Western Digital vs Seagate, Which One Is Better?

Basic Information: Western Digital vs Seagate

If you know anything about storage devices, you must have heard of Western Digital and Seagate, two of the world's top storage manufacturers. Especially when it comes to buying computer hard drives, you should be torn between Western Digital and Seagate. In order to solve your problems and worries, this article will introduce you to the differences between Western Digital and Seagate in terms of internal and external hard drives respectively. But before that, you should know the basic information of Western Digital and Seagate.

About Western Digital

Born in 1970, Western Digital is a world-renowned manufacturer of computer hard drives and data storage provider. The original main product is the hard disk drives (HDD). But after acquiring SanDisk to become the parent company, it has also begun to make efforts in integrated circuits and solid-state drives (SSD). Currently its hard drives can be divided into two main categories: consumer and enterprise.

The consumer grade can also be divided into Green (entry-level SSDs), Blue (mainstream drives), Black (performance drives), Red (NAS-specific drives), and Purple (surveillance video-specific drives). The enterprise class can also be divided into Xe (high-density performance storage), Re (high-capacity storage), Re+ (a combination of power-optimized and high-capacity storage), Se (for NAS and lateral expansion architectures), and Ae (energy-efficient HDD cold data set storage solutions).

About Seagate

Seagate Technology was born in 1979 and is a world-renowned computer hard drive and data storage company. Its main products include desktop hard drives, enterprise hard drives, laptop hard drives and micro hard drives, and it offers a dedicated hard drive testing tool SeaTools and a hard drive backup tool Seagate Discwizard.

Although Seagate's main product is HDD, it still invested $100 million in research and development of SSD in 2008. At present, SSDs that mix SLC and MLC chips have been successfully developed. The former has better performance, while the latter has a lower cost per chip.

Taken together, Seagate's current products can be divided into the following types:

• Barracuda: 3.5-inch desktop-class HDD up to 7,200 rpm.
• Skyhawk: a dedicated hard drive for surveillance video.
• Ironwolf: NAS-specific hard drive.
• EXOS X and EXOS E: dedicated enterprise drives.
• Firecuda: SSD products.
• Nytro: SSD products.

After understanding the above, I will introduce the differences between Western Digital and Seagate in terms of internal hard drives and external hard drives.

Western Digital vs Seagate: Internal Hard Drives

Western Digital and Seagate are both good options if you want to buy a hard drive installed inside your computer. But in fact, there are some differences in their hard disk products, and they have their own advantages and disadvantages. So, how can you choose the better one? First, let's start by understanding the differences between these two labels when it comes to HDDs.

Western Digital vs Seagate: HDD

As you know, HDDs are the main products of Western Digital and Seagate. If you want to choose a more suitable HDD, which one is better between them? You can evaluate all three aspects: performance, storage capacity and reliability.

🚩 Performance

The most intuitive indicator for judging the strength of hard disk performance is the read and write speed. Faster read and write speeds will also make your computer run faster. Although there are some differences in read and write speeds between HDD models.

But on the whole, Seagate's HDD read and write speed is faster than Western Digital, and the current maximum speed can reach 7200 RPM. It is worth mentioning that HDDs are divided into vertical disks and untitled disks, of which the former has stronger performance than the latter. Therefore, when purchasing HDDs, be careful not to buy HDD products with untitled disks.

🚩 Storage Capacity

Storage capacity is an important indicator when shopping for HDDs and is also the biggest advantage HDDs have over SSDs. Among them, Western Digital was the first company in the world to launch a 2TB SATA HDD. The company also launched the world's first 14TB HDD in October 2017 with the HGST Ultrastar Hs14.

Seagate's update pace has been a bit slower, but it's also currently launching the BarraCuda Pro with a 14TB capacity. Therefore, both Western Digital and Seagate can meet the hard disk capacity requirements of all users, and you can choose the appropriate storage capacity according to the actual situation. It's also worth noting that Western Digital's HDDs are more expensive than Seagate's for the same capacity.

🚩 Reliability

Any hard drive will accumulate certain errors after long-term use, which will eventually lead to failure. So when shopping for a hard drive, you need to focus on the reliability of the drive in addition to the storage capacity and performance. The more reliable your drive is, the longer it will last.

Despite the different models and capacities, according to a study by BackBlaze, among all HDD manufacturers such as Western Digital, Seagate, and Toshiba, Western Digital has the highest failure rate. The feedback results of users on the network can also prove this point. Therefore, in the Western Digital VS Seagate reliability comparison, the latter is significantly better.

Which Is the Better Internal HDD?

On the whole, the advantages of Western Digital's internal HDD are strong performance, large storage capacity and a variety of options. The disadvantage is that it is less reliable and expensive. The advantages of Seagate's internal HDD are high performance, large storage capacity and a variety of options, strong reliability and low price. The disadvantage is that the Flash acceleration effect cannot appear in time.

In summary, it is recommended that you purchase Seagate's internal HDDs. The following is a visual comparison between Western Digital and Seagate in terms of performance, storage capacity, reliability, and price.

Western Digital vs Seagate: SSD

Western Digital and Seagate were both firm HDD advocates, but under the impact of the SSD wave, they also began to study SSDs. In the latest M.2 interface (NVMe PCIe 4.0 protocol), Western Digital SN850 achieves 7000MS/s sequential read, 5300MS/s sequential write, and 1000K (IOPS) random read. The Seagate Coldplay 530 sequential read reaches 7300MS/s, sequential write reaches 6000MS/s, and random read reaches 1000K (IOPS).

