WD vs. Deskstar HD comparisons

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sleddriver

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I picked up a Hitachi 500G SATA/300, 7200rpm, 16mb buff deskstar with a 3 year warranty last night. Paid $49. I've had an Hitachi fail on me a few years back, just a few months outside of warranty. They weren't too pleasant to deal with on the phone.

I also spied a WD Blue? Caviar? similiar specs, same warranty, ~ $57. It was a toss up.

However looking at WD website, they offer several free? tools for use with their drives. By comparison, Hitachi offers very few. Interesting....

I have yet to open the Hitachi HD. Still sealed. I welcome all opinions & comments.

One last question...what's the best way to partition a big drive? How many partitions? How large? OS on one, data on another, apps on another? I've always kept everything together, however I've never used a drive this big before either. My current XP system, files, data, & apps takes up less than 10G? Maybe 15? So what do I do with 500G?

Thanks
 
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Unless something has changed in the past few years with the Hitachi (formerly IBM) they were previously known as "Death Stars" due to the high failure rate. While all hard drives can and do fail, between these two I would choose the WD.

For the partition size, there should not be any limits provided you are installing SP1 or later. One thing to consider is that if you split the drive into multiple partitions (say 100GB for C$ and 400GB for D$) you could wipe the C$ if needed in the future to re-install without losing the data on D$ (of course backups are always advisable).

Performance increases can be had when moving the pagefile to a different partition (other than C$) but this only the case when there is multiple hard drives in the PC.

Hope this helps!
 
I will never buy a WD drive again. Just had way too many of those fail over the years. I've never had any problems with the death stars, despite their reputation.
 
Originally Posted By: Brons2
I will never buy a WD drive again. Just had way too many of those fail over the years. I've never had any problems with the death stars, despite their reputation.


Funny how experience differs eh?

I had numerous Death Star failures. Yet even when a WD died on me (which has been rare compared to Seagate failures as of late) I've always been able to get the data off. Something that, when your Seagate laptop drive welds the head to the platter... Is a little more difficult to do, LOL!
 
Not a Hitachi nor WD fan. Samsung drives have been reliable thus far. 2TB 5400rpm drives for $79 on sale at NewEgg.com at times. Have them in an old P4 server, work great keeping up with gigabit network speeds.

As for partitions, two schools of thought:
1) use one huge C: drive.
2) use the C: drive for apps and Windows, then use a separate partition for data.

I find #2 is good for techs like myself who don't mind adding complexities to eek performance/convenience out of a system. Otherwise, a large C: drive is generally fine for most people.
 
Originally Posted By: Brons2
I've never had any problems with the death stars, despite their reputation.

You are extremely lucky based on what I have personally seen and read--the reputation is well deserved.
 
Originally Posted By: ToyotaNSaturn
Not a Hitachi nor WD fan. Samsung drives have been reliable thus far. 2TB 5400rpm drives for $79 on sale at NewEgg.com at times. Have them in an old P4 server, work great keeping up with gigabit network speeds.

As for partitions, two schools of thought:
1) use one huge C: drive.
2) use the C: drive for apps and Windows, then use a separate partition for data.

I find #2 is good for techs like myself who don't mind adding complexities to eek performance/convenience out of a system. Otherwise, a large C: drive is generally fine for most people.



I use dedicated drives.

My "C:" is a Seagate 250GB, whilst my data all resides on a 3x1TB RAID 5 array. My swap file is on a separate 76.4GB WD Raptor. I also have a couple 500GB WD's for dump/scratch purposes.
 
Originally Posted By: OVERK1LL
My swap file is on a separate 76.4GB WD Raptor.

Over...what is your experience with the Raptor? I am running 2 x 150GB in a RAID1 array for my C$ and they seemed fast when I installed them, but they seem to have slowed. I have an EVGA 790i that I will be upgrading soon (the nVidia chipset is not as hot as advertised).
 
Originally Posted By: 2010_FX4
Originally Posted By: OVERK1LL
My swap file is on a separate 76.4GB WD Raptor.

