Drives do not come all the same - but one has to be careful in comparing manufacturer selects - Western Digital now releases at least 3 different grades of drives and while it may be regarded that you can swap one for the other - they do have actually different specs.
So indeed a recent experience to get best Raid system performance showed me that selecting the equivalent drive to drive compare - a Hitachi model beat out Western Digital.
Western Digital now owns HGST (Hitachi Global Storage Technologies), although the Western Digital and Hitachi brands operate as separate companies.
Hitachi Global Storage Technologies was founded in 2003 as a merger of the hard disk drive businesses of IBM and Hitachi. (IBM being the inventor of the hard drive and originator of most all of the advances in hard drive technology.) Western Digital (WD) acquired Hitachi Global Storage Technologies in early 2012.
Just this month, HGST announced a 10TB 3.5" hard drive filled with helium.
Uhh, nothing will ever duplicate the warmth from my 1/8" cassette tapes, except maybe my old LearJet 4-track, which bit the dust many years earlier . . .
I totally agree with the assessment of Seagate drives. In my many years working with computers I've only had three hard drive failures. All three were Seagate drives. WD Black drives have been very reliable for me. I've only had two 2TB Hitachi drives that I purchased for backup storage. One developed intermittent write errors about a month after I got it. I contacted the factory and they replaced it immediately. Both drives have since been working fine for the past two years.
in the late 90's and early 2K the IBM Deskstar became known as the IBM Deathstars due to many many failures that we encountered when I was a desktop tech at a health care company that had about 3,000 users. I've even had 2 of my 4 RAID 0+1 drives die on my personal DAW machine around 2000-2002. I personally haven't used them since but I'm sure (hope) they've gotten better since IBM has teamed up w/ Hitachi. (;