By comparison, Seagate's SSDs lead the pack in terms of performance. In terms of storage capacity, reliability and price, the gap between the two is small. Overall, Seagate SSD is the best choice.

Seagate vs Western Digital: External Hard Drives

External hard drives can be easily connected to a computer via a USB cable and operate in a plug-and-play fashion. External hard drives have larger storage capacities and are usually used for data backup or as network drives. Among them, Western Digital and Seagate are common manufacturers.

If you are also entangled in Western Digital and Seagate when purchasing an external hard drive, please read the following content in detail to choose a more suitable external hard drive. It should be noted that the external hard drives of Western Digital and Seagate are mainly HDDs, and SDD-related products are few and small in capacity, so they are not included in the reference range. Next, we need to understand the following three common types of external hard drives.

Removable Hard Drives

Both Western Digital and Seagate offer removable external hard drives of varying capacities. Among them, the most popular of Western Digital is the My Passport series, and the most popular of Seagate is the Backup Plus series. These series will provide different capacity versions (up to 5TB), you can choose according to your needs.

Desktop Hard Drives

If you need to store a lot of games, photos and videos, a removable hard drive with a maximum capacity of 5TB may not be sufficient. At this point you are recommended to choose a desktop drive. Among them, Western Digital's My Book Duo desktop hard drive can reach a capacity of 28TB after RAID 0 or RAID 1 configuration. Even the standalone My Book desktop hard drive can provide up to 18TB of capacity.

The Seagate Coldplay series can provide a maximum capacity of 16TB, which is enough to meet the storage space needs of most users. But on the whole, Western Digital is better.

NAS Device

The best choice for NAS devices is Western Digital. This is because Western Digital can offer up to 40 TB in the My Cloud Pro and Expert series. While Seagate doesn't currently have first-party NAS servers, their product is the 14TB IronWolf series, which are drives designed for NAS.

Which Is the Better External Hard Drive

The advantages of Western Digital external hard drives are strong performance, plug-and-play technology, and the size of the mainstream 2.5-inch. The disadvantage is that the size is small and it is easy to receive shock, it is easy to overheat after long-term use, and some products are made of plastic material, which leads to weak shock resistance.

The advantages of the Seagate external hard drive are that the removable hard drive is simple to set up, small in size and light in weight, perfectly adapted to the Windows operating system and can be automatically recognized. The downsides are the short warranty period and the fact that the external hard drive doesn't come with backup software.

To sum up, it is recommended that you buy an external hard drive from Western Digital. Here's a visual comparison of performance, storage capacity, battery life, and data security between Western Digital and Seagate:

Easy Way to Migrate HDD Data to Internal or External Hard Drive

After choosing a suitable internal or external hard drive, if you want to transfer the data in your old hard drive completely and securely, then AOMEI Backupper Standard will be a good choice. Its disk cloning feature allows you to easily clone all data from the old hard drive to the new hard drive.

AOMEI Backupper Standard works with multiple system versions such as Windows 11/10/8.1/8/7, you can quickly clone apps, files, folders, etc. from the original HDD or SSD to the new HDD or SSD (Western Digital or Seagate) with just a few clicks. Next, we will introduce you the detailed operation steps of Disk Clone, which are the same for internal and external HDDs. First, please do the following preparations.

🤖 The software uses Intelligent Clone by default. Therefore, you need to check the storage space of the two disks participating in the disk clone and make sure that the destination disk is greater than or equal to the used space of the source disk, otherwise the clone may fail.
🧰 As the disk cloning process is performed, the existing partitions on the target disk will be overwritten or deleted. Therefore, if there are partitions on your target disk, it is recommended to backup the partitions first.
🐢 Download and install AOMEI Backupper Standard.

1. Launch AOMEI Backupper Standard, select Clone in the left panel, and select Disk Clone in the right panel.

2. In the Source Disk window, select either the original HDD or SSD and tap Next.

3. In the Destination Disk window, select a new HDD or SSD (Western Digital or Seagate) as the destination disk, and then tap Next.

4. In the Operation Summary window, please confirm the currently set disk cloning operation and tap the Start Clone button.

Tip📝:
☻ If the target disk is an SSD, please check the SSD Alignment checkbox. If you want to copy the whole sector completely, please check the Sector By Sector Clone checkbox.
☻ In addition, if you upgrade to the Pro version, you can tap Edit partitions in the lower left corner to use more features such as Convert the destination disk from GPT to MBR, Add unused space to all partitions, Manually adjust partition size, etc.

5. Wait for the disk clone to complete, and then tap the Finish button.

In addition to Disk Clone, AOMEI Backupper will provide you with more useful features.

• Both HDDs and SSDs (Western Digital or Seagate) are at risk of data loss after prolonged use. Therefore, it is recommended that you use the Disk Backup feature to back up everything on the source disk to any desired location to ensure the safety of the disk data.
• After creating a disk backup image, you can use the Disk Restore feature to recover lost disk data in case of accidental loss of disk data.
• If you want to migrate your system completely to another SSD (Western Digital or Seagate), please upgrade to the Pro version before using the System Clone feature, which will save more time than disk cloning.

Conclude

This article will provide you with the comparison results of Western Digital VS Seagate hard drives. And compare the internal hard disk and external hard disk respectively, and recommend the best hard disk brand for you.

If you want to replace a new HDD or SSD, it is recommended that you use AOMEI Backupper Standard for HDD or SSD cloning to ensure that all data in the old hard disk is safely and completely migrated to the new hard disk.