Hitachi vs WD vs Seagate 6.0gb HDDs

[Drazn]

I am looking on buying a new 1 TB HDD and was told that hitachi is the best HDD right now. I noticed that the WD black has a 64 mb cache vs the 32 mb Cache that the hitachi has. So my question between the 3 above HDDs which one do you prefer and why?

 

[Blain]

I prefer Blacks.
I've used them with good results and my wife has WD stock in her IRA.

"You gotta support the team" 🙂

 

[Zap]

SATA 6Gbps and (to a much lesser degree) the amount of cache memory doesn't add much to a HDDs performance. RPM, the aggressiveness of the head movements and the platter density has more of an effect on performance.

Not super familiar with Seagate's latest/greatest. The Hitachi 7K1000.D (note the .D at the end of the model number) is recommended these days because of two reasons.
1) 1GB platter density making it the highest on the market and thus able to hit the highest sustained transfer rates in benchmarks.
2) Vying to be the cheapest 1TB 7200RPM drive on the market.

People like the Samsung F3 7200RPM 1TB drives because they are near the top in performance while usually the cheapest, plus to my knowledge they haven't had any reliability issues. Seagate of course had some issues a couple years ago that soured most enthusiasts to them. WD had some recalls but that was long enough ago (5-10 years) that it is beyond the attention span of most enthusiasts because their more recent 7200RPM drives are pretty nice. Hitachi is still linked in some minds to the ol' IBM Deathstar debacle.

WD Caviar Black drives are popular as a higher performance choice because the drive is tuned to seek very aggressively, thus often has the best applications performance and not just sustained transfer rate (often 2nd or 3rd). However, due to this, these drives are the noisiest on the market. They are also usually the most expensive (other than Raid Edition versions).

I've used all brands and TBH in day to day usage cannot tell a difference among them as long as they are of similar generation.