John_F Loc: Minneapolis, MN

From the dpreview article:

Western Digital® Corporation (NASDAQ: WDC) today announced that its wholly-owned subsidiary Western Digital Technologies, Inc. has completed the acquisition of SanDisk Corporation (NASDAQ: SNDK). The addition of SanDisk makes Western Digital Corporation a comprehensive storage solutions provider with global reach, and an extensive product and technology platform that includes deep expertise in both rotating magnetic storage and non-volatile memory (NVM).

SanDisk was one of the four SD card manufacturers that made their own memory chips. From my own personal experience with WD drives their drives have not been all that good. So now might be a good time to stock up on SanDisk SDs while the original inventory has anything.

OddJobber Loc: Portland, OR

Is the second paragraph your opinion or from "the article"?

Longshadow Loc: Audubon, PA, United States

I never had a problem with WD drives in 25 years, especially the Caviar Drives.

marki3rd Loc: Columbus, Indiana

From your own experience? How many WD Drives have you had "experience" with? Tell us what your qualifications are so we can evaluate your opinion..

Peterff Loc: O'er The Hills and Far Away, in Themyscira.

This is fairly old news announced last October I think. SanDisk had its own troubles. In my personal experience I've had several Seagate disks die, but my WD drives are all going strong. All disks die, and Seagate did appear to have a bad patch, but they also are a good company. This seems just to be part of the ongoing consolidation of the tech industry.

mwsilvers Loc: Central New Jersey

Whether this merger is good for consumers I cannot say. But I can't agree with your comment regarding WD quality from my personal experience. In over 30 years of using PCs, back to the XT days, the only hard drives that ever failed for me were Seagate's not Western Digital. In fact in the last 2 years I've had two relatively new Seagate external drives fail. I've currently got ten WD drives, some of which are around 8+ years old and all are still working fine.

mwsilvers Loc: Central New Jersey

He said "From my own personal experience with WD drives their drives have not been all that good". While i may disagree with his general conclusion, he clearly had negative experiences with WD drives. After all, hard drives, regardless of manufacturer, do fail. I don't think he needs to defend an opinion based on his experience.

dcampbell52 Loc: Clearwater Fl

I have never had a problem with Western Digital drives and have been using them for a long time. I have worked for Control Data which became Seagate and will not intentionally purchase a Seagate drive for anything. If I purchase a device with a Seagate drive in it, I remove and replace it as soon as possible. The Seagate drives that I had (and I worked for several years for a major insurance company as a senior systems engineer, seemed to have a 60-70% higher failure rate than WD and Hitachi, a 40% higher failure rate than Toshiba and IBM and were banned from IT purchase. While any mechanical / electronic device can fail, your best protection against that failure is maintaining good backup practices (with regular testing of the quality of your backups), good rotation of your backups and storage practices of always keeping a known good backup in a safe place off site. Remember, these photos are your memories, the story of your life, and your money (if you do it for a living). I keep a known good copy of my images in a safe deposit box at my bank. Just remember that while all brands are not created equal. The weakest link in your backups is the lowest quality drive you have.

mborn Loc: Massachusetts

My Seagate HD failed fairly fast 3-4 mo My WD are going strong Had one WD that acted fun but did not loose any files downloaded the files and sent the WD back and got a replacement still going strong after 5 years

lamiaceae Loc: San Luis Obispo County, CA

I've had many HDDs in many computers, many brands of both PCs and HDDs. The only one HDD that ever failed was an IBM in an older IBM made (pre-Chinese) Lenovo laptop. Yes, an IBM branded HDD bit the dust. All the HDDs I intentionally buy are WD.

I have not had a SD Card fail yet. I had 1 of about 18 Thumb Drives get corrupted, and was able to return and exchange it. The one that died probably did so because I used it on a MAC at school and did not eject it before removing it. The MAC O/S seems to be pickier about that than Windows. On Windows the worst that seems to happen if you go too fast is an incomplete file transfer. But now I wait and eject even with Windows 10. Nearly all of my Thumb or Pen Drives have been SanDisk.

authorizeduser Loc: Monroe, Michigan

I have lost a few drives in my time .......... all Seagate!

Western Digital has always performed well for me.

I am currently running 2 x 1TB Western Digital Black Edition drives
which out perform Seagate with twice the performance.

Everything has its share of defectives but Seagate has managed to
make defectives an art.

Basil Loc: New Mexico

I have had mixed results with both WD and Seagate external drives. Just recently bought a 3TB portable WD drive that crashed and burned after a week. On the other hand, I have a 500GB WD MyBook that has been running like a champ for several years - t's on 24/7. I also have a WD MyCloud Mirror (8TB total) which I run as a 4TB RAID configuration and it has been running continuously for over a year. I think antidotal evidence is just that - antidotal. Here is a two year old study that shows relative reliability (at that time) of some different brands. http://www.pcworld.com/article/2089464/three-year-27-000-drive-study-reveals-the-most-reliable-hard-drive-makers.html

chapjohn Loc: Tigard, Oregon

I am having good use of Delkin and Transcend memory cards in my cameras. All U3 and 68mbs and 99mbs write speeds. I am currently using only Delkin Balck cards.

mwsilvers Loc: Central New Jersey

On a Mac you need to run the eject feature before removing a USB drive? How inconvenient. While I suppose that technically you're supposed to do that on a some versions of Windows as well, I never have and I doubt most people even know about the eject feature.

mkaplan519

I can give you a little perspective from someone that has been in the computer industry for over 30 years...
Way back when (not at the beginning of time ;) ) Seagate seemed to be the most reliable. Sometime ago something changed and all of a sudden we had a lot more defective Seagates than WD's. We switched over to WD's and although we do get some defective drives (it will happen with any make), we still see less problems with WD than with Seagate. SanDisk is probably the most respected company for memory devices. Usually if a new device comes out, there are incompatibilities with some other makes but not with SanDisk products. They seem to follow the spec better than most others. I think if someone is going to buy SanDisk, WD is a good choice. Just an opinion.
I have a friend that bought a $100,000 BMW. It was in the dealer's garage more than his for the first few weeks. Anything can happen with any manufacturer's product... Nothing is perfect.