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What should I choose? Help me answer these questions.

Last response: in Storage

ST32000641AS (7200 rpm, 2TB)
WD2001FASS (7200 rpm, 2TB)
WD20EARS (5400 rpm, 2TB)

My preference: Reliability > Performance > Noise > Temperature

My questions:

1. Are WD's harddrives really more reliable compare to the Seagate ? I have done lots of research through many forums and this seems to be confirmed by the majority. I am still not sure thought. But the WD2001FASS indeed has a gold award on so this might be true.

2. Are the modern 5400 rpm harddrives more reliable than the modern 7200 rpm harddrives ? If both HDD’s are made with same technique then its only logic. Somehow I cant find the MTBF of those HDD on WD's website. Can anyone tell me if this is really true? This is the most important thing I want to know.

This doesn’t look very promising to me. Window load 2 sec faster, read/write speed only noticeable by opening tons of programs and transfer huge file. Which can also be archieved with more RAM, right? Games would only load few seconds faster but performance stay the same. The performance different is to small to be considers as great sacrifice to reliability(question 2). Can you convince me otherwise?

4. I have a folder with sub-folders which contain more than 5000 images. Every time I tried to open this folder, it always delays ~8 sec. What is the best way to fix this, more rpm or more RAM? My current HDD is a Seagate 7200 250GB.

5. Which one is the loudest and which one is the quietest? Are the different between those noise very big?

6. Can anyone tell me the average temperature of the three HDD's when running? Without cooling.

Thanks for your time!

Unfortunately WD has changed their web site and it's become much more difficult to find links to their PDF specification sheets. But I managed to track down specs for all the drives via Google.




Both the Seagate and WD 7200rpm drives have a non-recoverable read error rate of 1 read error per 10^14 bits read.

The WD Green drive has a better rate - only one read error per 10^15 bits read.

This may or may not say anything about how likely the drive is to fail outright, but it does suggest your data is more secure on the Green drive.
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seagate as of late has been plain garbage, i generally stick to WD

ignore reliability figures and all that crap - DO A PROPER BACKUP AS REQUIRED

that 8 second delay is because you have too much in one folder - can you divide it up into smaller folders?

Yes, I did divided it in many sub folders of few hundreds images.

Seems like my choice will either be the caviar black or caviar green.

At first I wanted black but I have heard many bad reputation about it being to hot, VERY noisy, lots vibration. Also less reliable compare to green, while it doesnt offer much improvement to performance ?

I am still at school so I dont have much monney for more than one drive. So I plan using one for both system and storage. That is why I want it to be reliable.

Would my window load time, read/write improve if i add like 4GB RAM ?

Adding more ram won't appreciably improve your load times, after all the ram is the receiver of the data from the hard drive, you still have to read it first before you can store it in the RAM.

I just found most of the answer in an old post.

Quote by WD:
"Kindly take note as all drives are designed around a 5 year life span. Our drives have less then a 1% annualized failure rate and cost difference is usually because of warranty length and features. (speed, cache, RAID, ect.)"

On google search I have found out that WD green has recently many head parking issue so I am leaning toward caviar black right now.

How is it noise level compare to wd green? twice ? are external drives the best way to backup my database ?


I don't think you would see a difference in noise without a sound meter.

As for your other question, It depends.
Do you have room(and power) in your case for the extra hard drive(s)? Does your mobo have the connectors to support extra hard drives? If not, then external is the only way to go, otherwise, remember that bare hard drives are always going to be cheaper than hard drives plus an external enclosure. Depending on how the external enclosure is connected to your system, there may be a performance issue, also.