Western Digital or Seagate?

[SteveNZ]

I'm building a new PC system which I'm going to put a RAID 0 hard-drive setup into. I'm not sure which drives would be better.

The models I'm looking at are the Seagate 120Gb SATA 7200.7 (ST3120026AS) and the Western Digital WD1200JD (120Gb SATA).

Obviously this will give me 240Gb of storage.

I've had no luck finding comparitive reviews of the drives, Google just gives me lots of sites with them for sale.

The Western Digital is a bit quicker (claimed 93.5Meg/sec transfer rate, 8.9ms seek, compared to the Seagates 85.375Meg/sec transfer rate, 8.5ms seek). Whereas the Seagate is quieter (25dB at idle versus 33dB for the WD - active access volume are both roughly the same).

Now, the price difference between the 2 120Gb drives is about $60 each. Is the WD actually the approx 10% faster as claimed? How noisy are they _really_? (I've always found Seagates to be nice & quiet at idle but chattery during usage, WD to be noisier at idle but not too bad during use, this is with drives released in the last 18 months).

Recommendations one way or another?

The system they're going into is probably gonna be:

Chenbro X-Bomb case.
Abit IC7-G motherboard
1Gb (2x512) Corsair TWINX DDR400 RAM.
Plextor 708A DVD Writer.
Intel P4 2.8C (Northwood) CPU (Aim for at least 3Ghz OC).
SATA RAID hard-drives (see above ;)
Multi-flashcard reader instead of FDD.

I'll stick with onboard sound for a while. Contemplating putting a Soundblaster Audigy 2 into it, but I don't like Creatives customer support so would rather not give them the money. Problem is, not much seems to have proper EAX support, and quite a lot seems to use it instead of Direct-Sound 3D (more effects available I guess...). Doesn't really matter much anyway, games just get played through headphones...

Genius optical mouse which I'm happy with, BTC keyboard which does the job (I hate all modern keyboards I've ever used, I want my 1984 IBM metal one!).

The aging Viewsonic 17" CRT will go later in the year when LCDs get to a realistic price. (They cost less to produce than CRT, so I object to paying 3X the amount).


Anyhow, and info would be appreciated.

[Grrr!!]

If you look at the seek times you'll see that the Seagate is slightly faster, though the WD has the increased transfer rate.

Seeing as though it is almost impossible to max out a hard drives throughput, I would recommend the seagate.

[Agent666]

those figures are completely wrong... seagates usually have the worst seeks of all the magor brands.... those STR figures are a complete fabrication even the latest generation of 15k rpm SCSI disks max out at a 80MB/s sustained transfer rate..... so those figures are just WRONG

You need to know about storagereview!!
http://storagereview.com/php/benchmark/compare_rtg_2001.php?typeID=10&testbedID=3&osID=4&raidconfigID=1&numDrives=1&devID_0=250&devID_1=245&devID_2=241&devCnt=3

personally I would get the hitachi drive (or a Maxtor) over the two you mentioned.... the seagate is a real dog so forget about it....
no idea how loud the new fluid bearing WD drives are ..... storagereview says it is louder than the hitachi and I can only just hear my IBM/Hitachi 180GXP idling (model before the 7k250 series) so I would expect the same from the 7k250


since the hitachi is the same price as the seagate ($216 @ ascent) its no contest in my eyes.........

[Wibber]

some people have had trouble with WD's and RAID arrays, I'd go for the Hitachi

[Siris Le Osiris]

Thats a known error and theres a fix around for it, been discused here specfically before :P

[cadmax]

i have Seagates and WD

The WD is what i use for a O.S. drive

WD in raid 0
it will be all good i know of some people with 1/2TB of WD in raid 0 arry *why you would do that i dont know tho:rolleyes: *


lol i have a SATA 120GB seagate and a 120GB WD JB (ATA 133 i think) and the WD wins hards down (you can tell what hdd i'm useing) thats how bad it is :p

[FKF]

Originally posted by Agent666

no idea how loud the new fluid bearing WD drives are ..... storagereview says it is louder than the hitachi and I can only just hear my IBM/Hitachi 180GXP idling (model before the 7k250 series) so I would expect the same from the 7k250


The WD FDB drives aren't as quiet as I was expecting them to be, to be honest I don't find them any quieter than the old ones.