If you had a choice between these two HDs, which would you choose?

[VirtualLarry]

A. WD 6400AAKS, 640GB, 320GB/platter
or
B. Seagate 7200.12 1TB, presumably 500GB/platter


Consider not just performance, but longevity and quality (and RMA rates).

If it were me, I would probably pick the 6400AAKS. But would I be leaving a notable performance increase on the table? I'm just concerned about Seagate's reliability issues, more than anything else.

This is for a friend's rig, trying to get him to upgrade his HD (from a 250GB Seagate IDE drive), to something faster, SATA, and Win7 instead of XP. (Maybe I could talk him into an SSD, but he is on a very limited budget for upgrades.)

I suppose I should also comment, that I am running two 6400AAKS drives in my desktop rigs, and they are reliable and snappy. I bought them when they were the latest and greatest drives on the market.

Edit: A third option might be to pick up a Hitachi retail-box 1TB 7200 RPM HD at Microcenter, the 7K1000.C. I haven't really heard about reliability problems from them. Only problem is, I don't know if those are two-platter, or three-platter, and Hitachis are known for being a bit loud. The 6400AAKS is pretty quiet, I don't hear it at all over the GPU, case, CPU, and PSU fans.

Edit: Friend's rig is an IP35-E (currently with an IDE 250GB Seagate drive, and IDE Samsung DVD burner), E5200 @ 3.625Ghz, 4x1GB DDR2-667, and XP SP3.

 

[cytoSiN]

C. Samsung F3

 

[noblemo]

I prefer Caviar Black. My limited experience with Deskstar has not been good (premature "crunching" leading to early replacement). I am more neutral between Caviar Blue and Barracuda, and would decide between the two based on benchmarks, relative price, and local availability.

Failure Trends in a Large Disk Drive Population (usenix.org)

 

[Elixer]

Consider not just performance, but longevity and quality (and RMA rates).

Nobody here has access to RMA rates, nor can you get a good sample for longevity.
Forums usually find people that say never had issues, and those that say stay away.
You can't win.

The only people that would have lots of info on this would be all the hosting places, and google / MS and what not, but I don't see them doing another report anytime soon as to how good/bad HDs are.

The best advise is to just get whatever brand, and make backups. This applies to SSDs as well.
Everything will fail at some point, there is no getting around it.

 

[nanaki333]

i've had reliability issues with far more seagate than WD. the seagate constellation drives are the only seagate i would buy, but those have a significant price premium. i would go with the 640GB WD in your case.