Seagate 7200.12 and Western Digital Caviar Black

Just look at toms charts for dar drives and they will answer all you want to know

The Western Digital Caviar Black 640gb is much better than both of those.

This makes me think to hard...
After reading an article on a forum I found out the following:
The Seagate has a faster read speed, is mlre effecient, and is quieter.
The Caviar Black writes faster, boots faster, loads games faster, and is more reliable.
Overall, I think the choice is personal, but I am most likely going to go for the Caviar Black because my build will be a single HDD set up so I can not afford a screw up. It also has more pros than the Seagate.
The confusing part is that the specs look so much better for the Seagate its just that it does not perform well at all.
The Caviar Black will be my choice unless $10 changes y budget. Lol

The seagate drive has a much slower data access speed. There is also a firmware issue with that particular model. If it doesn't have the updated firmware you will need to update it.

Overall, I don't think there is any question which is better. WD is by far the best quality. Specially the cavair black series. +1 to the suggestion of the 640Gb black drive. It's the best price/performance drive available.

There is no firmware issue with the 7200.12's. also the difference in access times would be barely noticable in real world apps

WD

Good catch Homeboy. My fault, it's the 7200.11 that had the firmware problem. The 7200.12 is the same drive with the updated firmware. But here is a good review on the seagate.
http://techreport.com/articles.x/16472/12

A little caution on reviews at newegg: (1) a couple of the 1/2 eggers I think are aimed at the -11 (Misplaced). (2) I have a feeling that a number of the DOA's are do to Newegg's pis*poor packing on the drives - THIS applies to WD's DOA's also. The short term results indicate a improved reliability rating - BUT hard to say on long term.

Hard to find reviews for the -12's here is one on the 500 Gig drive.
Tom's chart does not have the -12 (at least didn't last time I looked.
www.cdrinfo.com/Sections/Reviews/Specific.aspx?ArticleI...

aford10 - disagree, as the -12 has a higher density per platter than the -11.
Also could not find any review of the 750 Gig -12. Two platters vs 1 for the 500 gig, but 32 Meg cache for the 750 vs 16 Meg Cache for the -11.
Don't believe cache makes a big diff inwhich case the 500 may be a better performer than the 750.

I'll post my benchmarks because I have two .12s

HD Tune: Seagate ST3500410AS Benchmark

Transfer Rate Minimum : 66.1 MB/sec
Transfer Rate Maximum : 128.4 MB/sec
Transfer Rate Average : 104.4 MB/sec
Access Time : 15.3 ms
Burst Rate : 86.9 MB/sec
CPU Usage : 66.5%


HD Tune: Seagate ST3500410AS Benchmark

Transfer Rate Minimum : 63.2 MB/sec
Transfer Rate Maximum : 130.1 MB/sec
Transfer Rate Average : 104.1 MB/sec
Access Time : 15.6 ms
Burst Rate : 127.3 MB/sec
CPU Usage : 68.5%

CPU usage seams VERY high, or is that do to other programs running.
Ref previous thread (yetyhunter) posed a snap of his -12 with a CPU usage of 5.6, also his Access time was slightly lower - 14.4

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/forum2.php?config=tom...

I just bought the 7200.12. Pros: dead silent. But there's a price to pay for that. Seagate locked the drive in its "quietest mode" in order to compete with the WD "Green" models; very fast sequential transfer rates. But keep in mind that transfer rates are in contrast to random access rates which brings up a con. The RAR for the Seagate is noticably slower than the competition. As a result of that the file copy rates -which is your bread and butter in terms of performance- is very slow.

So despite the data density, single platter 500GB drive the Seagate agains falls short as a performance drive compared to others. I'm keeping my 7200.12 for a data drive.


Another note. I bought the WD Velociraptor and I'm returning it. A year ago or so it was the performance king. But 7200 technology has improved to the point where the performance difference between the new 500GB - 1TB drives is so small that the price premium for the Velo isn't worth it. My mistake. its going back I'm getting a 640 or a 1TB WD black.

Kiniku, so if you could go back in time would you get the WD Caviar Black instead? Do you think that the Seagate 7200.12 1TB (2 platters of 500 GB) and 32mb cache would perform better than the 500GBand 16 mb cache?

See:
http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.asp?driveid=552

WD Caviar Black 500GB is 32MB Cache 7200rpm HDD

The specs for the Caviar Black are published on Western Digital's website. Looks like a SATA I (1.5GB/s) controller card would be more than enough to optimally handle either the SATA II or the SATA III drives without an I/O bottleneck.

http://www.wdc.com/wdproducts/library/?id=120&type=8