steelrain33

the wd in raid are sweet nice burst rates to

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liberalelephant

Watch out for the WD RAID. They apparently drop out of RAID volumes due to them lacking some sort of instruction set that only the WD RE (raid edition) drives have. Yes this even happens to the WD Black drives. They are still awesome drives though.

low strife

No, the firmware update WAS the problem. It bricked alot of 500GB (and some 750 & 1TB) drives. The only way to recover the data was a swap out of the discs into a new drive and a manual read of the data on it.

That was a MASSIVE blow onto seagates reputation. I wouldn't be surprised if they lost 5-10% of their sales because of that.

I have two WD's and two Samsungs in my Raid5, no problems to report.

I hope it's only a one-in-a-million thing.

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Megaman_90

Ah, my bad. Thanks for clearing that up.

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reLm

i might have to go with seagate. i want to get wd but ncix will take a week to ship and the site that im ordering from will ship right away but doesnt carry wd.

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pippolo

The Seagate problem was due to a bad firmware version AND to a bad firmware update released for the 7200.11 series. Actually there is a FW update that resolve the issue if you already have an HD with the bad FW (the units actually on the shelf already have the good FW).

The WD problem with RAID (using not-RAID version HDs) is well known and documented.
Actually, due mainly to a smear campaign against Seagate, a lot of people is thinking that WD disk are the best but, based on my experiences, I think that the WD are the worst HD on the market.

Actually I have 24 HD attached to my main PC (8 external) and only one of them is WD (all the other are Seagate). The WD is a 1 TB Caviar Green and it's the only HD of the lot to give me problems, not only about performances (this was expected, the greens are really 5400 RPM) but also limiting the number of simultaneous accesses to the HD.

The reality is that the Seagate are usually faster on transfer rate and lower on access time, the WD the contrary. You have to choose based on your type of disk usage.

Ad example, recently some web forums reported about a comparation between WD Velociraptors and 1.5TB 7200.11 Seagate short stroked at 300 GB (http://www.techwarelabs.com/seagate_1-5tb-mod/). The Seagate outperformed the VR in all the tests except access time (the VR are 10K RPM).

But remember that it's all relative and the benchmarks aren't the reality. If an HD is good at benchmarking, this does not mean that it's good also in real usage.

And the final word is really the price. In Italy where i live, the prices for a 1TB HD are the following:

Seagate 7200.12: 81 euro
Samsung F1: 83 euro
WD Caviar Black (NOT raid edition): 100 euro.

Since the Seagate 1.5TB costs about 110 euros, there are no match. The WD is not a valid option for me, but I know that in other country the prices are different.