1TB 7200.12 or 1Tb WD Black?

Devilman

Devilman

Devilman

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Looking at replacing my aging IDE HDD's in my system, not entirely sure which to shell out for however... Would I be right in thinking the 7200.12 is 500gb per platter, while the WD is 333?

Since it will be the boot drive (aswell as programs / games on other partitions) I'm leaning towards the Seagate as it's probly got slightly better performance, but would apreciate some input, as I havent bought any new HDD's in quite a while! (my last was a 7200.8 IDE drive a few years ago lol)


Any Thoughts / Suggestions welcome, Thanks all :)
 
Neither, a samsung f1 1tb! :D lol

They're all about the same performance. I have both the samsung and black so if you wanted some performance figures i could run benchmark for you.
 
I've been researching this today too. The Seagate is dual platter and it's one of the best out there at the moment - definitely faster than the wd black for read & write times(~15%), is also cooler (~5'), quieter, & more energy efficient (~1.5W). I'm going to get one.
 
cmndr_andi said:
I like to refer to tech report reviews when looking for HDDs. The 7200.12 does not seem to perform as well as its 500GB platters might suggest. Meanwhile, the 333GB/platter Wester Digital Black does better, and at £75 they are a very good deal.
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Hmm, interesting info in that review, was expecting to see better performance all-round from a 500gb per platter drive...

Given the 5 year warranty of the WD Black, it does look quite tempting, Though I have to say that the price on the F1 is pretty nice too... hmm.........

CowboyTony said:
I've been researching this today too. The Seagate is dual platter and it's one of the best out there at the moment - definitely faster than the wd black for read & write times(~15%), is also cooler (~5'), quieter, & more energy efficient (~1.5W). I'm going to get one.
Click to expand...


Hmm, more food for thought :o Strange that some reviews seem to say the seagate is no faster (or even slower at some operations) than other drives, while some other review sites are raving about them and saying they are fastest and quiet too...
 
I think either tech report got some early drives or a problem with their drives...

Seek times are about 5ms quicker than they are quoting and write speeds are similiar to the read performance - all in all about 20MB/s quicker across the board than the blacks and much faster than the F1s.

The IOPS are still a little on the poor side considering what the drive is - but I honestly don't think you'd even notice the difference unless you were running them under enterprise conditions... and you wouldn't be using these kinda drives for that kind of useage anyway...

Of course, given Seagate's recent firmware fiasco, some may be wary of the new 'cuda's reliability. And there's reason for concern: one of the two 7200.12s Seagate sent us for testing consistently failed mid-way through HD Tach's "full" disk benchmark, rendering the drive unusable until the next reboot. The second drive ran through our entire benchmark suite without a hitch, though.
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I find this interesting - and probably an indication of problems with the drives they recieved or potential bias - I've got 5 of the 7200.12 drives and all are flawless - heres a couple of them in RAID0:

hdtach1.jpg
 
Rroff : Thx very much for that info, and benchmarks.. it does indeed seem as tho their benchmarks (or benchmarking system) had some issues, as I found it hard to believe right from the start that the drives could be as slow as they were making them out to be...

Damn, thats brought the 7200.12 right back in the game again now, Decisions decisions..... lol :p
 
Just a thopught Devilman - your motherboard does support SATA doesn't it? If you're just using IDE at the moment you'll need different connectors to the ones you're using now.
 
I recently had a Seagate 1TiB brick-up @ 95% capacity. Wasn't even a year old yet. It was that damn ST31000340AS series. Since Seagate never really officially owned up to this issue I will not throw my money in their direction anytime soon. Nor will I recommend their HD's. Their customer service says it all.

I've got a few WD's in my desktop and a WD Scorpio Black WD2500BEKT with a external WD 1TiB enterprise on the laptop. I'm actually gonna stick to enterprise equipment or close to it from now on.

Who cares about slightly better performance if the hardware isn't reliable to begin with?
 
Go2it : aye thats a fair point tbh... I think that most people that have issue with seagate is not so much that the drive failed, but the manner in which they (as a company) delt with the issue... very poor service tbh...

That said, the drive you had problems with was the older .11 version, which had the firmware issues etc.. so it may be a bit of a biased to presume all their drives will be crap now days :o

Bleh, really not sure what to do now lol... I've almost always used seagates in the past and never had a problem with em, compared to a WD drive which was noisey (general mechanical noise, not click of death etc..) but again that was a few years back and things change so fast, that "past experience" is often not much to go by when you have newer models come out...
 
Devilman said:
Go2it : aye thats a fair point tbh... I think that most people that have issue with seagate is not so much that the drive failed, but the manner in which they (as a company) delt with the issue... very poor service tbh...

That said, the drive you had problems with was the older .11 version, which had the firmware issues etc.. so it may be a bit of a biased to presume all their drives will be crap now days :o

Bleh, really not sure what to do now lol... I've almost always used seagates in the past and never had a problem with em, compared to a WD drive which was noisey (general mechanical noise, not click of death etc..) but again that was a few years back and things change so fast, that "past experience" is often not much to go by when you have newer models come out...
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Yeah I'm not a fan of how they dealt with the issue - if it wasn't for the fact I've had almost 20 years of rock sold reliability from 100s of their drives I'd have jumped ship... I dislike how the .11s are still on sale as well - as I've heard of several people who have bought them in recent weeks and had problems still.

That aside the 7200.12 so far appear to be back on track - so I will continue to reccomend them.
 
Is it still the case that the 7200.12 has annoyingly bad random seek times? When they first came out, they seemed to be really quick at sequential reads and writes but have rubbish seeking performance compared to WD and Samsung.
 
go2it said:
I recently had a Seagate 1TiB brick-up @ 95% capacity. Wasn't even a year old yet. It was that damn ST31000340AS series. Since Seagate never really officially owned up to this issue I will not throw my money in their direction anytime soon. Nor will I recommend their HD's. Their customer service says it all.

I've got a few WD's in my desktop and a WD Scorpio Black WD2500BEKT with a external WD 1TiB enterprise on the laptop. I'm actually gonna stick to enterprise equipment or close to it from now on.

Who cares about slightly better performance if the hardware isn't reliable to begin with?
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When you say "enterprise", any specific code/model?
 
Look up WD Enterprise HD's on the net for futher info.

RE3

Thermal extended burn-in test - Each drive is put through extended burn-in testing with thermal cycling to ensure reliable operation.

Each drive <- 8))
 
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go2it said:
Look up WD Enterprise HD's on the net for futher info.

RE3

Thermal extended burn-in test - Each drive is put through extended burn-in testing with thermal cycling to ensure reliable operation.

Each drive <- 8))
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Yep, reflected in the price also. :) 30 quid more for the 2TB to get the RE4 version. Not bad (imo).
 
WD Black

I had a few brand new 7200.12's this morning at work, and it seemed as though the platters were not secured onto the motor properly.

Shook them and there is clearly something loose inside, turn them on and it sounds like a car skidding, horiffic.

I used to trust seagate but never again, these 7200.12's are the last straw. WD all the way
 
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