Which would be better?

[satyamdubey]

Two options:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136769
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822149380

The Toshiba one is 32 mb cache while WD is 16... how would that make a difference?

I would not be buying the drive from newegg but from an Indian site.

Thanks
-Satyam

 

[phil22]

Go for the larger cache - - the Toshiba one. It will perform better than the WD drive.
If Toshiba had a poor track record I would have said go for the WD drive instead, but Toshiba products have a good reputation.

 

[blazorthon]

More than half of that Toshiba drive's reviews are 1/5 reviews. Sure, they're just Newegg shoppers, not experts, but that doesn't give me much confidence in the drive (nor does the crap warranty) whereas the Caviar Blue there is a very well-rated drive and one that I know to be reliable from experience with several units of it.

Also, higher cache capacity doesn't mean higher performing. There are other performance factors such as data density that you're not accounting for.

 

[satyamdubey]

^Blazorthon...exactly what i've been thinking....the reviews aren't good. I made a mistake of using a crap psu in my build and that has killed my Seagate 500 barracuda. Trouble is, Seatools never reported a failing drive. What I would also want to know is whether Toshiba or WD would have reliable programs that can identify a failing drive?

 

[blazorthon]

No tool may report a drive that fails unexpectedly due to power surge and the like, just to be fair. That'd be like a trying to predict lightning strikes as far as the failure report tools are concerned. They report gradual failures based on wear and tear and the like, not suddenly being killed by the PSU.

 

[satyamdubey]

No tool may report a drive that fails unexpectedly due to power surge and the like, just to be fair. That'd be like a trying to predict lightning strikes as far as the failure report tools are concerned. They report gradual failures based on wear and tear and the like, not suddenly being killed by the PSU.

yeah you are right...just frustrated coz I had a lot of stuff on the drive. I checked the drive and the pcb seems to have been damaged (looks burned with all the signs you know, intermittent clicking, drive led initializing and then turning off etc)...the i read that all those pcb's are uniquely matched to the drive. so like if the seagate service centre here gets it to work can i recover the data with tools like "getdataback"?

 

[blazorthon]

Maybe, I make no guarantee that you can or can't. I couldn't know the extent of the damage.

 

[satyamdubey]

well...I've made up my mind..will stick with WD since there's a lot more to drive performance than just available cache...and WD has more service centres here than Toshiba.....Thanks Phill and Blazo.

 

[satyamdubey]

Best answer selected by satyamdubey.

 

[blazorthon]

Glad to help.