What components make enterprise HDDs more reliable than consumer HDDs?

I believe it was Western Digital Green drives that were flawed from the start. In many cases, the different year means different firmware which was the problem with Seagates 7200.11 drives, I believe. The 7200.12 drives turned out to be quite good because the firmware was updated. I own a few and have had no problem with any of them.

essenbe said:

I believe it was Western Digital Green drives that were flawed from the start. In many cases, the different year means different firmware which was the problem with Seagates 7200.11 drives, I believe. The 7200.12 drives turned out to be quite good because the firmware was updated. I own a few and have had no problem with any of them.

It's the Green and Eco drives like Steve said the Caviar Blue and Black are there top sellers because they are reliable

I have a WD My book 500GB from like 2007 damn thing acts like it did the day we turned it on so no issues there

For me I just more familiar with Seagate as I used them longer nothing wrong with WD even Maxtor Toshiba drives it all boils down to what you feel works best for you

You wouldn't buy a Ford if you were a Chevy man would you ? pretty much same thing in a sense but most general people will go with the best bang for the buck not what performs better because performance cost money and not only you but everyone else think same thing less speed but save some money

essenbe said:

I believe it was Western Digital Green drives that were flawed from the start. In many cases, the different year means different firmware which was the problem with Seagates 7200.11 drives, I believe. The 7200.12 drives turned out to be quite good because the firmware was updated. I own a few and have had no problem with any of them.

It was the Seagate 7200.11s. I got burned by two of them (one died after a year; the other one had bad sectors when I received it and the vendor weaseled out of replacing it). What really left the bad taste in my mouth was the way Seagate tried to keep the problem quiet and wouldn't even acknowledge that there was a problem with the run for quite some time.

Some of the earlier WD Greens had problems with the heads repeatedly parking themselves when idle, creating a faint clicking noise, wearing themselves out prematurely. I use 2TB Greens to back up the WD Blacks in my machine. One of the drives sounds like it may be a clicker but, since it doesn't get plugged into my computer except for during a backup, it sees very little idle time so I'm not worried about it since I do have a spare (I have a total of seven, one being an accidental spare). If it does die (which probably will be well out of warranty since it gets plugged in for less than hour only once a week), I do have that spare to replace it with. I'm not worried about losing data since I make two backups, one right after the other, when doing my weekly backups. I also have a third back up that resides in a safe deposit box at my credit union that gets renewed no less than once a month (actually, I swap drives to keep them in rotation and to avoid an extra trip to the credit union each time). In addition to that, I use Carbonite for a continuous back up to the cloud.

Another reason for the bad rap the Greens have been getting is they were getting used for combined boot and data drives (the head parking when idle feature, among other things, caused a lot of "interesting" problems with the OS) and in NAS systems (again, the head parking when idle feature frequently caused grief with the RAIDs). The REDS were developed to provide "green" advantages (lower power usage and less expensive) and still be compatible with a RAIDed NAS.