Which is preferred: WD Caviar Black or Seagate Barracuda 7200.11?

[savoirfaire]

I've got a few unused 1TB hard drives sitting around and plan to sell off some of the surplus. My question is, I've got about equal numbers of Western Digital Caviar Blacks (WD1001FALS) and Seagate Barracuda 7200.11s (ST31000340AS). They have all worked great for over a year before I retired them in favor of larger capacity drives last winter. Any suggestions for which ones I should keep (the "better" ones)?

 

[VirtualLarry]

well, the 7200.11 series had a bunch of serious firmware bugs. If you've never updated the firmware on those drives, then I wouldn't use them.

 

[SpeedTester]

I have replaced almost all my 7200.11's with WD blacks and havent had one problem other then one arriving doa but it was replaced in two days by WD with a larger drive.
I have RMA'd at least 8 drives in the past few years to Seagate all being 7200.11's

 

[DominionSeraph]

Caviar Black. No contest.

 

[Ketchup]

I love my WD black edition drive. My seagate does a nice job as well, but the black is a little faster (and runs cooler). Over the years I have also seen better reliability out of the WDs, but YMMV.

 

[moriz]

the 7200.11 have bugs, as a previous poster mentioned.

i think a much fairer comparison would be between the caviar black and the barracuda XT. the 7200.11 and 7200.12 (which aren't plagued by the firmware bugs) are more in line with the caviar blue.

 

[savoirfaire]

Thanks for all the input. Performance-wise, the data out there seems to favor the Caviar Black also, but I wanted to get some more expert opinion than my own. Looks like it's pretty much no contest!