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Seagate 7200.10 or WD Caviar? Help please!!

I

iamfalcon

Junior Member
I am trying to choose between two hard drives. One is the 250GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 with an 8MB cache. The alternative is the Western Digital WD2500KS with a 16 MB cache. Both hard drives are 7200 RPM and SATA II. The question is whether the perpendicular recording technology and NCQ features of the Seagate drive will offer better overall performance than the 16MB cache of the Western Digital drive. Both drives are the exact same price, so performance is the only question here. Thanks in advance for the help!

Iamfalcon
 
I'm curious about this question as well, as I'll be ordering parts within a few days.

Someone please say WHY one would be better than the other.
 
I've seen 7200.10 320GB / 16MB SATA disks for $100 or so recently. If you're paying close to that amount, maybe you can spring for the extra 70GB, Seagate brand, and 16MB cache 🙂
 
check storagereviews.com i thikn it is. the Seagate .10 is an awesome drive and beats out almost everything in the SATA market. It even beats out the Raptor in some tests. With a 5 yr warranty to boot, there' sno reason not to get it.. and it's cheap.

I got one myself for 109.00 🙂

and p.s.: NCQ Is useless unless you run a file server or shared access.
 
I have Googled for reviews, and all the reviews are against the top-of-the-line models (i.e. the 750GB Seagate and 500GB Western Digital). In this case, the Seagate wins in every review that I have read. What I cannot find however, is a review which would give me a good idea of the performance difference between these two drives. Thanks for the suggestion Baked, but if the answer was that easy to find, I would not be posting here.

Iamfalcon
 
Alimoalem, why would you go with the Western Digital? I need more info if you're going to convince me one way or the other 🙂
 
Seagate - almost a no brainer these days. Their warranty trumps WDC's, and currentlythey are winningthe reliability battle - 60,000 hour MTBF.
 
Seagate all the way. My reason is all but 2 WD drives I've owned have died, most of them suddenly and without warning, as in fine one moment and gone the next. One I only had for a month so it didn't have much of a chance, the other I had for a little over a year before selling it. Never had a seagate die on me, and only one has had bad sectors. Actually that drive is still running, just the first part of the drive isn't usable but its been running fine like that almost 2 years now (my brother is using it).

Now some people have no trouble with WD but that is my experience.
 
I'd go Seagate myself. Aside from the Raptor, I think as far as 7200RPM drives go, everyone should just buy Seagate 😛
 
Originally posted by: iamfalcon
Alimoalem, why would you go with the Western Digital? I need more info if you're going to convince me one way or the other 🙂
Click to expand...

i read incorrectly, my bad 😛. i thought you were looking at the YS. speaking of which, why don't you go for the YD? you won't notice any performance differences...the drives are all fast. what you will notice, however, are the acoustics and thermals. the YD is pretty quiet/cool. Link. it's $82 on newegg

EDIT: comes with a 5 year warranty and this is in response to corkyg's statement below:
Originally posted by: corkyg
Seagate - almost a no brainer these days. Their warranty trumps WDC's, and currentlythey are winningthe reliability battle - 60,000 hour MTBF.
Click to expand...

Seagate doesn't use an MTBF system anymore but let's suppose your 60,000 hours is true...the western digital drive i'm referring to has a MTBF of 1 million hours. it's server class so it needs the reliability
 
I've been reading the forums over at silentpcreview.com while I've been silency my computer, and I gathered that people there prefer the WD drives because they are less noisy.
 
Originally posted by: alimoalem
Originally posted by: iamfalcon
Alimoalem, why would you go with the Western Digital? I need more info if you're going to convince me one way or the other 🙂
Click to expand...

i read incorrectly, my bad 😛. i thought you were looking at the YS. speaking of which, why don't you go for the YD? you won't notice any performance differences...the drives are all fast. what you will notice, however, are the acoustics and thermals. the YD is pretty quiet/cool. Link. it's $82 on newegg

EDIT: comes with a 5 year warranty and this is in response to corkyg's statement below:
Originally posted by: corkyg
Seagate - almost a no brainer these days. Their warranty trumps WDC's, and currentlythey are winningthe reliability battle - 60,000 hour MTBF.
Click to expand...

Seagate doesn't use an MTBF system anymore but let's suppose your 60,000 hours is true...the western digital drive i'm referring to has a MTBF of 1 million hours. it's server class so it needs the reliability
Click to expand...
that one you linked is slow as hell...
 
