I'm going to buy two new HDDs this week, and during my pondering over whether I should go for Seagate or WD I discovered this drive on my pricelist:



Now this drive is around R130 more expensive than the standard WD 320gb drive, but it offers a very slightly reduced seek time (8.7ms versus 8.9ms i.e. negligible) and the other added features in italics above.

Now since I plan to RAID 0 these suckers I figure this looks promising, especially the 5 year warranty, but I read somewhere that these drives aren't really designed for the end-user and are meant for server use: can anyone shed some light on this? Does the extra cash justify the features?

Other than that, I'm considering this Seagate 320gb:



...but surely that seek time is wrong? I was certain the 7200.10 drives were all 8.something?

So, which of the 3 is it to be?

we've done tests in the office of seagate vs. maxtor vs. hitachi and seagate came out as the leader by far.

i'm not sure if any wd drives have been tested though, maybe creati0n could clarify on that.

Yeh, with all our tests Seagate was constantly faster than the other drives. This was IDE only and ill try find the results and post them sometime...

Seagate ftw

Fanks Ian

Yup I'm thinking Seagate FTW too, I haven't heard enough about those WD Raid Edition drives to risk buying them.

Seagate came out by far? you sure it's the 250/320 range? cos Hitachi wins hands down on the 250's. As for RAID the Western Digital has a awesome feature of TLER but the seagates NAS is also a pretty feature...

Overall I think the Seagate runs a bit too hotter than the WD

So which of the three should I go for Fish?

Bearing in mind I'm RAIDing the drives for maximum speed

here's some of the results:





Can't find the hitachi results atm but the seagate definately came out tops

Docmoo that maxtor's results is really skewered

if it was up to me I would take 2x250 cos going any higher results:

1. 1.2Terabytes of RAID = madness to backup
2. 320gigs is actually slower than the 250, yes it may be marginally but refer to point 1

as for 2x250's I would take the Hitachi over the Seagate yet the WD with it's nice new tech incorporated would be my second best choice plus you're probably looking at the 5 year warranty.

Just one BIG issue remains are you going to cool the drives? if not then I wouldn't recommend raiding it cos as most people would worry about you'll lose your data over raid.

I already have one Hitachi 250 which I plan to keep for backups, then I'll RAID 0 the 320s for my main drive. It seems worth the extra cash to go from 250 to 320 too, so getting new 250s isn't really an option IMO.

So ja, warranty is an important point too, which would probably then bring my decision down to the Seagate vs the WD Raid Edition.

I'll slap a fan in the drive cage mount so no worries about cooling

i'd go for the WD's even though i'm not a fan of WD

For that Seagate/ Maxtor/ Hitachi debate, the DLT range of 250GB drives were the fastest hands down.

That Maxtor test looks wrong to me, it may have been running in SATA1 as you have to unlock SATA 2 from the command prompt with a tool on both the Maxtor and Hitachi

The maxtor was retested a number of times cause none of us could believe such results.

i've only had bad experiences with maxtor drives in personal use and stay away from them anywho

I have a maxtor that is running A OK (touch wood), but my Seagate is better IMO.

i've had problems with all of them

must be my luck

ya I had problems with the IBM "DeathStar" (deskstar) 40 and 80gigs, maxtor definately the shit one but Fujitsu (NOT SCSI) takes the cake! WD 120 had lots of problems but 160 was stable and so far my Hitachi 250 is the cream of the crop have 3 atm

I once had a 20GB Fujitsu that after running a scandisk and selecting to mark bad sectors it turned into a 1GB drive LOL

Seagate faster than Hitachi?????

That is not something you see everyday

Crashandburn, who said seagate was faster than the Hitachi's? the Hitachi 250's rape anything in that range as for the 320 and higher I'm not very happy about seagates level of noise... it's terrible!

Got the two Seagates, running without any issues thus far. Picked up my RAID array no worries in Vista, which was surprising

Also no problem with the noise level, and this is after adding an extra Vantec Stealth fan to my case too.

Just out of curiousity how much did you pay for your 320's??

900ish.

geez why seagate? I would prefer to have taken the WD's

I'd rather have the 5 year warranty

In 5 years a 320GB drive will be like a 320MB drive

I'm more concerned about performance

hahahahahaha yeah right!

More like 32 MB!

With the sizes of upcoming games and HD movies, terrabyte drive arrays will be more and more commonplace!!

Fish, WD themselves state that those Raid Edition drives are not for desktop machine use.

Also the warranty isn't for me, it's to tell the person that buys them from me in a year or two that there's still several years warranty left on the drives

hahahaha which nob gave you the idea that those drives aren't for desktop use???

Western Digital.

LOL it's like "hang on I have a brilliant idea, let me buy a less reliable desktop edition than the server edition"

Yea that sounds like an awesome idea!

It's not about reliability: I wanted a drive with 5 year warranty so I chose the Seagates over the WD RE's because they're apparently slower due to this TLER technology, which is why they're not recommended for desktop use.

Funny that, it looks like one of the fastest drives.

http://www.tomshardware.com/2005/02/17/wes...ital/page4.html

I don't trust reviews from Tom's

Besides, that's a different model to the one I was gonna get.

Anyway, the Seagates are up and running problem free so I'm happy with my purchase

Did W@RP@T}{ post a review from Toms. *falls over and dies*

Lol don't hate me cyfer, I couldn't find many reviews

Geez what are you people smoking? Toms hardware is bias towards AMD and favours INTEL they have no problems with regards to HDD's

as for RAID care to compare? this is my 2x250 Hitachi SATA2 tested with HD Tach 3.01

[attachment=10151:Hitach_2...gig_RAID.JPG]

Those WD are actually performing better than the Seagates and right now in terms of performance this is my personal experiance:

Seagate 2x320gigs SATA2 transfer rate at an average of 90MB/s tested by copying 15x180mb files from my hitachi 2x250gigs.

while copying from the 2x250gigs back from the seagate I got an average write of 111MB/s using burst copy v2.7

When I used my 2x160 Western Digital SATA1 I sustained a transfer rate of 109MB/s to my hitachi and 92MB/s back to the WD.

Yet between Seagate and WD I could only muster 88MB/s to the WD... and 97MB/s to the Seagate.


Using Speedfan v4.31 the Seagate temperature sensor picked the drive up at 42 degrees for the 1 drive while the second drive had 41 degrees.

my hitachi remained at 34 and 33 degrees.

These drives were enclosed in my Antec P160 with at 120mm fan antec Tri-Fan at full blast.

What I do like about the WD and the Hitachi is the option to use molex connectors... Seagate only had the option to use the SATA power connectors