Analysis
Seagate: Can There Be Only One?
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With such a hodgepodge of results data, can we make any credible deductions about our four contenders? Perhaps a few. Predictably, the WD Green tends to deliver low overall numbers. We went into this article expecting the WD Black to mop the floor with every other drive and instead found its results to be decidedly lackluster, so much so that we wish we’d had a second Black on hand just to make sure that our unit wasn’t somehow deficient.
The surprise of the batch was the WD Blue, which posted better than expected results, especially in PCMark 7. Despite several wins across our four benchmark applications, we had to say that Seagate came in a strong second-place, although which drive it comes second to is wide open to argument. Perhaps that’s the real take-away here. There is no clear performance leader, so the idea of paying extra for performance may well be moot in this segment.
This takes us back to evaluating other purchase criteria in the light of our performance data. In looking at price, are there anomalies? Without question, the WD Black fails to justify its roughly 28% price premium. The WD Green probably sacrifices more in performance than its $2 or $3 price savings calls for, but it does remain the clear leader on low power consumption, so in quantity the Green will look more favorable from a bottom line standpoint. (But this is murky ground. The counter-claim would be that if users place a fair number of workloads on their drive throughout the day, and the drive stays in active mode longer because of its slower performance, then net power consumption could be greater from the lower-energy drive under the right circumstances.)
The WD Blue and the Seagate Barracuda emerge as our two best performance-per-dollar propositions here, and making a choice between them is difficult. However, there are a couple of other factors that might come into play as tie-breakers.
Purchasing managers appreciate only having “one neck to choke,” meaning only one vendor to deal with for support. Taken further, just as it’s easier to support one vendor than several, it’s easier to support one SKU than several. Anyone who orders bare drives can vouch for this, even at the smallest companies. There’s a definite benefit to being able to order an advance replacement for “a Seagate Barracuda” rather than needing to figure out if it’s this or that or the other model from a given vendor.
Any business that validates computer configurations for compatibility with software packages will also appreciate a single-SKU approach. Quite simply, the fewer components there are to validate, the fewer resources need to be spent on validation, which helps reduce costs. If these savings can result in lower pricing to buyers, that’s even better.
The WD Blue and the Seagate Barracuda both come with two-year warranties from the two top names in the hard drive industry. Based on our Amazon queries at the time of this writing, Seagate had a $2 pricing advantage, and the Seagate Barracuda includes 64 MB of cache to the Blue’s 32 MB. Pricing is in a constant state of flux, of course, but we’re less interested in which drive is a couple of dollars less than we are about these other factors.
All told, then, we give the final value nod to Seagate’s Barracuda. Can there be only one model that fills the three marketing niches targeted by Western Digital’s desktop line? All evidence seems to answer “yes.”