Originally posted by: TAGImperialMarch
Originally posted by: alimoalem
Originally posted by: iamfalcon
Alimoalem, why would you go with the Western Digital? I need more info if you're going to convince me one way or the other 🙂
Click to expand...

i read incorrectly, my bad 😛. i thought you were looking at the YS. speaking of which, why don't you go for the YD? you won't notice any performance differences...the drives are all fast. what you will notice, however, are the acoustics and thermals. the YD is pretty quiet/cool. Link. it's $82 on newegg

EDIT: comes with a 5 year warranty and this is in response to corkyg's statement below:
Originally posted by: corkyg
Seagate - almost a no brainer these days. Their warranty trumps WDC's, and currentlythey are winningthe reliability battle - 60,000 hour MTBF.
Click to expand...

Seagate doesn't use an MTBF system anymore but let's suppose your 60,000 hours is true...the western digital drive i'm referring to has a MTBF of 1 million hours. it's server class so it needs the reliability
Click to expand...
that one you linked is slow as hell...
Click to expand...

no it really isn't...
 
I bought the 320 GB 7200.10 for 110 bucks! compare that to last year when i bought a 160 GB 7200.9 HDD for 99! Talk about price drops! BTW, the 7200.10 I own is fast and quiet!
 
i've had good experiences with both my seagate 7200.7 and 150 raptor. both serves its purpose as advertised and both have been reliable from the time they came out (which was when i got them) till today
 
Originally posted by: TAGImperialMarch
Originally posted by: alimoalem
Originally posted by: iamfalcon
Alimoalem, why would you go with the Western Digital? I need more info if you're going to convince me one way or the other 🙂
Click to expand...

i read incorrectly, my bad 😛. i thought you were looking at the YS. speaking of which, why don't you go for the YD? you won't notice any performance differences...the drives are all fast. what you will notice, however, are the acoustics and thermals. the YD is pretty quiet/cool. Link. it's $82 on newegg

EDIT: comes with a 5 year warranty and this is in response to corkyg's statement below:
Originally posted by: corkyg
Seagate - almost a no brainer these days. Their warranty trumps WDC's, and currentlythey are winningthe reliability battle - 60,000 hour MTBF.
Click to expand...

Seagate doesn't use an MTBF system anymore but let's suppose your 60,000 hours is true...the western digital drive i'm referring to has a MTBF of 1 million hours. it's server class so it needs the reliability
Click to expand...
that one you linked is slow as hell...
Click to expand...

i'm with PurdueRy...are you dumb? just cause it's not at the top of the benchmarks doesn't mean anything...it's competing with larger hard drives. the larger the drive, the faster it is.

iamfalcon, NCQ won't help you. it helps in multiuser environments...if you use it as a single user, you're going to LOSE performance, not gain
 
Seagate 7200.10 320GB 16MB cache, perpendicular recording tech (heck, why not...sounds cool), very quiet, doesn't run hot, and a 5 year warranty. $100 at NewEgg. FTW.

Edited to say: the other posters are correct in that you should NOT use NCQ unless you are installing the drive in an environment where there are multiple outstanding random read requests (ie, multi-user in a server situation). NCQ has proven over and over again to be of no benefit (or worse, you lose performance) on the desktop except in a couple of very isolated instances (I believe there was a Maxtor drive that performed better with it on, but I chalk that up to a firmware anomaly in that case).
 
Edited to say: the other posters are correct in that you should NOT use NCQ unless you are installing the drive in an environment where there are multiple outstanding random read requests (ie, multi-user in a server situation). NCQ has proven over and over again to be of no benefit (or worse, you lose performance) on the desktop except in a couple of very isolated instances (I believe there was a Maxtor drive that performed better with it on, but I chalk that up to a firmware anomaly in that case).
Click to expand...

NCQ only helps when trying to read multiple files at once. In other words when multi-tasking. You dont have to be in a server environment to multi-task.

For most users Seagate will be absolutely fine. Outstanding company. However, if you are looking for a quiet drive, nothing beats a Samsung. In my experience I prefer Samsung to Seagate simply for thermal and acoustics. However, i have yet to have a Seagate, WD, or Samsung drive die on me.

Both drives that you are looking at are fine, i would give the edge to Seagate right now.

-Kevin
 
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