The Ultimate Dream Computer

shuboy00
Another drive to consider is the Seagate Barracuda with the Perpendicular Writing technology. They're another high quality drive and they come in larger sizes than the Raptor. Some reviews claim the perpendicular technology gives the Seagate an edge over the regualar WD drives. The Seagate shows a little faster from the specs.

Seagate Barracuda ES ST3400620NS 400GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - OEM

Average Latency: 4.16ms
Average Seek Time: 8.5ms
Average Write Time: 9.5ms
Cache: 16MB
Features: Industry's Highest Reliability Optimized For Enterprise Storage Environments
Form Factor: 3.5"

Model #: ST3400620NS



Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD4000KS 400GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - OEM

Average Latency: 4.2ms
Average Seek Time: 8.9ms
Average Write Time: 10.9ms
Cache: 16MB
Features: Cool operating temperature – WD hard drives are designed to have the lowest power consumption of any high-capacity, desktop-class hard drive which lowers the operating temperature for enhanced drive reliability. Whisper quiet – These highly reliable drives deliver technologically advanced acoustics. With its WhisperDrive™ and SoftSeek™ technologies, WD has minimized
Form Factor: 3.5"

Model #: WD4000KS

 

peak data transfer rates seem to give the WDs an edge from what I've seen. Could be wrong though, and after all, I use a Seagate!

 

I see the same. I think I am going to get the Raptor and then get a large WD for storage.

 

sammorris
There's a difference between the Seagates with and without the perpendicular writing. With the newer drives, I was under the impression they were faster than the WDs, except the Raptors of course. Where did you get your information?

 

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/storage/charts3/117-117-31.png - Interface performance, Caviar SE16 sits high
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/storage/charts3/117-676-32.png - Random Access time, only the 160GB Barracuda 7 series is quicker
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/storage/charts3/117-676-33.png - Max read rate, only the 750GB Barracuda is faster than the SE16.
Etc. etc.

 

@Sammorris
Links didnt work for me...

 

Hmm, they work fine for me. What happens when you click on them?

 

I get this error:

Error404

Sorry! The Requested Page was not Found!

Dear Visitor. The page you requested couldn't be found - If you followed a link from another Website please inform their Webmaster. If you happen to get this message while browsing Tom's Hardware Guide please inform the Webmaster of Tom's Hardware Guide.

Please check the URL in the address field of your browser. All pages end with .html, maybe it is .htm. You might want to use the Search Engine to find what you are looking for.

You might want to check the Historical Archive. Here you can find all articles in a chronological order.
Home

 

How bizarre, the links are fine for me.
Go to the tom's hardware main page, then click "Hard disk charts" down the side. Thatll give you the same diagrams.

 

Sammorriss
Some time back Anandtech compared similar SATA drives from WD and Seagate (with perpendicular drive). They were close and each had some slightly different advantages. The tie breaker of the comparison came down to Seagate's better warranty. Here's an excerpt:

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2803&p=12

I go with WD, but I've been thinking of trying one of the new Seagates. As Anandtech pointed out, they've been improving the Seagates and they're better than what was in that review.

 

Sammorriss
I noticed that your selection of benches mentioned some of the Seagates having an edge. I ran the guides with models similar to those in the Anandtech test. The difference is the Seagate is a larger model (Tom's didn't have the smaller one listed). For the Data transfer you were interested in, the Seagate won out between the 2.


--------------------------------------------

 

I should have used the WD500KS in that comparison, but the Seagate is still faster. The only WDs faster were the Raptors and a 160GB drive with 8MB cache (WD1600AAJS). For a big storage drive the Seagate was smokin'. Note it actually beat a Raptor or 2 in there. Looking at that, my next storage drive may be a Seagate.

 

I'm very limited with my present board on how many drives I can setup.
Its one of the failings of the P5WDH IMO.

I just use 3x drives in RAID 0 as I always back everything up onto separate drives anyway.

I would never recommend Raptors on a reliability score, as I seem to get about 1 drive fail per year on average.
That’s in a well vented system in a constant temp room.
Other WD’s which I use on other systems have never let me down at all.

I would also never recommend Seagate, as the support is total crap compared to WD's, WD always turn the drives around within a week on an RMA.

They'll always be people that argue on both sides, but I can only use my own personal experience to go by, the service from Seagate made me sell off the last drives I had by them.

I had bought drives with 5 year warranty, I produced the original documentation proving their age and supplier details etc…, but they still refused to except the drives were under any warranty.

 

Double Click -- Ignore!

 

Hmm, duly noted. Didn't know that about the reliability of Raptors, good thing I'm not relying on it for storage. Mind you, we've had two hard disks fail between us at uni, a Maxtor 120GB IDE (of reasonable age), and a Samsung 200GB IDE (new). The Maxtor developed a load of irreparable bad sectors, and would throw a wobbly once you exceeded 40GB, and the Samsung kept thinking it was an empty 32GB partition every few weeks (one of the jumper settings, but we didnt use any jumpers, seemed like a PCB short).

 

Well we all have our problems. One of my fairly new WD(s) went down recently. I'll have to give WD credit. They had a replacement on the way before I got mine off in the "brown truck". You guarantee shipment of the one under warranty with a credit card and they ship out the replacement. I had the HD in a couple of days and they had the old one a day or so later. Nothing was ever billed to the card. I'm not overly fond of refurbished parts, but so far it's held up.

 

Well my 80GB WD sounds like a 1952 Chevy that wont start! Its in my old rig, so I think I am going to get a Raptor 150GB, maybe 2 and put them in RAID. and get a large WD for storage for my new pc i am building...but i dont want my Raptor to crap out on me so iunno.

 

Alright here is my setup, this was my first computer build, still in the process. IF anyone wants to help like take a pic of their setup that would be cool, cause I have alot of extra cords and empty motherboard prongs and I dont know exactly what to do. Computer lags a little, and windows starts up slow. Please help D:

-7950 gt Nvidia video card
-2.14 ghz Intel Core 2 Duo
-XFX Creative sound card
-Creative speakers w/ sub, remote, portable volume adjuster/reciever
-EVGA 680i SLI motherboard
-XIONII Case w/ 4 fans
-19" View Sonic widescreen monitor
-Big thyphoon Heatsink/fan
-580 Power Supply
-2 Corsairs (2 gig)
-24x dvdrw w/ lightscribe | 8x dvdrw
-No floppy disks
-250 gig hardrive

 

Sounds pretty good, did you use a Hiper power supply?

 

aren't those 750gb 16mb hds the ones with the data writen on them in a realy dense, perpendicular configuration that the other brands are tring to copy without breaching copywrites.