Seagate vs. Western Digital

[Dolorous Dave]

I'm looking at SATA drives and it seems like the prices are about the same between the two brands...anyone have a performance preference? I'm leaning towards this one:

Seagate

but this one has caught my eye as well:

WD

 

[Dolorous Dave]

Any particular reason?

 

[Dolorous Dave]

Will the SATA 3GB/s be faster than my 100GB Maxtor SATA from over a year ago? Doesn't really matter since I'm upgrading for the increased capacity but I'm just curious.

 

[Talcite]

Theoretical burst speeds are faster, but for sustained read/writes, they're both the same. Drives rarely every reach over 70mB/s.

 

[j00fek]

Originally posted by: Blain
Get the Seagate

 

[43st]

I'd recommend the Western Digital SE16 line (review). Mostly due to them running cooler and quieter than the latest Seagate drives. If Seagate would match their Barracuda IV design I'd stick with them, but they haven't been able to.

 

[Dolorous Dave]

haha, fair enough

 

[crimson117]

Originally posted by: Blain
Get the Seagate

More anecdotal evidence: I built a Core 2 Duo PC with 2x250GB WD drives for my gf's brother. Worked fine for a bit, then started crashing. WD's software showed the C: drive ot have major errors, so we sent it back and got a new drive through RMA. Few days later, started crashing again, even with just the new drive installed. Went out and bought two seagates, installed them, thing's been running fine and quiet ever since.

ymmv but mine never does: seagate always works.

 

[WT]

This is hardly an easy answer, as you will attract varied answers to the question posed. Each manufacturer has had bad runs, and if you have been bitten by that model, you won't recommend anyone buy ANY of the model line. We suffered through 75+ Seagate 80gb drive failures about three years ago, so at the time I wouldn't touch Seagate with a 10' pole. I've bought the KS series WD drives the past year, but I would actually recommend a Seagate at this point. Its a shame I have some gift cards from Xmas left but Staples only carries Maxtor and WD drives.

 

[CallMeJoe]

Seagate = 5 year warranty

 

[bob4432]

Originally posted by: Talcite
Theoretical burst speeds are faster, but for sustained read/writes, they're both the same. Drives rarely every reach over 70mB/s.

sata/pata drives rarely reach over 70MB/s str....

 

[Ika]

Originally posted by: CallMeJoe
Seagate = 5 year warranty

WD has the same warranty, so your post is ambiguous.

But I could've sworn Seagates had lifetime warranties...

 

[CallMeJoe]

Originally posted by: Aflac
WD has the same warranty, so your post is ambiguous.
But I could've sworn Seagates had lifetime warranties...

WD warranty ranges from 1 to 5 years, depending on the drive. AFAIK, Seagate has 5 year warranty on all their drives (except refurbs).

 

[IntrinsicValue]

Honestly I like both of these brands a lot. I don't think you can go wrong with either one. With that said, my latest computer has a Seagate 7200.10, and it's been great thus far. As far as reliability, ask me again in 3 years.

 

[jameswhite1979]

Both are good a personal preference for me is seagate just becuase for the years working on servers and home system I have never been let down by seagate but others have caused issues. Everyone has a different story...

 

[Tegeril]

I have 7 Western Digital HDs presently. They have been in operation from 2.5 years to 4 years and all work perfectly.

My new system has 1 WD and 4 Seagates. They all work fine too. Failing drives are just luck of the draw. The biggest selling point on anything now is the 5 year warranty.

 

[gsellis]

These are the two brands I always recommend. Have not had an issue with a Seagate since my 46MB MFM drive (stiction). No serious issues with WD. Had significant incidents (100/1000s of units) with other brands. But with 320s, I would lean towards the Seagate. At 250, I would get a WD.

 

[Dolorous Dave]

I don't think I'll be going higher than 320GB right now just because I have to fit some memory into the equation as well (though I doubt I'll see much benefit going from 667 to 800mhz DDR2)

 

[SparkyJJO]

I vote for the seagate because I have a personal hatred towards WD drives All but 2 WD drives I've owned (one I only had a month so it didn't have much of a chance, the other was a year) have died on me :frown:

 

[NeonFlak]

I've got a cpl of harddrives and every seagate I own are by far the slowest drives once you start doing more then one thing that is harddrive related. The seagates range from 160gig 7200.9 to 750gig 7200.10. Other drives are various WD from 160gig to 320gig, and 74gig adfd raptors, 160 and 250gig samsungs and a cpl maxtors though I can't remember their size ranges or types. Of all the drives the maxtors consistently finish tasks the fastest once there are multiple things running at once causing harddrive activity.

 

[Dolorous Dave]

No no, this was much easier when everyone hated Maxtor.

 

[ColKurtz]

Are you hooking them up to a RAID controller? If not, you should definitely avoid the Western Digital RE drives. The RE is for "RAID edition". Most ATA drives assume they are for desktop use and thus can't rely on a sophisticated controller for error-handling. But many/most RAID controllers expect to do error handling themselves.... sometimes an ATA drive is doing error handling on it's own and takes so long to respond that the RAID controller assumes the drive has a problem and marks it as dead. WD's RAID Edition drives are designed to avoid just that (according to their marketing dept, at least). The drive itself does little or no error handling -- instead assuming a controller will do it -- and for that reason you should NOT use a RE drive unless it's hooked to a RAID controller.

I learned all this myself recently while building a new home file server. Seagate apparently has it's own "RAID Edition" drives, called "Nearline". I think those drives are designated by ES, so it appears that the Seagate drive you linked is not a Nearline.

So based on that, if those are your only 2 choices, I would say definitely go with the Seagate.

 

[SuperNaruto]

Just a bit more info

RE & Nearline aka ES (enterprise storage).

I got both ES 750GB & RE2 500GB in my home server.. Can't really tell about the performance or noise.. once in a 1u server, all the noise are drown by fans..

http://www.anandtech.com/IT/showdoc.aspx?i=2859&p=5


The difference in reliability between typical SATA and real enterprise disks has been proven in a recent test by Seagate. Seagate exposed three groups of 300 desktop drives to high-duty-cycle sequential and random workloads. Enterprise disks list a slightly higher or similar failure rate than desktop drives, but that does not mean they are the same. Enterprise disks are tested for heavy duty highly random workloads and desktop drives are tested with desktop workloads. Seagate's tests revealed that desktop drives failed twice as often in the sequential server tests than with normal desktop use. When running random server or transactional workloads, SATA drives failed four times as often![²] In other words, it is not wise to use SATA drives for transactional database environments; you need real SCSI/SAS enterprise disks which are made to be used for the demanding server loads.

[i/]Even the so called "Nearline" (Seagate) or "Raid Edition" (RE, Western Digital) SATA drives which are made to operate in enterprise storage racks, and which are more reliable than desktop disks, are not made for the mission critical, random transactional applications[/i]. Their MTBF (Mean Time Between Failure) is still at least 20% lower than typical enterprise disks, and they will show the similar failure rates when used with highly random server workloads as desktop drives.

 

[WobbleWobble]

They both have 5 year warranties, but WD does advance RMAs and Seagate doesn't. Based on that alone, I would go WD.

 

[ColKurtz]

Originally posted by: WobbleWobble
They both have 5 year warranties, but WD does advance RMAs and Seagate doesn't. Based on that alone, I would go WD.

Again, ONLY if you are using the drive in a RAID array. Do not use WD RE drives in a non-RAID environment