Western Digital Cavier Black or Seagate 640GB?

[goony20]

Is there much of a difference between the two brands 3.0gb/s sata? I used a seagate for my first build years ago and never had a problem. Was going to stick with it when I started researching and some say WD Black has impressive speeds comparable to 2nd gen raptors? True or not?

 

[gkay09]

Yes what you have read is very true...
The WD Blacks are worth the extra bucks...
They have better read/write performance than other standard drives and when used in RAID 0, would give the Velociraptors run for their money...

 

[goony20]

5 Types of raid, isn't Raid 0 really not raid at all? Just multiple hard drives?

 

[aziraphale]

For more than 3 disks you can go for raid 5. This is also raid since one disk can fail. But the data is striped across the disks not mirrored which means that when one drive fails you really really have to replace it asap. Raid 0 is for parralel usage = better performance. Raid 1 is mirroring of two disks.

 

[goony20]

For raid 0, I'd need two identical hard drives? How will the speed compare to a single drive, SSD, velociraptor? Is it a noticeable difference?

 

[gkay09]

Well yes you need 2 identical drives...
You would notice that the performance of RAID 0 is comparable to that of SSDs...
But be careful that you don't store personal and sensitive data on those drives because if one fails, it would take the other along with it(Data Loss)...
But there is a good RAID option - RAID 10 - It needs 4 identical HDDs where RAID 0 is applied to 2 drives and RAID 1 of those 2 drives with the other 2...
So you get speed and data redundancy...

 

[goony20]

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/round,1132-36.html
Here's a link to windows startup and write benchmarks for HD. It seems that toms has the larger seagates, as a whole, being faster than most of the WD blacks. Does anyone interpret this differently, or can produce some more benchmarks?

 

[gkay09]

Well did you notice the date of that review ??? Its a 2005 article...
And there are no WD Black in that article...Those are older WD HDD...

 

[gkay09]

Check these reviews...
These are the reviews of the 1TB WD Blacks... and the WD Black 640 is the same type...So the performance would be similar to the 1TB except the capacity...
http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/forum/hardware-canucks-reviews/16043-western-digital-caviar-black-1tb-hard-drive-review.html
http://www.gamingshogun.com/Article/3623/Western_Digital_Caviar_Black_1TB_Hard_Drive_Review.html
http://www.futurelooks.com/western-digital-caviar-black-wd1001fals-1tb-hard-drive-review/
http://www.thinkcomputers.org/index.php?x=reviews&id=906

 

[dragonfang18]

I'd go WD!

 

[apache_lives]

seagates *did* have a firmware issue - im sus at them for now so i'd go with the WD

RAID0 is so worth it, never use a main rig without it - only other RAID0 owners will agree here since they have actually experienced the benifits etc

 

[leo2kp]

+1 for Western Digital

 

[goony20]

http://www.futurelooks.com/western-digital-caviar-black-wd1001fals-1tb-hard-drive-review/
This link had some good benchies for the seagate 1.5tb. It seemed to be the only review that compared WD to Seagate directly. They did mention that seagates firmware issues make it suspect though. However, if the 1.5tb drive is reading and writing that much faster than the smaller 1tb WB, the 640gbs are prolly impressive as well.