WD SATAII hdd - what are they like ?

mrk · 19 Jan 2007 at 21:28

Going to buy (probably!) this

Western Digital Caviar SE16 250Gb 16Mb Cache Hard Disk Drive SATAII 300MB

Just wanted to know what are they like for noise/performance and reliability? I currently have a 80GB Seagate 7200.9 and a 320GB 7200.10, both are virtually silent and only heard during seeking and want to replace the 80GB which is only SATAI and 8mb cache with a II with 16mb cache, the WD fits the price I'm looking to pay and I can ghost over to the new drive.

Your thoughts on the drive will come in handy when choosing!

naro · 20 Jan 2007 at 10:58

I don't have much experience with WD drives except for the Raptor. My experiences are limited by the hdds that I own in my sig. From what i have, the noisiest is definitely the Raptor followed by Hitachi and then the Seagate when seeking, writing and transferring files.

The following comparison charts might be useful for you:

http://www.storagereview.com/comparison.html

http://tomshardware.co.uk/storage/charts.html

mrk · 20 Jan 2007 at 11:09

cheers!

mosfet · 20 Jan 2007 at 13:45

I've got two of these in my PC7+, mounted in the Optical bays. They get quite warm with no cooling, but they're fast and generally quiet, except when both are seeking at the same time. If I had more ports on the controller I'd get another 2 and have RAID5 - they're good drives.

2Thumbs · 20 Jan 2007 at 17:49

Here is my WD SE16 320GB that arrived yesterday.

Slackworth · 20 Jan 2007 at 21:03

WD has been OcUK's most popular brand for years and keeps getting stronger and stronger. They're quick, reliable and generally good value.

My views:

Maxtor:
Pros: Cheap and reasonable performance
Cons: Not that reliable - Seagate's influence doesn't seemed to have helped either so far.

Samsung:
Pros: Bargain and silent
Cons: Not that brilliant performance wise

Western Digital:
Pros: Fast, reliable and good value for money
Cons: Almost none. Only thing that could improve them is by offering a 5-year warranty on all desktop drives rather than the RAID editions. They also offer an upgrade service in the US similar to EVGA graphics card.

Seagate:
Pros: Reliable and good performance
Cons: Tend to be the most expensive out of them all

Hitachi:
Pros: Quick drives, middle range price and actually quite reliable
Cons: Bad name from the old IBM days

Fujitsu:
Can't really say much about these as they're a fairly new brand to OcUK but the RMAs are very low and they are cheap too. Only negatives is a lack of desktop drives sadly. Their new 2.5" SAS drives are ludicrously fast.