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500GB 2.5 inch HD recomendation

jeme

jeme

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Jun 12, 2009
422
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Find this hard to believe - the WD 5400 is faster than the seagate 7200?

http://techreport.com/articles.x/17010

Any recomendations or experience on what is the best 500GB drive available now. I have both sitting on my desk and am debating which to open - FYI it is going in a mac mini,
 
It's pretty split in this forum. Half will say WD the other half will say Seagate. The Seagate HDD has it's advantages and the WD HDD has it's own. I know if it wasn't for the vibration, I would've kept the Seagate instead of switching to WD though I don't know how the vibration will affect a Mac Mini if it even has any at all. It's totally up to you.
 
Interesting - thanks keep the comments coming
 
Agreed - but it you read that article they both use 250GB 2 platter designs. OK - so I got the mini open and on my desk - which one? Seagate or WD?
 
I have one of the 500GB Scorpio Blue WD drives in my early 2008 17" MBP. The drive is very quiet, generates less heat that the original drive and for daily acts of computing seems to be plenty fast.

The spindle speed difference between 5400 & 7200 should get you faster transfer rates because of the increased speed of the disk surface under the read head. It should also give a very minor improvement to seek times. I will point out that if the drive logic is slow or poorly implemented, it could reduce the impact of the spindle speeds.

Summary ... I am a satisfied user of the WD product ... I got it from NewEgg for $89 + free shipping.
 
OK - so I am confused - are you recommending the Seagate 7200 or the WD 5400, also what impact with the 16MB cashe have on the seagate?
 
jeme said:
OK - so I am confused - are you recommending the Seagate 7200 or the WD 5400, also what impact with the 16MB cashe have on the seagate?
Click to expand...

It's your call. The WD drive has been out longer, is cheaper and on *some* benchmarks, it keeps up with the 7200 RPM drives. The benchmark results include the impacts of the 8MB cache on the WD and the 16MB cache on the Seagate. IMHO, the true measure of the "greatness" of a hard drive is longevity. Both the WD and Seagate have not been out long enough to know how well that will hold up.
 
being that i have a WD black caviar and i saw very very nice increase in boot up time and reading/writing than with the original 320gb seagate that came with my imac of course i would suggest WD

Shop around for prices thou.. you might hate yourself when you see a nice 640gb or 750gb for $10 - $15 more than what you're about to pay
 
BulletToothTony said:
being that i have a WD black caviar and i saw very very nice increase in boot up time and reading/writing than with the original 320gb seagate that came with my imac of course i would suggest WD. Shop around for prices thou.. you might hate yourself when you see a nice 640gb or 750gb for $10 - $15 more than what you're about to pay
Click to expand...

OP is looking at notebook drives, not desktop drives.
 
What about the Hitachi drive. It looks like its lower power than some of the others. In a laptop that's very important to battery life.
 
I have never had good luck with hitachi drives, maybe I'm too rough on them. The Western Digital Scorpio Blue drives seem to hold up quite well. I agree with others that they are very quiet - Quieter then the OEM drive.
 
Some say its faster, some say its not.

I just went with my instict and that told me to get the latest hardware for my computer, and thats 7200 and 16mb cache.
 
Since this is a mac mini - power consumption, noise and vibration were not major concerns for me. So i put in a seagate 7200.4 - 500GB, all is well so far.
 
Wd 500

I just upgraded my baseline Mini to the WD 500 5400RPM (after reading that article) and 4 GB of RAM.

It is a world of difference so far compared to 1GB RAM and the junky 120GB Fujisitu drive it came with....

The WD had many more positive reviews than the 7200 Seagate, granted the Seagate is newer.

The way Seagate handled their last firmware issue, sometimes replacing drives with the same ones without the upgraded firmware, I'm staying with WD.

Just my opinion.

Oh, I've dropped, tossed, etc many 2.5" WD passport drives around and they all still work. I knocked over a Seagate 3.5" drive 10 inches and boom, lost 850GB of handbrake rips h.264 m4v (hundreds of hours of encoding) and legally downloaded VIDEO_TS DVDs.


Only had 2 HD failures in my computing years, one was Seagate and one was my fault. (It wasn't a WD)
 
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