Over...what is your experience with the Raptor? I am running 2 x 150GB in a RAID1 array for my C$ and they seemed fast when I installed them, but they seem to have slowed. I have an EVGA 790i that I will be upgrading soon (the nVidia chipset is not as hot as advertised).


The drive has been excellent, other than it is noticeably louder than all my other drives. It has been in three systems now, first was an i875-based P4. This one is a P55-chipset Core i5 setup. I don't get a lot of swapping with 8GB of RAM, but when it does, it is very quick.

I like EVGA. I just don't like NVidia's motherboard chipsets. I'm thinking of swapping out my ASUS for an EVGA because they are an American company... Even though their boards are actually manufactured "over there" by Foxconn.
 
I just bought a WD Green 2TB for backing up my RAID, so I can keep a copy offsite. I hoping its good, because I need to upgrade my Array capacity. Keeping two backups of 5 machines is very space intensive. Looking at getting 4x WD RE3 1TB.
 
Like you said between Hitachi and WD it would be a toss up. My understanding is that WD's quality is slightly better than average after they bought ReadRite, a head manufacturer, and from what I know a couple years ago ReadRite head was better than IBM's own head supply. It could be different now, but for 500GB size at this price point, they both should be mature technologies with high yield -> high reliability.

If you are concern, look for reliability data on newegg. If one of them is retail package and the other is bare drive, pick the one with retail package as the chances of mishandling by seller is lower (#1 cause of premature drive failure).

To split hair, depends on your luck WD has 2 chipset architecture. If you are lucky you may end up getting the Marvell chipset which tends to be quieter and uses less power. IBM's chipset architecture tends to be more powerful in both performance and power consumption.

Like all Japanese vs American hard drives, Japanese tends not to spend too much on user tools for drive imaging and give it away for free.
 
WD is my preferred brand. They all fail, but out of the ~10,000 WD drives we have in service at work we only get maybe 2 per month going out. These have been in service for 3-4 years and some up to 5, mostly in poorly cooled, heavily power-cycled systems with inadequate RAM which increases drive seeks. Have had poor experiences with the Hitachi drives and good, but limited experience with Samsung.
 
Raptors have been hit or miss for me. Installed in 1U Asus servers with great ventilation and a temp controlled room, I replace 1 about every 6 months....of about 24 drives total. All are 143GB version.

Anyone try the 600GB model? Those look great on paper, but in real life...?
 
Personally, it's Western Digital all the way.

But like some have said, I've seem them all fail eventually.


Side note: Wife's friend gave us back an old computer (my first home-build) that we gave them a few years ago. Was having boot issues so their FIL bought them a new machine.
I cleaned up the RAM sockets and all is well.

Moral of that little story: That PC is now over 9 years old, and the only things in it from the original build are the case, floppy drive, and 40gb Western Digital harddrive.

But boy does that puppy spin loud now!
 
Western Digital for me too - zero failures over 5 drives (4 of them in the last 2yrs). I have the 80GB, 320GB, 640GB and 1TB - the last 3 humming along merrily currently @ 35C, 36C and 34C degrees respectively. All are Blue Caviar except the 640GB Black. They are excellent fast drives and I'd highly recommend.
 
Originally Posted By: greenaccord02
WD is my preferred brand. They all fail, but out of the ~10,000 WD drives we have in service at work we only get maybe 2 per month going out.

Wow! That's a good service record.
cool.gif
 
Last night I returned the unopened Hitachi and purchased a WD Blue instead. I took PandaBears advice and looked at the comments on Newegg. Sounds like Hitachi's CS is still a pain to deal with.

I also noticed Fry's had dropped the Hitachi's price by $10 since my purchase. A tech there said they had lots of the OEM versions, but were out-of-stock of the OEM WD's.

We'll see. . . thanks for all the feedback!
 
I think Hitachi's hard drive division has taken a dive since the IBM 75GXP debacle and that Hitachi no longer makes drives in Hungary or Singapore but in China.

I usually specify Western Digital or Seagate. I won't touch Toshiba/Fujitsu hard drives, they're somewhat frail especially in laptops. I got a WD Scorpio Black in a MacBook, it's working good so far.
 
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