers with similar capabilities.
In this case, Western Digital is your best choice when you want to choose wireless storage products or use cloud storage.
The Best Disk Cloning Software for Seagate/Western Digital
After reading this post, you should know the pros and cons of Western Digital vs Seagate in terms of storage. Both of them are very good HDD brands. If you need to upgrade your HDD/SSD or backup your disk to an external device, you need to utilize a piece of disk cloning software. And MiniTool Partition Wizard can be your best choice.
MiniTool Partition Wizard is a reputable partition manager & disk cloning software. It can help you to migrate OS to SSD/HD, backup disk or partition, move/resize partition, convert MBR disk to GPT, and convert FAT to NTFS and so on. All of these operations can be performed with extremely simple procedures, so you don't need to worry about how to use.
And the following will show you the detailed steps on how to upgrade SSD/HDD without data loss or backup hard drive with the help of MiniTool Partition Wizard. Note that if you want to backup system related partitions or upgrade system disk, MiniTool Parition Wizard Pro Ultimate is required. After connecting the target disk to your computer, you can follow the steps below:
Step 1. Get MiniTool Partition Wizard by clicking the following button. Install it on your computer, launch it and get the main interface.
Step 2. Select the disk you want to copy and choose Copy Disk from the left panel.
Step 3. Select a target disk to copy content to and click Next. When you click Next, it will remind you all the data on the target disk will be deleted, click OK if there are no important files on the target disk.
Step 4. Review the changes you are going to make and click Next to go on.
Step 5. Read the note about how to boot from the destination drive. Then click Finish.
Step 6. At last, click Apply to allow the pending operations.
You see, it is very convenient to upgrade SSD or HDD with MiniTool Partition Wizard Pro Ultimate. With only a few clicks, all the files on the old drive will be transferred to the new one. If you need to backup hard drive or upgrade HDD to SSD, try using the best disk cloning software MiniTool Partition Wizard now.
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Bottom Line
Now, do you have a better understanding of Seagate vs Western Digital on storage? If you have different opinion on Seagate vs Western Digital external hard drive, SSD, cloud storage and other aspects, please don't hesitate to share it with us.
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If you have encountered any issue when using MiniTool Partition Wizard, you can leave a message on the following comment zone and we will reply as soon as possible. If you need any help when using MiniTool software, you may contact us via [email protected].
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Seagate vs Western Digital FAQ
Western Digital is not Seagate. Seagate and Western Digital (WD) are both well-known American computer hard disk manufacturers and data storage solution providers. They are two giants that dominate the hard disk market. Western Digital does not belong to Seagate, and vice versa.
Many users report that Western Digital HDDs are more reliable than Seagate hard drives. But, regardless of reliability, you may occasionally encounter WD or Seagate hard disk drive failure because there are many factors that can cause disk failure. (Here Are 6 Signs Indicating Hard Drive Failure, Check out Now)
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As one of the global leader in data storage field, Seagate is a very good and reliable hard disk brand. Now the products of Seagate technology mainly includes Desktop/Laptop HDD, Enterprise HDD, Archive HDD, SSD and so on.
Seagate acquired Samsung's hard disk business in the year of 2011, so Seagate is not owned by Samsung. On the contrary, Samsung's HDD business is owned by Seagate.