Ok, so I'm looking to get meself a 1TB hard drive. I've heard a lot of good things about all 3 of these drives, and personally had good experience with the Seagate brand, but I'm still not sure which will get me the best combo of performance/reliability. The 3 contestants are: Samsung Spinpoint WD Caviar Black Seagate Barracuda Thanks in advance for any advice.
Personal opinion would be the F3... ...not only has it tended to stand out of the crowd in reviews, but mine have been great.
I would take a Caviar Black every day, they are fast & warranties 5 years. Have mine for a year and half, never had a bit of trouble.
I have a 1Tb F3 and a 1Tb Caviar Black in my machine atm, and having lived with both (in separate machines) for a year, I went with the WD for boot drive as it was the better performer.
I never had a WD fail on me. I am using samsung F3s though because they are faster. They are working great. Since I had samsung F3s in raid 0, I back up all my documents. Instead of using a RAID with redundancy because running like 8 drives at the same time is loud I used some Seagate 2TB drives and just drag and drop important files into. It works ok because I use a program to do it automatically at night once a week. Funny thing is that my 2TB Seagate LP drive which only reads/writes once per week died before any of my main drives. Before I had a Seagate .11 which got RAM'd 3 times until I just gave up. Before I was using WD RAID edition 3s in RAID 0 for almost two years and they are still alive. I just can't recommend Seagate at all when there are other manufacturers that sell drives for similar price without problems. Also after what seagate has done to me, im not RMAing a drive ever. They send refurbished drives (AKA a drive that already failed once), the chance of it failing twice is unacceptable. Best I will take is the 90 day exchange period with the seller, I can get a new drive on the day.
My vote: Samsung F3 - performance winner and damn quiet (I have 2). People also like to quote reliability figures and such, you know the whole "But I had one seagate/WD drive that died so they must all break!".. Ignore those if you (as I did) spent ages delving through reviews and forum discussions.
I have a Samsung F3 1TB in my current machine and I love it. It's quick, quiet, and from everything I've heard reliable. The only reason I don't state that mine is reliable is I've only had it two months They also stay very cool, so you wont have an extra heater in your tower adding to your other thermals. tl;dr: get a Samsung F3 and save up for a SSD
Upgraded from an F1 to and F3 and can't recommend them enough. Great drives. Have served me well and are fast and quiet.
Both the WD and Samsung are great drives. Had a few WD's fail on me in the past but the returns service was very good, so no complaints there. I've also found Seagate to be very good. Go for which ever is cheapest i guess. Sam
http://techreport.com/articles.x/19330/1 This review includes the Samsung Spinpoint F3, Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 and the new 1TB WD FAEX drive (the FALS edition will be slower)
wd are good drive manufacturers, the only way i've seen a western digital drive die, is through overheating.
My Raptor 74GB still working without a single badsector after 25 000 hours. You will never have a bit of trouble, If you take them top quality of course. I Can't say about them Green line, I only purchase black.
I have 11 Samsung drives: 2 x 250GB, 3 x 500GB, 2 x 640GB and 4 x 1TB F3's. I guess you could say I like them! I have had only one fail on me, it was a brand new 205mb and didn't even last the installation of Vista 64 before it failed. I guess after getting so many the law of averages meant I was due a failure. I am just glad it happened before any data went on.
