I'm looking to buy a new hard drive but I can't make up my mind, either this one or the Samsung F1 750GB HD753LJ. You would think the Western Digital SE16 640GB WD6400AAKS would run significantly quieter and cooler since it only has two platters compared to the Samsung and Seagate 7200.11 which have four platters, but the Anandtech review showed the 6400AAKS running hotter then the Samsung F1 for both idle and load.
http://www.anandtech.com/stora...howdoc.aspx?i=3269&p=2
The acoustic levels were about the same as well, but the 6400AAKS got blown away in the Windows media center benchmark. The Anandtech review stated,
"The Samsung F1 750GB drive sports a 32MB buffer while the WD 640GB "gets by" with a 16MB buffer that has been highly tuned for random seeks and small sequential block sizes. The WD 640GB drive leads in all PCMark Vantage categories except the Windows Defender and Media Center applications where the Samsung exhibits exceptional results. These scores reflect our own off-line application benchmark testing, where we saw similar results because the 32MB buffer greatly assists in the read performance of large data block sizes accessed in sequential order."
Sounds like the Samsung is better if you're going to store large files to it. Now I have to make up my mind....maybe I'll just go with a 750GB SSD, that would be top them all...