I am looking to replace my hard drives in both my laptop and my desktop (this will be the last upgrade i need to make). I looked at all the bench marks and read all the reviews but for the laptop its between the Seagate Momentus XT (750 GB, 7200 rpm, SATA 6 Gb/s) and the Western Digital Scorpio Black WD7500BPKT (750 GB, 7200 rpm, SATA 3 Gb/s). The Seagate gets better scores but it seems like the WD still out performed it. Maybe I'm reading it totally wrong. What are some things i need to factor in? Which benchmark test should I be looking at?
Well For one the Seagate Momentus XT has double the cache size 32mb vs 16mb. It's also an hybred HDD drive that uses an 8gb SSD so that will help out with boot times and load times over a trandional HDD. But you are also paying 40 dollars more as well. Personally if it's in your budget i'd go with the Seagate Momentus XT, but if budget is a factor then i'd go with Western Digital Scorpio Black,Iron Sharpens Iron.
ok so when i look at the benchmark test where can i find out what they are actually testing for example: "Read Throughput Minimum: h2benchw 3.16
Sequential Transfer Rates (Minimum)" ------------for that particular test the WD scorpio out performed the Momentus, and actually if you compare the chart [32] Overall Performance ----and compare the two drives, the WD Scorpio actually beats the Momentus in 22 of the test. Maybe im just reading the results wrong...
Benchmarks are important but so are failure rates. Just something else to research.
I find Western Digital drives to be more reliable in general. For me, it would be the WD drive since that is more important to me. The Western Digital Black series hard drives are the only ones I have purchased since Maxtor was purchased by Seagate (10 years?). All of the drive issues that I have experienced have been with factory built systems that have had Seagate drives in them. I have had (old) Maxtor drives and WD drives last over 10 years without failures. You have to be a little bit crazy to keep you from going insane.
I prefer WD too, yet Seagate produces more hard drives and their published failure rate is lower.
Published, maybe, but all problems I have had were Seagate and for a while I was keeping a rough count here and Seagate was way higher complaint on failure on posts I remember reading and answering. If they factor in enterprise level drives and count that they probably sell more to system manufacturers, that is where they fudge the numbers. Enterprise level drives are tested to a higher level and marginal ones are rejected before entering the market. System manufacturers are warrantying their drives themselves and though they are counting them as drives sold, they do not count the defects because of this. What I assume I have noticed is that they are not as demanding on the quality control on their retail level drives as WD appears to be and WD treats their Black series drives as the premium level quality that they have become. You have to be a little bit crazy to keep you from going insane.