Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I oversee technology for an entire school and have done so for over a decade. For my professional and personal usage I only purchase the WD Black Hard Drives and I have literally never had a problem or failure with any of them during that entire 12 year period. So, that's all I continue to buy. I used to purchase another brand name drive but we had problems with them. There's nothing worse than having a hard drive crap out taking all the data with it. Granted we usually have back ups but there's always the gnawing feeling that something gets lost when restoring from backup no matter how frequent the backups. Plus there's the stress, frustration, and lost productivity while the unit is offline. Yes, these drives are more expensive than many other hard drives. However, when you factor in the dramatically improved reliability and longevity, it has been my experience that they are more than worth the extra money. To be sure, there's no doubt that there may be an occasional bad unit or one that just fails, but, so far, in my experience we have never encountered one. Plus, they have a 5 year warranty and a high MTBF rating both of which, of course, are very reassuring. Side note: if you're not backing up your data to some sort of disconnected storage device and you lose data that's not the fault of the drive or the malware that took out your data. In my experience, there are two kinds of people in the world: those who have lost data and those who will lose data.