tl;dr WD and Seagate would be my recommendations... they are both pretty much the same now, although their marketing departments would tell you different!
I've used many a Seagate and WD hard drive over the years (and the odd Hitachi and Fujitsu one), and they have both made lemons... older Western Digital hard drives used to have a relay or some mechanical switching on their power management circuitry, which you would hear making a noticeable clonking sound when the drive powered itself up or down from standby... and even more noticeably when it failed, and was engaging repeatedly, ending in the drives untimely demise. Seagate had a bad batch of drives a few years ago... think it was the first production run of the 3 or 4 TB drives they made?
Regardless, I've used Seagate more than any of the others, and also trust in them (it doesn't hurt that we have a local dealer who will do over-the-counter exchanges if they ever did fail). Modern Western Digital drives don't seem any different to the Seagate drives, so I don't see any reason not to use them also. Point of fact... I use a WD laptop drive as the SATA connected rootfs and primary samba share on my NAS setup (a CubieTruck, not a pine64), and two 3TB Seagate USB3 external hard drives as the bulk storage (got four of them from Amazon when they were on sale so I could have four matching units, two in service, two as offline backups).
I've used many a Seagate and WD hard drive over the years (and the odd Hitachi and Fujitsu one), and they have both made lemons... older Western Digital hard drives used to have a relay or some mechanical switching on their power management circuitry, which you would hear making a noticeable clonking sound when the drive powered itself up or down from standby... and even more noticeably when it failed, and was engaging repeatedly, ending in the drives untimely demise. Seagate had a bad batch of drives a few years ago... think it was the first production run of the 3 or 4 TB drives they made?
Regardless, I've used Seagate more than any of the others, and also trust in them (it doesn't hurt that we have a local dealer who will do over-the-counter exchanges if they ever did fail). Modern Western Digital drives don't seem any different to the Seagate drives, so I don't see any reason not to use them also. Point of fact... I use a WD laptop drive as the SATA connected rootfs and primary samba share on my NAS setup (a CubieTruck, not a pine64), and two 3TB Seagate USB3 external hard drives as the bulk storage (got four of them from Amazon when they were on sale so I could have four matching units, two in service, two as offline backups).
