WD Caviar Black vs Barracuda 7200.12

So it's about time to get a larger hard disk. Will probably use this as my main system disk. Likely won't be doing any Raid setup as I've never really messed with it before. So it would probably be a single drive I'd be ordering.

Currently I'm using a WD 400GB Sata 3 drive which is great (nice and quiet too).

I'm considering these two drives:

Western Digital Caviar Black WD1001FALS 1TB 7200 RPM 32MB
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136284

Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 ST31000528AS 1TB 7200 RPM 32MB
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148433

Price being the same on each, I've been looking at reviews and benchmarks. Unfortunately I seem to be finding conflicting information. Some sites seem to show the Barracuda being faster, and others show the Caviar Black as being faster.

My understanding is that the Seagate 7200.11 drives are the ones that had the Firmware issues. Supposadly the 7200.12 drives no longer are victim to this plague.

Anyone have any expert knowledge on which of these drives is the better drive performance wise? I'm sorta leaning toward the WD Caviar Black, as I've always had great luck with WD. I've had a single Seagate drive before, but their ownership in Maxtor bothers me. Every Maxtor drive I ever owned was a piece of junk, and noisy to boot.

My system is used 90% for gaming. I play Age of Conan right now, but sometimes will play Crysis, CoD, Farcry, etc depending on if I get bored. :) My current system specs are below in my sig.
 

ausch30

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Don't let the Maxtor thing bother you, Seagate makes great drives. I've had a lot of Seagate drives, I have 3 in my system right now including 2 7200.11 drives, and they are very good. That being said I don't think you can go wrong with either, just pick the one your more comfortable with.
 
The Seagate drives are quite good, and as far as I know, they have fixed the issues that plagued the 7200.11 series. You can't go wrong with the Caviar Black either though - I have one of the 1TB Caviar Blacks in my computer as a storage drive right now, and I love it. It's an excellent drive.

Honestly, I'd say go for either one. They are both excellent drives. IIRC, the caviar black is a bit faster in random access, but the Seagate is a bit faster in normal desktop applications (probably because of slightly different firmware tweaking).
 
Well apparently the price on the WD drive went up $10 between the time I posted this thread earlier today, and this evening. Not sure what the deal is with Newegg on that one. Kinda irks me ;)

I'm going to take a chance on the Seagate drive. Now that it's $10 less, and the performance between the two seems to be reasonably a toss-up. Aside from the 7200.11 troubles, Seagate I know is generally a reliable product.

Besides, cooler and power power efficient (two platters instead of three) is good I suppose. :)
 

rand_79

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both are good. both make you happy.

seagate is abit newer technology, uses less power and has higher throughput,


WD has slightly better seek time and IOPS
 
Well now that I already ordered the Seagate drive, NewEgg.com and reduced the WD Caviar Black 1TB to $99 again. I don't know what their problem is, but I'm a little annoyed by this.

They had it at $99, then $109, and now $99 again. All within 24 hours.
 
I did in fact end up calling NewEgg's 1-800 number. Good folks. Their website says once they charge your card you cannot change your order. I called them, explained that they had changed the price on their WD drive, and then changed it back. They allowed me to cancel my Seagate (7200.12) order and voided my transaction.

I was tempted to order two drives and try a Raid 0 (It'll be for gaming and won't have personal/business/sensitive data). Never done a Raid setup, so I'm not sure if the Caviar Black is even good for Raid 0 or not.

Anyhow, I splurged and ordered two (2) of the WD Caviar Black 1TB drives. Worst case, if I can't get them to work in Raid 0 I can use one for my system/gaming needs, and use the other for my growing stash of video footage of my kids. :)

And the Seagate drive I was looking at (and originally ordered) was the newer 7200.12 version. LOL I've heard enough about the 7200.11 drives I wouldn't even try it. Just asking for trouble there.
 

ausch30

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I think either of them would be very good drives but at least your mind is at ease.

It takes a lifetime to build a reputation but a few seconds (or a bad product) to ruin it. Before the 7200.11 issue I would imagine you wouldn't have thought twice but unfortunately for Seagate they had that problem and now a lot of people are shying away from them. They had a great reputation and I think it might take until the 7200.13 with no issues with the 7200.12 for them to regain it.

I am biased toward Seagate but I feel both companies are very good, Seagate just always seems to be one step ahead until the whole 7200.11 issue. As I said before , I have 2 7200.11's and I've never had a problem as well as about a dozen other Seagate drives that still work but are too small to be useful.
 
Seagate has always been a reliable brand so far as I know. I'm not really hesitant to order a 7200.12 due to the failure of the 7200.11. For me it's mainly making sure I'm getting the right drive. I've looked at several benchmarks, some say the Seagate is faster, some say the Caviar Black is faster. All seems to depend on which benchmark software that site used.

Either way, I've owned more WD drives than anything else, and I've read more recommendations for the WD drive. Had I not seen the Caviar Black on sale as well, I'd probably have simply ordered the Seagate 7200.12 :)

Either way, at least I've got two good drives en route, and the five year warranty is just sorta nice to know.
 

ausch30

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I have to say that it's a little disturbing because Seagate always had a 5yr warranty and everyone else had 3yrs. Now, since the 7200.11 thing, Seagate is 3yrs with their 7200.12 and WD has gone to 5yrs. I expect a hard drive to last until it's speed or capacity is obsolete and 3yrs just doesn't do it. It is a little troublesome that they put out a product with some issues and then gave themselves a 2yr buffer to protect against the fact that they might have an issue in the future. If you have faith in the product your producing then you won't have a problem guaranteeing that product.

