WD Black Caviar 1TB

To make a long story short:

I've ordered two 1 TB drives from Newegg, and both were DOA. They were Seagate drives, so I am switching back to Western Digital. So here are my questions:

1. I've noticed that drives under 1 TB are typically recommended, like the Black Caviar 640. Is there any reason for this? Do these lower capacity 7200 drivers offer better performance than the 1 TB counterparts?

2. Do you recommend I pay a little more and get a retail from a brick-and-mortar store to prevent the possible shipping damages? (Although those drives had to be shipped to the brick-and-mortar...)

I'd like to have the extra storage space of the 1TB, but if you guys say stay away...


Just need some advice.

Thanks

Its not so much the number of platters, but the density of the platters. The 1tb should perform close to the 640 as they use the same 334mb platters. As jchan said, the spinpoint F3 uses 500gb platters as do the seagate 7200.12s. They will have better performance since the heads can read more data per revolution than a platter with 334mbs on it.

Recommending the 640 over the 1tb is more about price and the fact that most people don't need 1tb. I run a single 160gb drive and have XP and Win7 dual boots with Crysis Max edition, The orange box, and Fallout 3 loaded on both partitions. Media files cover just over a gig. So be realistic about your capacity needs and take a good look at that spinpoint F3, great price/performance. $55. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] %20samsung

I've ordered 100s of the caviar black 1TB drives, and only had 2 DOA...it is my drive of choice for most builds because it offers the best mixture of high storage and performance. If you have a lot of media files like I do that 1TB doesn't go as far as a normal user, so buy for your needs. Music files don't take up a whole lot of space each, but if you have 100,000 like I do they add up fast. It only takes a few HD video files to chew up all your available space.

Thanks for all of your input guys. I think I should put performance over storage size, so I've decided to risk it and go with the Spinpoint that has been recommended by 3 of you (plus some mentions of the spinpoint on a review I read on the 1 Tb itself!).

Hopefully it is not another DOA

thanks guys

palithius

Why does the WD Black 500GB offer less performance than the 640GB version? Does it use one platter or two smaller ones?

I think this review is worth looking at WRT this conversation.

http://www.tomshardware.com/review [...] 430-9.html

I too have been contemplating which hdd to get and it seems to me that the WD Black 1TB is faster for loading apps and games than the F3 500GB ... despite the fact that the F3 has 500GB platters.

I'm still curious about the WD Black 1TB vs. WD Black 640GB. It makes sense to me that the 1TB would be faster (since it has 6 heads and 3 plates) than the 640 (which has 4 heads and 2 plates), but these specs:

http://www.wdc.com/wdproducts/libr [...] 701276.pdf

say that the Host to/from drive is 106MB/s for the 1TB and 113MB/s for the 640GB ... does anyone know how important the 'Host to/from drive' for games/load times?

Thanks for any advice.