See page 2 and page 3 http://www.storagereview.com/1000.sr?page=0%2C2

Your low-level results also back this up.

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There was a discussion on their forums about how it would be prohibitively expensive to produce a drive that could vary it's spindle speed due to the extra stress on the mechanism.

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IBM is varying the spindle speed (Low RPM Standby mode). But only after quite an amount of idle. http://www.silentpcreview.com/article304-page2.html

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Anybody with a mic e.g. in his headset and a PC with microphon input is able to measure the fixed spindle speed of a WD10EACS: [url=http://forums.storagereview.net/index.p...c=26021&view=findpost&p=246459]5400 rpm[/url].

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Me thinks that this whole "green" thing from WD is because they were having issues producing a performance drive. Maybe the lower power consumption would make sense in a laptop drive, but I'd much rather have performance on the desktop.

Seagate's ATA drives have always been so-so performers, so I'm not surprised with the outcome. However, they 5 year warranty more than makes up for it in a home server environment.

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Other drives are performing well. It's nice to have the choice. And there are uses for low-power high-capacity drives.

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Why is it that almost every single article Anandtech puts out has a conclusion that contradicts their own test results?

Seriously. If the two drives are so different and so suited for different purposes, why are you even comparing them? If it's just to say that the WD drive excells at being green and the Seagate drive sucks at performance, why even bother with an article?

You cannot judge the drives solely on the merits of the competition while ignoring what the drive is good at.

This right here: "the redeeming feature of the Seagate drive is only that it turns in better results than the Western Digital drive". That's a no-brainer, and anyone could have guessed that by looking at the manufacturer specs. More to the point: wasn't that the goal of the article--to find out which of the two performed better? So, why, in your conclusion, do you completely ignore the fact that the Seagate drive is clearly the better performer?

You judge the Seagate drive for not being quiet, for running hot, for having bad performance, yet you completely ignore the fact that in your little "head-to-head" comparison, it is the victor in terms of performance. By that same token, you praise the Western Digital drive for being quient, for running cool, and you completely ignore the fact that it performed worse than any other drive tested.

The bias on this site is palpable. So much for honest reviews.

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Do you actually make a HD purchase decision solely based on performance?

I actually liked the conclusion. Sure, the WD is slower in almost everything. But if you look at the real life benchmarks it's only about 5% in all apps except WinRAR. Is this difference high enough to offset the savings in price and power consumption? I think this is the type of question that the consumer should be asking, and the conclusion does a good job at doing just that.

Anyway, if you do not like the conclusion, you can easily look at the facts and benchmarks only and make your own call. Ultimately, AT can only give information and recommendations. The decision maker is still you.



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This isn't just a comparison of Seagate to Western Digital, obviously. That's why there are several other hard drives listed in the benchmarks. The conclusion for the Seagate fits with the benchmarks: it is slower than (or at best equal to) the Hitachi 1TB drive in every single test. The only thing it has going for it is a five-year warranty, which doesn't count for much in my book. Sure, you can get a replacement drive for an extra two years, but until manufacturers start providing data recovery as part of the warranty I just don't think it's a big deal. I have dozens of hard drives from all the major manufacturers; granted, I'm not stressing every single drive 24/7, but drive failures are uncommon - whether in the first three years or at 4-5 years.

WD has lower power (meh - 4W is *nothing* when it comes to power!), but it also has a much lower price. Seagate has a price that is $5 cheaper than Hitachi (at Newegg - though I admit I'm not sure what the difference is between the four Hitachi 1TB drives that show up). The "enterprise" version is also $25 more than most expensive Hitachi - $55 more than the cheapest 1TB Hitachi. Given the better performance (Seagate has low write performance) and essentially equal price, we'd recommend the Hitachi over the Seagate.

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Well put, Jarred.

The Hitachi was reviewed some time ago, now, and (as you mention) its results are included in the charts. It gets mention in the conclusion as being the preferred option over the Seagate, as well.

The Green drive does have a place as a quiet drive (the quietest of the 1TB drives tested), and it comes at a low price point. That's considerable - particularly for HTPC users, who may not appreciate the Hitachi's noise.

For performance-oriented applications, though, it's a tough sell.

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