Hi there, Please help me in choosing between two brands of 500GB HDD, Choice -1 Western Digital WD Caviar Green SATA Hard Drives 500 GB, 32 MB Cache, SATA 3 Gb/s Model: WD5000AADS Choice -2 Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 SATA 3Gb/s 500GB Hard Drive 16MB Cache Model: ST3500418AS Please suggest which choice is better in terms of reliability and performance from above two. Thanks
thanks '2centsworth' from benchmark at tomshardware.com/charts/2...hmarks,50.html briefly analysing It seems seagate 7200.12 has little edge over WD green. while WD black is more better but for me the choice is only from above two choices. does HDD cache size have any major effect in performance? because in my case seagate cache is simply half of the size of WD green.
Between Caviar Green and Barracuda, I would prefer Barracuda for its performance. Caviar Green is great for secondary disk (data). Low power. As a OS HDD, not so great and no comparison with Barracuda. Have you thought about Caviar Black. OK, it is not a SSD, but for reasonable price, you get better performance than Barracuda. I think 2 TB Caviar Black is comparable to Velociraptor, and 1 TB Caviar Black is much better than Barracudas. But in a contest between your choices, I would go for Barracuda.
Drive caches don't really impact perfomance that much. A 32MB cache will hold about 1/2 a second worth of data at typical transfer speeds. Windows uses spare RAM to cache GBs of data - that has a much bigger performance impact than anything a hard drive can give you.
I have 18 Seagates, 6 internal and 12 external, 7200.11's and 7200.12's in 500 GB and 1 TB. No problems of any kind and great performance. If I start replacing the older ones, I'm looking at Seagate first.
Cache size is determined by the design of the drive and firmware, MFG. use what is optimal for their design. Some drives have a 32MB chip but only enable 16 MB of it. The WDGreens don't do well in RAID (TLER) but run slower (and hopefully cooler) than their black series. The WDGreens are primarily intended for mass storage. The 7200.12 is intended for boot drive for a desktop workstation, and they work beautifully with Intel ICHR controllers. Just my 2 cents worth today.
thanks folks, comparison is on. WD Black would definitely do better than WD Green, But WD Black is little expensive than WD green for me. I have got this impact from you folks that from my two options, Barracuda is much better in performance thatn WD green, Yes I would use it for Desktop OS drive. I have a day or two to finally close the deal, my votes are going for barracuda 7200.12 choice. Hey guys, if there are Two Sata HDD present in a system, both have primary, active partitions on it, both has OS installed, which one will boot first ? HDD on lower SATA port no. or what? any ideas ?
I have ASUS P5QL PRO mobo. Can i selectively change the order from BIOS to boot from SATA-1 instead from SATA-0? or from SATA-0 intead of SATA-1? and from IDE instead of Sata. It seems to me, in BIOS Boot priority options->It just gives boot priority option for removable drive, CD/DVD and Hard drives, no futher selection for Which HDD first. I have one IDE PATA drive also with bootable partition. once boot sequence is selected to boot from Hard drive, on next boot IDE drive gets priority in IDE, Sata-0, sata-1.
Award should offer "Boot device priority" and another option below that on same page "Hard disk drives" which is where you select the drive you want to boot from. Whichever drive (device) is listed 1st there the PC will try to boot from.
It is AMI BIOS BOOT options are : 1st boot device: [Hard Drive] ( no further options under this selection, nothing to select WHICH HARDRIVE FIRST ) 2nd boot device: [ATAPI CD ROM] 3rdt boot device: [1st Floppy Drive] ( this appears if there is a USB stick present before system is powered on 4rdt boot device: [Removable drive] all Sata ports are enabled and set on AUTO detect. at the moment I have removed one Sata-1 HDD, and now I have this: TWO IDE PATA one master ( bootable active partition with OS ) MAXTOR 40GB one slave ( no bootable active partition, no OS only Data) SEAGATE 40 GB ONE SATA -0 Sata-0 HDD seagate 250GB ONE SATA -1 Sata-1 DVD Writer TSST corp. Sata ports configured for HDD as AHCI enabled. BIOS-> Boot priority-> HARD DISK is first option in this case IDE MAXTOR boots first, then Sata-0. To forcefully boot from Sata-0, I have to: 1.disable IDE onboard ports from BIOS OR 2.Mark Boot partition as inactive and hide boot partition on IDE OR 3.remove IDE cable from both IDE drives. Only in case of 2. I am able to boot from Sata-0 and still able to see IDE partitions in Sata booted OS. Suppose I populate this: IDE HDD master + slave two HDDs , master with bootable active bootable partition. Sata-0 HDD with bootable partition Sata-1 HDD with bootable partition Q. What is the easy way to go , to boot selectively from the drive/partition of my choice between IDE master, Sata-0 and Sata-1 HDDs? as stated above, If I disable IDE onboard from BIOS, my IDE is still connected and set, no need to open the case to remove any cables. BUT I am unable to see IDE partitions in Sata booted OS. another thing, suppose IDE is out of question ( assume not installed) now to selectively boot between Sata-0 and Sata-1, ... : hard crude way: swap the sata-0 and sata-1 cables, since sata-0 HDD will get priority first but to do this, I have to open the case everytime. please suggest
Most BIOS have such an option, not sure why Asus would leave it out, how can you choose your RAID array over your single harddrive to boot from without such an option in the BIOS? It might be located elsewhere, I don't have one of those motherboards but AMI uses different layout for their BIOS settings...i'll see if I have an ASUS AMI BIOS to look at. Looks like under 1st boot device in AMI BIOS, when you hit enter, you should be presented with all the drives and RAID arrays to choose which should be the first boot device.
That's the missing point, My BIOS setting does'nt show anything further inside option for 1st Boot device as Hard Disk
At least it seems from the reviews at tomhardware and other sites, Caviar Black gets better with higher capacity. At 500 GB (or whatever is the min capacity sold), maybe not much better than Barracuda given the price premium. At least in the US, 1 TB Caviar Black is at US$80-90.
that's also my opinion. a day or two, I am going to deal to : seagate barracuda 7200.12 500GB instead of WD green, untill there comes a strong reason in replies not to do so.