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Samsung spinpoint F3, Seagate barracuda, or WD caviar black?

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What bechmarks have you guys been looking at? :heink: 
The only WD drive I would suggest right now is the 2TB Caviar Black. But if you don't need that much space, 2x Spinpoint F3s in raid 0 (500GB or 1TB model) would be much faster.
I recommend the F3s over Seagate and WD offerings because from what I've seen, they have the best avg read and write throughputs. Seagate 7200.12 drives trail closely and non-2TB-Caviar-Black WDs take last. Even Hitachi's latest Deskstar 7K1000.C drives are a bit faster than those WDs.
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blackjellognomes said:
What bechmarks have you guys been looking at? :heink: 
The only WD drive I would suggest right now is the 2TB Caviar Black. But if you don't need that much space, 2x Spinpoint F3s in raid 0 (500GB or 1TB model) would be much faster.
I recommend the F3s over Seagate and WD offerings because from what I've seen, they have the best avg read and write throughputs. Seagate 7200.12 drives trail closely and non-2TB-Caviar-Black WDs take last. Even Hitachi's latest Deskstar 7K1000.C drives are a bit faster than those WDs.

What benchmarks have you been looking at, and are you sure the 1 TB caviar black that was included was the current model with the 64MB cache?

cjl said:
What benchmarks have you been looking at, and are you sure the 1 TB caviar black that was included was the current model with the 64MB cache?

No, the new WD1TB was not in those benches. But I've yet to find benches that compare the new WD 1TB with the Samsung F3s and Seagate 7200.12s at all. However, from what I have read, they don't perform as well as they should:
http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=870&type=expert&pi...
Quote:
PROS:

* With only 2 platters, offers good performance with relatively low heat production.

CONS:

* Performance trails behind the 2TB models.
* SATA 6Gb/sec interface sees negligible gains for this generation of drives.

I haven't found any other reviews with benches. To me it seems two F3s in raid 0 would be much faster.

And the most important metric: which one won't destroy all my data after the first 30 days of use. They need to add a benchmark for reliability. They shouldn't build them for speed but rather reliabilty and mass storage. Leave the speed for the SSD crowd.

andy5174 said:
Many 7200.12 have serious clicking sound issues.

ST31000528AS and ST3500418AS clicking sound mentioned in the following thread.
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/256234-32-seagate-bar...

Also, check these.
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/252416-32-seagate-bar...

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/248925-32-seagate-st3...

Seagate is the last brand that I would trust out of the three.


I have some actual data on the 7200.12 series, not just anecdotes, and its reliability is quite good. The .11 series... not so much.

cjl said:
I have some actual data on the 7200.12 series, not just anecdotes, and its reliability is quite good. The .11 series... not so much.


The performance might be good if their quality are good, but many of them are crappy in quality according to many of its owner.

A Ferrari is useless if it can't run properly and tends to crash; and I would rather pick a Nissan that can run.

That's why most member don't recommend Seagate these days.

BTW, you are not the only one who have .12 drive here and your Seagate drive is good doesn't mean that they are good.

You might be just lucky enough the get one of the very few good .12 drives.

andy5174 said:
The performance might be good if their quality are good, but many of them are crappy in quality according to many of its owner.

A Ferrari is useless if it can't run properly and tends to crash; and I would rather pick a Nissan that can run.

That's why most member don't recommend Seagate these days.

BTW, you are not the only one who have .12 drive here and your Seagate drive is good doesn't mean that they are good.

You might be just lucky enough the get one of the very few good .12 drives.



Believe me, I'm talking about data from tens of thousands of drives here, not just my own. The 7200.12 series is doing well, as far as reliability is concerned.

Better, but still not great. In general, I would say avoid the 7200.11s.

Part of the reason it's difficult to completely classify the 7200.11 reliability as well is that the "7200.11" is actually two complete generations of drives. Initially, the 7200.11 was known internally as "Moose", with 250GB per disk and capacities up to 1TB. These had abysmal failure rates, and were in general terrible drives. Later, around Summer 2008, "Brinks" was released, still under the name 7200.11, with 333GB (or so) per disk, and capacities up to 1.5TB. This was slightly better, but still had some odd reliability problems. Given how cheap a 7200.12 is, I would say that it's always worth buying the newer drive if you need a new drive, and if you have an older 7200.11 that is still working, you can keep using it, but I'd say backups are a good idea (of course, backups are always a good idea).

cjl said:
Better, but still not great. In general, I would say avoid the 7200.11s.

Part of the reason it's difficult to completely classify the 7200.11 reliability as well is that the "7200.11" is actually two complete generations of drives. Initially, the 7200.11 was known internally as "Moose", with 250GB per disk and capacities up to 1TB. These had abysmal failure rates, and were in general terrible drives. Later, around Summer 2008, "Brinks" was released, still under the name 7200.11, with 333GB (or so) per disk, and capacities up to 1.5TB. This was slightly better, but still had some odd reliability problems. Given how cheap a 7200.12 is, I would say that it's always worth buying the newer drive if you need a new drive, and if you have an older 7200.11 that is still working, you can keep using it, but I'd say backups are a good idea (of course, backups are always a good idea).


The thing is that if I choose to go with a 1.5TB Drive, then would I would get is most likely the 7200.11. There's no 7200.12 1.5TB Drive, and the 7200.11 performs almost twice as fast as their LP Version based on the benchmarks I've been looking at.
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