I've never owned a WD Caviar, only their older offerings (quite some number of years ago) and all of my modern drives are Seagate with 1-2 others mixed in (one's an Hitachi I believe), until recently none of them has really died on me before they became obsolete, one of my Seagate's is dying. I've had no issues with the WD drives I've owned either, they're both good companies but it seems Seagate has been steadily lowering the length of their warranties while WD hasn't, so if for the same price/capacity I'd get the WD. However I'm fairly certain the Seagate will be cheaper.