Which 640gb ?

oTTo

oTTo

oTTo

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Question as title really - which 640gb is the one to go for ? Samsung or Western Digital. I'd appreciate as many opinions as possible, I'll be ordering soon. I'm currently leaning towards the WD as I've bought a few of their drives and they've been faultless. Noise levels are important to me though and I know Samsung have a history of being very quiet.

Bring on the opinions :)
 
Two WD 640GB in RAID 1 (so twice the noise from using 1 drive) and they are very quiet to me, even when seeking - had to move my old seagate .9 drives up to the 5.25" bays with rubber mounts as they annoyed me so much compared to my new drives!

WD%20640%20RAID%201.jpg


Pretty quick too :)
 
seems a little low pandobear, think there is some options like shadowing or something in control panel or something like that that might make it faster. I havent used raid0 for several years now so not sure what settings to change and where they are, hopefully someone will help you out.
 
Yeah, looks a bit flat for an Intel array. Check that the write back caching is enabled in the Matrix Storage Manager wotsit.
 
Access time of the Samsung is a bit higher than the WD. Is that to do with these settings you guys are talking of ?
 
No, access times are generally going up slightly for the latest drives. The platters are so dense that accurate head placement becomes tricky, slowing down the head movement a shade makes it easier.

That said there are some drives, the 320Gb WD AAKS is a prime example, which have been slowed deliberately to keep the noise down in order to please the big box manufacturers.
 
So Fobose's HDTune shot of RAID1 WD's with an access time of 12.2ms is about as fast as you'll get with new 7200rpm drives ?
 
On the same system and over lots of iterations of benchmarks the performance of both will be near enough identical.
But you say you want opinions, I would buy the Samsung. Their RMA service is much better in case you ever need it and from what I've read of those with both the Samsung is a little more pleasant acoustically.
 
Im also looking for a 640GB two platter HDD...

Is the samsung the one to chose in this case? Was only thinking of the WD as it's in TWO and cheaper than the Samsung for this week ;):D

Considering I have a old 250GB maxtor that's noisy and only get about 40mb/s should I see a nice-ish increase in speed...? If not then noise and extra space should still be nice :D
 
fobose said:
Two WD 640GB in RAID 1 (so twice the noise from using 1 drive) and they are very quiet to me, even when seeking - had to move my old seagate .9 drives up to the 5.25" bays with rubber mounts as they annoyed me so much compared to my new drives!

Pretty quick too :)
Click to expand...

yah got 2 of these myself for boot drives, v.nice and quiet compared to my 7gb raptor.

with 9TB of WD drives you could say i'm a fan :p
 
i wanna see some full reviews comparing the drives together along with the 320gb wd and 1tb samsung f1 and 1tb wd then we could have some facts. the 1tb wd's are now using 320/334gb platters now btw.
 
I've had good experience with western digital, bought many drives from them and the only one that did fail was replaced within a couple of weeks.
 
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