I'm having trouble deciding which one I should get. I'm getting mixed benchmarks, for example:

http://www.tomshardware.com/charts [...] e,658.html
says that the barracuda crushes the WD (79.8 to 50.5)

whereas http://www.custompc.co.uk/labs/180 [...] 250gb.html
actually says that the WD is faster than the barracuda both in read/write speed and in real-life performance (they used loading a level in Crysis)

Can someone explain this? Or am i missing some important detail in these benches?

Also, I've been reading a lot of the reviews on newegg, and a lot of them said that the seagate drives were DOA or that it failed on them within 1 hour of use. So... which one should I pick?

Thanks a lot.