HI...i have a question about the New WD drives that just came out (Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD6400AAKS 640GB 7200 RPM)

Are these as fast as the Seagate drive (Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 ST3500320AS 500GB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb)

The seagates benches very high on the Toms Hardware benches...but the WD's are brand new but have the higher density platters.

Does anyone have an idea?

Benchmarks in my opinion show the best possible ratings. In real life use, hardware rarely represents it's benchmark rating.
I can recommend the Western Digital KS series having very high quality.

It's up to your own personal choice to choose which hard drive manufacturer you like best. I believe either drive you choose to purchase will please your needs.

It's about as fast as the Spinpoint HD103UJ in benchmarks of course it has a Western Digital Firmware focus. So it is going to be faster than the Seagate in benchmarks where the WesternDigital is normally faster than Seagate and even a few where they are close when they have equivalent platter sizes (Exception being the WDGP series). Anandtech did a short benchmark of the single platter drive on their site, not as thorough as I would like, but it is something..

so far most WD drives run cool

Yeah, but there is no 320GB platters in the RE series yet. So for this drive it is not an option right now..

I've seen reviews on Storagereview and Anandtech that show the 7200.11 Seagates performing poorly with simultaneous read/write operations. Anandtech attributed it to a problem with the firmware that started with the 7200.10 series. http://www.anandtech.com/storage/s [...] i=3161&p=9 If you look in the middle of the page above where it says "Vista Startup / Shutdown" they make reference to the problem and I think they address it in the conclusion as well. In any case, I think that the 7200.11's synthetic low level test results are misleadingly positive. Not to say that it isn't still a good drive, its just not as good as the synthetics would suggest.
Also, the new 320GB/platter 320GB drive seems to have poor seeks in the new Anandtech article, but early reports from reviews on Newegg suggest that the 640GB drive does not have this weakness.

If I had the money for a drive right now (and I do need more storage) I'd probably go for a 7500AAKS, and if reviews painted the 6400AAKS well I'd consider it as well.

-mcg

I just bought myself two WD7500AAKS drives from NCIX Canada for $156 each. (Savings code for $62 is 25561-1055, if anybody needs it).

The WD6400AAKS will have the new high-density platters, so I'm very optimistic about their performance, but I haven't seen any benchmarks yet. The only other drives I know that have that sort of density are the 1TB Spinpoint F1, and those are like 20% faster than anything else when reading/writing large video files.

The WD7500AAKS humiliates the Seagate 7200.10 series in benchmarks, but the 7200.11 series is better than the 7200.10. In general, I wouldn't buy a disk based on performance alone because they are all too close to distinguish in real life. Look at warranty (Seagate wins), noise (WD wins), reliability (Seagate and WD are OK, Samsung not so much), price (Hitachi loses badly here, good drives but overpriced IMO).

Edit: I notice that the WD6400AAKS is a bit cheaper per GB than the WD7500AAKS, at newegg. ($130/640GB vs $155/750GB). Sounds very tempting, especially if it's really faster. I'd just wait a bit until we get a better idea about its reliability.

I'm in the market for hard-drives. But why did Western Digital go with 16MB cache and not 32MB cache with the WD6400AAKS/WD7500AAKS? Seagate 7200.11 has 32MB.

Apparently the additional 16MB of cache has very little benefit and costs more than it's worth. At least that's how the people at WD think. No idea if they're right, but it does make their disks cheaper.

I got already 2pcs WD3200AAJS in Raid0 just for experimenting. Its really cool & silent compared to my previous Seagate 250GB 7200.9

Thanks!

If initial samples arrive in April, for example, when do you guys think we should expect actual availability on newegg?