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Fastest hard drive in low end 27 inch says Macworld
- Thread starter emsworthboy
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There are no rumors, just facts:
1.) Any 27" iMac can have either the Western Digital or the Seagate. I've had several replacement iMacs, and it's been a total crapshoot which one had a Western Digital vs Seagate.
2.) If you have a fusion-drive equipped iMac, the difference between the Seagate and the Western Digital is not as pronounced, depending on what you're doing.
So Macworld may as well have said both these things:
Fastest hard drive in low-end 27 inch
Slowest hard drive in low-end 27 inch
Bleh... not getting an iMac myself, but if I were, I'd MUCH rather have the "slower" Western Digital than the "faster" Seagate. Too many problems with Seagate over the years; I trust my data to WD exclusively (well, for HDDs - haven't made my mind up on SSDs).
I've had no issues with either in many, many years. Heck, historically the most unreliable drives I've ever owned were IBM (Deathstar!), and some Western Digitals many, many years ago. That said, I have an array of Western Digitals that work just great, too, and have done for several years. I'm certainly brand agnostic at this juncture, though I do tend to prefer WD and Seagate for spinning disks, and Samsung for SSDs.
Personally, I've had very few problems. Thing is I work for a school district with TONS of Dells; while I'm not in the tech repair dept now, I was before and I teach technology now. I have seen and we see as a district far more replacements of Seagate drives than WD (about a 2:1 ratio in my experience). Scientific? No, not at all.
I've only had ONE of my personal drives fail ever (knocking on my wood desk, lol) - an 8.4GB Seagate 7200rpm (before they were even called Barracudas, I think) in 1999. Yeah, I might hold a grudge.
I'll take a Seagate, but only if I don't have a choice or it's MUCH cheaper. For SSDs, I've had great luck with Intel and Samsung (no issues at all), and overall good luck with OCZ (one minor compatibility issue).
"I don't always buy hard drives, but when I do - I buy Western Digital."
And I remember the IBM Deathstars... *shudder*
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Personally, I've had very few problems. Thing is I work for a school district with TONS of Dells; while I'm not in the tech repair dept now, I was before and I teach technology now. I have seen and we see as a district far more replacements of Seagate drives than WD (about a 2:1 ratio in my experience). Scientific? No, not at all.
I've only had ONE of my personal drives fail ever (knocking on my wood desk, lol) - an 8.4GB Seagate 7200rpm (before they were even called Barracudas, I think) in 1999. Yeah, I might hold a grudge.
I'll take a Seagate, but only if I don't have a choice or it's MUCH cheaper. For SSDs, I've had great luck with Intel and Samsung (no issues at all), and overall good luck with OCZ (one minor compatibility issue).
"I don't always buy hard drives, but when I do - I buy Western Digital."
And I remember the IBM Deathstars... *shudder*
Yeah those Deathstars were bad. I went through five of 'em.
OCZ, eh? See, I personally only ever owned one - the OCZ Vertex (first generation!) 120GB. Never had an issue with it. My wife, however, had to have her 120GB Vertex replaced because it just died one day out of the blue after about a year. Two of my friends who also bought them are on their third (fourth?) replacement. Reliability apparently not great! But if you just asked ME, I'd say the Vertex was very reliable. But having to deal with wife/friends' RMAs for them for the same drive, you'd think the entire line of Vertex-es were faulty!
I have the Seagate 1Tb in my high end Fusion 27" iMac.
It gets read/write speeds over 300Mbps. But I have a bunch of external HDDs, mostly USB2 so transferring files to them from a PC on the LAN can feel slow at times, even with Ethernet and not using WiFi.
It gets read/write speeds over 300Mbps. But I have a bunch of external HDDs, mostly USB2 so transferring files to them from a PC on the LAN can feel slow at times, even with Ethernet and not using WiFi.
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It's the SSD portion of the fusion drive getting over 300MB/s, not the 1TB Seagate, fyi.
With a bit of difficulty. The way the fusion drive is set up, 4GB of the SSD is reserved for data being copied to the disk, so you'd need to basically copy 4+GB to the fusion disk, and straight after, run the benchmark on the fusion disk. At that point, I'd imagine, it would be using the Hard Disk portion of the fusion disk.
I have a fusion iMac, but I separated the SSD and the hard drive for better control of what goes on.
I've had more issues with WD and checked mt 27" has the Seagate... but no matter what HDD you have you should always back up, I have Time Machine PLUS a 2nd HDD with a CCC copy of my iMacs HDD I plan to update weekly.
I would never trust my important data to a single drive of any type or brand. My most important data (my baby's pictures!) lives on a mirrored RAID array, is backed up to an on-site Time Machine drive, and is cloned monthly to an off-site drive. Even my much less important data is backed up in multiple locations. Backup is the key to any important data.
I'd do off-site but my connection speed is too slow for large uploads. I figure the chances of all 3 copies (including the original) failing at the same time is so low it's not worth thinking about.
The only stuff I haven't backed up is non critical downloads which can either be found again or recovered else where.
Mine, too - only 512kbps upstream, and that's the best I can get. My "off-site" solution is an old external drive I keep at my parents' house. Hey, it works.