seagate 7200.12 500 or Western Digital Caviar Black 640

olryst

olryst

olryst

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Im building an AM3 system and I cant decide if I should get 2 seagate 7200.12 500GB or 2 Western Digital Caviar Black 640GB.

I will be raid zeroing whatever ones I get and they will be used mostly for gaming.
 
The western digital 640GB would be my choice, not a fan of seagate. Also have a look at the Samsung F1 500GB if you want a slightly cheaper option although it's less storage, maybe the 750GB if you need more.
 
higher density platters usually result in faster read/write drives so the seagate should win out in theory

fewer platters> less stress on the motors > lighter > quieter and more power efficient
 
Yeah thanks, I was thinking of the seagates cause the single platter with less heat and noise, cause im trying to make my next rig quite.

I still want high performancee aswell.
 
The 500GB platter seagates are very quiet and fairly cool running and great performance as far as raw read/writes go... tho IOPS are a little down but thats not really a huge problem for non-enterprise use.

Heres a single drive:

hdtune.jpg


and 2 of them in RAID0:

hdtach1.jpg
 
Bare in mind it was probably the hottest day of the year so far when I was doing these tests - the room temp was probably not much under 30C.
 
For a quiet setup with high transfer speeds the seagates win hands down....but for startup/gaming loading times I'm pretty sure the WD Black will be marginally quicker.
 
I don't have any WD blacks to compare to here - but I have a samsung F1 RAID array of similiar configuration to the seagate one thats just replacing it - and the seagate one is a LOT quicker for load times.
 
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