Edit: I've asked the seller if there is a custom firmware that makes the drive unusable and it answered me saying that they work with any SAS HBA controller. They have worked 1863h and written 130TB (he showed me 4 screenshots of 4 tests of 4 drives)
All my WD drives died, while all my Seagate drives are in perfect working order.
Bought 2 WD hdds new, used them for about 4 years in RAID for daily borg backups, one died, the other got very slow with tons of smart errors.
Bought 2 Seagate hdds new, same usecase, same capacity, have been running for over 5 years now.
Personal anecdotes are not a reliable factor for manufacturer quality.
To quote some statistics:
In general, Seagate drives are less expensive and their failure rates are typically higher in our environment. But, their failure rates are typically not high enough to make them less cost effective over their lifetime.
NetApp is big in enterprise DAS space; think big server rack with highly redundant components to provide block storage devices to multiple workstations in the office. If I remember correctly, they're also the ones where their drives are formatted with 520 bytes per sector, and you'd need to reformat them using sg_format to 512 bytes per sector before you can use them with some systems.
Mmm...interesting, how did you arrive to that thought?
Edit1: in the meanwhile I've asked the seller if they have a custom firmware.
They have already answered me with 4 test of 4 drives that reports 1863h of work and about 130TB written
Edit2: the seller has answered me saying that they work with any SAS HBA controller
I have a bunch of ST6000NM0095 (which are similar specs) in my NAS, and despite already being well used when I got them, so far only one needed to be replaced in nearly 5 years of (my) usage.
My only advice with these is: if you notice a maddening noise coming from them when they're idle, update them to the latest firmware and it'll go away.