Seagate or WD HD

The 32MB/16MB cache doesn't matter at all, according to the benchmarks I've seen,

The WD 500GB is slow, it's from the days before perpendicular recording.

Get this WD 640GB:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136218&Tpk=WD6400AAKS

It's a bit faster than the Seagate, a lot faster than the WD 500GB, and the price/GB is really nice.

Quieter: TBH I don't think it makes sense. I have used Seagates at work and WDs at home for 14 years now and I have never even noticed hard disk noise. You'll be fine either way IMO.


Edit: if you can get the WD 500GB for a ridiculously low price, and intend to use it only for storing movies and pictures and music, then it's fine, sure. I have 3 of those and they're reliable, quiet, and definitely fast enough to play videos from them without problems.

the WD is one of those green drives than use less energy and are somewhat slower... I have that Seagate 7200.11 it is quite and pretty fast... googd luck.. l8r

if you can get similar discount on the wd 640gb go for that one. only slightly more than the 500gb and faster/bigger. but if that is not the case then i think you will be happy with either.

wd for life, ive had too many seagates die on me

Thought so. Some swear by seagate, some by wd.

If it was $10 more for the 640gb i would think about it, but double in price i'm going to stay with the two 500gb.

for sure. didn't know if you could get the same deal. i wouldn't do it for double either.  

I worked for a gov sub building systems for 10yrs and I can say that overall they have the same breakdown %... but WD seem to have platters/head crashes more... and seagates have more bearing/pcb problems.... I think the average is around 5% so u got a 95 out of 100 shot of being right either way... lmao

+1

Just curious, the hard disks that failed, were they usually in servers, or just used for Excel and Word by some employee for 8 hours a day?

I have never had a seagate or WD drive fail on me, they are both very reliable. I would go with the 640GB AAKS as others said, it is much faster. The 320 GB AAKS is also faster than that 500 GB.

Go for Western Digital!

25% of our build were servers with RAID setups and 50% of our systems were desktops, and lst 25% were Laptops

But I dont really count laptops because most go because of drops...
so... but most servers we built had at least 4 usually more dives, and desktops only 1
More of the drives were had fail came from desktops. they get moved more and some where on ships on the ocean.
We would dip the whole assembles MB into Poly to prevent water damage but that usually caused heat damage so...

But out of the 10,000 or so systems I've overseen I think it's pretty consistent failures between SG and WD...
I will say that WD used to build some nice SCSI drives that never failed, some of them I know are in desktops going on 12+ years old. I dont know why they were so good. And seagate made a couple exceptional models oin the cheeta line... but Barracuda vs Caviar you are just splitting hairs really.