BEST CHEAP 5TB Portable hard drive: Seagate vs WD — Should YOU buy one? | Detailed review and tests

Portable HDDs have become pretty cheap for the amount of storage they offer. While they are sure much slower than NVMe SSDs, in certain scenarios it can be a perfect choice.
In this video I'll review and benchmark Seagate and Western Digital external portable hard drives, so that You can understand whether it's a right option for You.
If You wonder whether it's a good choice for editing 4K footage straight from this type of drives — I'll be showing that use case in the video too.

Links to tech:

Backup software:

Free Paragon NTFS driver for mac:

Time codes:
00:00 — Into
01:05 — Options and prices
01:29 — Bundled software
02:23 — What's in the box
03:23 — Size and design
05:24 — Benchmarks
07:42 — 4K video editing test

[NoEggu]

If your drive fails, Western Digital makes it a nightmare to get a warranty replacement.
Every conceivable obstacle is used to make you give up.

Seagate, on the other hand, goes out of their way to make their warranty process painless.

Also some (maybe all?) Seagate drives include free data recovery under their warranty.
The data that they recover will be placed on a drive and shipped to you. That drive is in addition to them replacing your failed drive. And you get to keep both drives.

Western Digital drives cost a bit less. If you never have an issue with the drive (and you probably will not have any issues), then go with them. But you are rolling the dice. If you need to open a warranty claim, their site delivers error messages, their phone support (which takes a long time to reach someone and to navigate their phone-button ecosystem)... their phone support personnel will also tell you that their systems are having issues and cannot create an RMA, followed by you calling a dozen times for a month or more and finally getting an RMA, followed by them not shipping you a replacement drive for a month or more.

And to add insult to injury, Western Digital offers a Convenience Fee service.
For $25, they will expedite replacing your failed drive.

"Convenience"?
They expect you to pay them $25 to honor their contract. If they can expedite your replacement for $25, then why can't they do so without the $25 fee? How does that $25 make them work harder or more efficiently?

They should have their act together and simply replace qualified drives, and not drag their feet if you do not want to pay them to honor their warranty.

All of this cannot be by accident. It is by design.

They make good drives, and that is where it ends.

[pyracurse]

The internal drive inside the WD has a native USB port soldered onto the PCB, , so it's useless if you want to open it up to use inside a laptop/PC or Playstation, for instance. The Seagate has a SATA internal drive with a separate SATA to USB controller board.

[NickBorodenko]

Chapters are still not working for my channel, so here are the time codes:
00:00 — Into
01:05 — Options and prices
01:29 — Bundled software
02:23 — What's in the box
03:23 — Size and design
05:24 — Benchmarks
07:42 — 4K video editing test

P.S. Sorry for low voice audio level at 05:28.

[opoaloas]

Is the seagate 5 TB more reliable than the Western Digital elements in the long term because I see a lot of recertified on sale on this model. ( Elements ) Thanks

[AamirK]

Which is reliable I want a long term hdd that can store my important data and run minimum of 8+ years many are saying segatte is crashing very often

[vitorfernandes]

I have both, I use the WD for 4K movies and the Seagate for ps5. Both work perfectly but I prefer the WD for being smaller and has a nicer feel to it.
With that said, I've had both WD and seagate drives in the past, 2tb and both still work perfectly, from 2010.

[Breakfast_of_Champions]

I heard that some of these drives are SMR (shingled magnetic recording) and have horrible write speeds?

[suyogghosh]

One of the best videos put there for 5tb jard drives. The video quality is at par with the top Youtubers. Keep up the nice work!

[irtj]

the directly porting files from phone to drive, is that also possible for iOS?

[billyousey]

Which would you suggest for a MacBook air M1. Mainly for storage

[ichbinmarek]

thanks for the comparison! i found the WD very noisy and returned it. can you say anything about the noise level of the seagate? i own an older 4gb version and it is absolutely silent.

[ItaloMaiaTM]

I have had some bad experiences with seagate; mostly bad blocks. Any info on this?

[olega]

I heard formatting the seagate drive to ntfs will speed it up. It should reach 145 mbps on average, but I guess it also depends on the pc specs.

[brentsummers]

A very good thorough test! I wonder if Seagate & WD should put some air vents in those plastic cases? Especially on their high capacity 4 and 5 tb portable drives.

[quinnebol]

subscribed to your channel...great video!

[boogiedownbronx]

Been using Seagate 1tb, 2tb and 4tb for many years and never failed ..i travel often with them and they can handle a bump or two...to me they are reliable...in the end you never know...out of the thousands from the production line you might have bought a bad apple.... 🤷🏻 I still got drives dating back 10 years ago all working fine...in my past use i found WD less reliable

[luckyamarsingh]

keep going, SUB count is irrelevant, Intention of helping Matters. thankyou for the video

[santhanakrishnand]

I was searching for the comparison video for these 2 HDD's (WD & Seagate). This is the best one I'll recommend to any one. Thank you for the review. Plz Keep up the good

[flyby]

Excellent test!
However; you must have noticed the massive-reverb in the section 'Benchmarks'? Also; that background-music is not necessary. Cheers.

[TunaPetunia]

I use the WD drive as extra storage for my ps4 and it works perfectly fine. I happened to get it during the black friday sale back in 2021 and I don't have problems with it. Starting it up there's a tiny noise (which I assume is the fan inside) but that's the least of my worries. I'm thinking about getting the seagate hard drive for my pc since I've been playing pc games recently.