What are your thoughts on Seagate EXOS X16 vs WD Ultrastar HC530 both in 14TB?

I have 4x8TB HGST Ultrastar HE8 drives that have almost 40K hours on them currently so their time is coming to be replaced.

Current, I have a mix of WD Gold (the older good ones), HGST Ultrastar, and WD Ultrastar drives on my main NAS but with prices of SSD's/HDD's going up and supply going down thanks to HDD/SSD based crypto mining as well as the microchip shortage I'm thinking of grabbing some EXOS drives as they are $290 vs $450 for the Ultrastar.

They both appear to be made in Thailand and have the same warranty and overall specs.  I've just never been a Seagate guy but I did have a Barracuda 1.5TB drive on my work PC that was at 68K hours when I retired the machine and it had no issues (reallocated sectors, etc).  I just kind of have a bias against them for some reason.

WD has been pulling shady crap though lately (like changing drive specs without notice) so I'm less than thrilled with them.  It appears that the only drives they have now with a URE of 10^15 are the Ultrastars as the Red, Red Plus, Red Pro, and Gold are now only 10^14 which I don't trust for parity based RAID on drives larger than 4-6TB.

HGST is me go to drive. The WD holds have been giving me problems on write intensive applications. Look at the back blaze report for good drive stats.

HGST was my go to as well but their warranty system is horrible!

The WD Gold's of today aren't the same as they used to be.  They have worse specs now so I won't buy them.  

They used to be equal to the Ultrastar's until WD was able to start using the Ultrastar name in house.  Then they discontinued the Gold's for a year and brought them back as a lower tier drive.

Basically I'll only buy Ultrastar from WD now for NAS use with parity based RAID.

It looks like these specific Seagate drives have done well with Backblaze but they don't have a ton of them in service yet.

That's because they used to suck donkeys. Now they're my go-to.

I have...

FireCuda 520 1 TB x2
Barracuda 510 1 TB x1
Barracuda 120 250 GB x1
Barracuda 3.5 1 TB x1
IronWolf Pro 4 TB x3

...in active service in my house with no regrets.

I got piles (like over a 100 total) of 10, 12, 14, and 16TB Seagate Exos in servers at work.  I haven't had them long enough to get a good feel for the reliability of them,  but so far the number of failures (2 so far) has been in line with what I'd consider acceptable.

My 2 cents, pick any quality 7200rpm NON smr based drive, and make sure you have both a robust error detection solution and data backup solution in place.

Error detection solution? dont drives come with that?

I just this morning had to replace a Seagate Exos X14 12TB that failed. The best part, it was the hot spare.

That's not exactly confidence inspiring

I did find some Ultrastar HC530 14TB drives for $345.  Do you think I should grab a couple of them or stick with the EXOS 14TB for $295?

What about the Toshiba MG series of drives?

SAS
SATA

Scratch that.  I just remembered that I did test a SAS3 drive in my SAS2 backplane as I dropped one (HGST Ultrastar) at work once and brought it home to run a pre-clear (unRAID) just to see if I killed it...I didn't and it's been fine for a couple of years now
ETA: Will a SAS3 drive work with a Supermicro SAS2 backplace?  I'm thinking the answer is yes but I don't have access to any SAS3 drives to verify.

all modern drives will have SMART built into them.  SMART is decent tech, but it's not the entire solution.

For my big file servers, I use ZFS, which has MUCH better error detection and correction above and beyond what SMART does.  And I set up ZFS to email me when problems are found.  A lot of your cheapo NAS's don't do a good job of that.

All drives can (and will) die.  Its like car tires, you're gonna get some that pick up a nail and go flat.  The real distinction is what the failure rate is over time for a large number of drives from the same model line.  And about the only good data I've seen on that is what Backblaze publishes.  The problem is that it takes several years to really know if a certain model line was a bunch of lemons.

From what Backblaze publishes, historically Hitachi drives tended to be more reliable, followed by Toshiba, then WDD and Seagate.  But this is for the last 5 years or so.  With Hitachi now owned by WDD, who knows if their future drives continue the trend.  

I restate my point from a few posts back - never trust any single drive.  Always have 2 things in place.  

1.  Robust error detection, correction, and reporting
2.  a solid backup plan

Yeah I've been lucky and only lost 2 drives so far.  I do have backups though that occur anywhere from hourly to weekly depending on what it is.

I actually wound up getting some of the Toshiba drives for $260 as they've done as well or better than Seagate in the latest Backblaze report.

Try here