They are both very good. Opinions and usages can differ. I actually prefer both of them for different needs unless you talk about SAS, which is dominated by Seagate for many years.

That's be cause they don't have any competition at all from WD there.
And I said, the seagate unreliabilty problem is based on cuntry-wide statistics, not personal opinions.

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My Samsung SpinPoints where leading or pretty close to leading in RAID arrays in the benchmarks way back when, but now....These things are 3 years old. When I build computers now I use Seagate 500GB 7200.11 with the 32MB cache. One of those drives is almost faster than my RAID-0 setup, except in bandwidth and multiple read/writes of course.

It's becasue of the SB600 RAID problems that I didn't enable RAID on my pals Spider platform. Didn't even do AHCI. He has SATA optical drives also, and I guess with that you can't do RAID. It's working and I didn't feel like messing around to get AHCI working since I was reading that performance wasn't that optimal on SB600. But I did put his Page File on the second drive and that seems to cheat it into being a bit faster.

Now, on my parents tri-core 790G system with SB700 I did do the trick of enabling AHCI after being in IDE mode. It's actually quite simple, and painless. If you ever want to do it, search for enabling AHCI in Vista and you should find a MSDN KB article on it. Basically you do a registry edit of enabling the Microsoft AHCI driver. You reboot and go into your BIOS and then switch it over to AHCI mode. Voila. Be patient as it loads the drivers up, and then it'll tell you it needs to restart. Do so, and then you can update to the AMD drivers. Again, patience on the boot up time, reboot and you have it all good to go. RAIDXpert works there for enabling NCQ and SMART polling.

I never did bench if the Microsoft drivers are better than the AMD drivers, or vice versa. I can tell you that the AMD drivers did boot up windows much faster. Once I did a few restarts and then defragged, bootup was about 5 seconds quicker. I hope you guys have more success with this, and I really hope when the 800 chipset comes out, that they fix this. I mean come on, they're doing a server chip so you'd think their expertise would spill over to the high(er) end desktop chipsets.

Kab, I really feel for you, man. I lost a RAID array a few times. Once becasue of a bluescreen hard reboot and once due to a power outage during a defrag. It really sucks. I know we can't say or do anything to make it better, but we all feel the hurt here. Hope you get everything up and running again!

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I'd like to see your statistics if you don't mind, because I can't find anything anywhere on reliability by vendor.

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The opinions expressed above do not represent those of Advanced Micro Devices or any of their affiliates.

The 32MB of cache is a marketing thing; if offers no extra performance compared to 16MB on the same drive.

And yes, a new drive is almost up to the speed of an old RAID.
That's why I sold all my HDDs below the 750GB RE2.


I posted them at the begining of this year for last year.
I can order a Q1/Q2 statistic centralization next month (so data from at least 90% of the retailers is gathered).

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Western Digital drive

Seagate drive

Both are 500GB unformatted capacity, SATA2 (SATA 300), 3.5" DIN size, 7,200RPM and identical prices. Hardware.info has just about every peice of computer hardware and related accessories tested, and done extensively. Seagate comes out on top. As for realiability of the two bransd, I've heard some things of both camps. But it's nothing compared to the early Maxtors or IBM "Death Stars". I heard some things of the Seagate 7200.10, but that's why I go with the 7200.11 and so far so good.

At one time I heard IBM made the best, and then they had some problems. I even had people tell me to stay away from Samsung's when I bought these. So far these Samsung's have been my most stable RAID-0 array I have ever created. When it comes to talk, is it hype, is it FUD or is there really a clear problem?

People are still trash talking Vista, and it's a very good OS when you sit down and use it. People still trash-talk the X-Fi card and it's Vista drivers, when I have everything working exactly as it was in XP. There are people out there that still think the Pentium 4 is the best CPU out there. Hard drives are going to fail. heck, we'll have to keep our eyes out on these new SSDs becasue I don't think they have the reliability yet for massive read/writes, formattings and so on that's going to happen outside of controlled test environments.

The thing is, I have hard drives that are old. Very old. They are still in active, or semi-active use today and all come from different manufacturers that above have been listed for reliability problems? Am I lucky, or am I the norm?

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Your comparison is ultra-cheated.
You are comparing a green model (WD) that is created for low power consumption with the top of the line seagate model (.11).
Why not compare that seagate with the WD5002ABYS that is the Elite WD model for 500GB ? Or at least with a RE2... or even a RE...or even a standard model (SE16).
You see, your comparison is low end, low power WD vs. top of the line Seagate.

So quit seageting me.
Currently, WD has 3 Godlike sets of drives: black edition, RE2 and RE3 that are overall undefeatable by any other company's SATA HDDs.

Getting back to you futile comparison, either you compare RE3 or black with .11 (high end comparison) either .7 with the WD GP models (old tech/low end). In any case, the equivalent WD wins.

And here's your .11 getting owned with even 40% by the respectable HDDs (Spinpoint F1, deskstat 7k1000 and RE2, and above) : http://techreport.com/articles.x/15363/6

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Edited: 09/17/2008 at 07:32 AM by Overmind

Can I have a link?

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All those hard drives are much more expensive than the one I quoted for $68.99. I did metion they both have identical prices. Unfortunately for WD I would have to nearly double the price to get a better hard drive from them, and to start getting into RE2 and all those ones, more than double in some case. Some of those hard drives are $204!!!

But I can see you are on the kool-aid and WD seems to win in every aspect. Cool. So why do we have other manufacturers making hard drives if WD is the shiznit? I mean, I did see the Samsung F1 above WD in those tests. We're obviously not including the Raptor or VelociRaptor since those are outrageously expensive hard drives for their performance.

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He's getting blood transfusions with the kool-aide

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We were talking seagate, not F1. The F1 gets pwned by the RE3 and Black and even the 640 GB Blue mainstream model.


Exactly...but what's that got to do with anything ?

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