Hacker News Reader

It's a sample size of one, but the worst recent HDD I bought was a Toshiba. I got it in, and within a week I was getting SMART warnings about a high number of reallocated sectors (accompanied by strange performance characteristics.

I RMA'd the drive and the replacement had the exact same issue.

Technically that's a sample size of two.

Could be a sample size of one though. One of the most important things for hard drives is to keep them protected. If your shipping company screws up (see Amazon) and drops the box hard on your front porch, you may end up with a broken drive.

AKA: The issue could very well not be the hard drive manufacturer, but instead the company that delivered your hard drives to you. I prefer to pick up hard drives physically from Microcenter for this reason, it means that I can properly "baby" those fragile drives all the way home.

Sample size of one customer with a bad experience, or a sample size of two bad drives.

Toshiba spun off their flash storage as Kioxia. WD and Kioxia are considering a merger.

Seconded. I have many Toshiba drives, always very happy with them.