Maybe it's just the fact that Seagate is a bigger company and when you get to a certain point you cover your ass but I'm reminded of recently I called Logitech about one of the keys not working on my keyboard and they sent me a whole new set (keyboard and mouse combo). Customer loyalty and word of mouth will go much further to build your business than watch your ass.
 

ausch30

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I have quite a few of their products and they all seem to be very good. I've had nothing but good experience with them so we'll see if that continues.
 

bitmonx

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I own Maxtor and Seagate HDD's. I just ordered a WD Caviar Black 1TB and received it a few days ago. I have not yet installed the new WD HDD yet since my new MOBO is on back order.
I got 2 Seagate Barracudas 7200.11 500GB in a RAID 0 config. and will be making a RAID 1 with the Seagate HDD's while using the new WD for OS and Games and stuff. I never had a Seagate failing but I had a Maxtor failing. It was one of the Diamondmax 60GB HDD. I used to own 2 of them and I wanted to use them in RAID. At that time I owned the Asus P4C800E-Deluxe MOBO and the RAID constantly failed (like every 2 weeks or so on boot the RAID was corrupt...). I decided to not touch RAID anymore and was not sure if it was because of my HDD's or my MOBO.

I own lots of Logitech products. I always had Logitech Mice. I just recently got the G9 Mouse and the G15 Keyboard. Love them both. Especially the G15, it is nice to have a LCD screen and have extra info while gaming like GPU & CPU temps.

I did have a Logitech wireless Keyboard that failed on me (not sure which model) but that was a long time ago.

 
In reference to warrenties:
1. Not a bit of difference between an end item with a 3 year warrenty and the same item with a five year warrent - Except cost. The same end item with a five year warrenty cost the company more than that same item with a 3 year warrent. Ex. when I had a side job repairing TVs. Went to the distributor to buy a replacement CRT, the salesman plunked the CRT on the counter - Cost was based on lenght of warrenty SAME daggburn boobtube.

2. Item dies two days after warrenty expires. Some companies use to spend more on "Engineering" a failure time frame than new developement to boast turnover. Case in point (20 years ago). company XXX 1.5 D cell, They had to add impurities to the paste (C-Zn) battery so that it would failure before the "More expensive" Cell.

--- For HDD drives I think #1 applies. Most HDDs will last beyound the "5 year point" and length of warrenty is more a marketing point - Which you pay for - even though manfu knows it should last well beyound the warrenty time. Most people upgrade HDD due to performance and size vs failure of the drive (Maybe not quite Maytag, but close enough for government work )

Still have some 20/40 gig drives arround, and at work have a stash of 8 gig SCSI drives.
Bear in mind all brands have produced exceptional drives AND poor drives. When it comes to HDDs I have NO Loyalty
 

justcubes

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I have a Seagate 7200.11 1.5TB, and just ordered two more from NewEgg. Seagate has made some progress on the issue:

http://seagate.custkb.com/seagate/crm/selfservice/news.jsp?DocId=207931

The main reason I went with the 7200.11 is size. I wanted to get the most storage in my case possible. I have had great service with Seagate over the last few decades, all the way back to massive 40MB (megabyte) drives. But I can say that about all of my drives, except some problems with just a few Maxtor's.

I will be getting something quicker for my system drive, maybe WD Caviar Black 1Tb or the 7200.12, but I'm trying to wait for the 7200.12 2TB. I'm currently running Seagate 320GB x 2, WD 500GB x 2, and the 7200.11 1.5TB, with 2 80mm case fans to cool them all.

 

Marcus52

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One thing I do when I'm trying to decide what to buy is look at the customer ratings on places like newegg; this is only good if a bunch have been sold, and of limited use anyway, but if it's got a 5-star rating and 500 people commented, I think it's probably a reliable product. :D

Generally, the Western Digitals have better consumer ratings on newegg than the Seagates. For that reason, all else being equal, I tend toward WD. But then, I got stuck on WD when the Raptors came out, so I'm biased that way.

I have 2 640GB Black Caviars in Raid 0, works great!

;)
 

shock312

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i have always bought WD in the past but i saw a good deal on the seagate 7200.12 1TB (thought the 500gb per platter would make it better) and i was going to get it, till i found this article ( http://techreport.com/articles.x/16472 ) basically the black out-performed the 7200 in almost all catergories and was rather poor in the benchmark tests for game level load times. so i got the black 1TB for $100 at the time of this post, also if you look at the combo deals there is one that has software a hard drive back up/ migration program called 'Acronis True Image Home 2009' and it comes out to be $100 still so i figured i might as well get it.
 

ribs291

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I'm also trying to decide on one of these or another brand and having trouble picking one.

Leaning towards a 7200.12 Seagate but not sure to go with the
16mb cache 500gb
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148395

or the 32mb cache 1tb.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148433

Some reviews for the Seagate 1tb show very high random access times, and I am not sure what this really means.
What does this affect in real world computing??

The WD reviews show it runs hot and is louder, while the the Seagate has the random access slow times.