Laptop Storage HDD HGST 7K1000 or WD Blue 1TB?

[Mmachina1]

I'm looking to replace a failing Secondary Storage HDD (Samsung 640gb w/bad sectors for the 2nd time) in my older ASUS N70s Laptop, with Vista (Soon to be Win 8.1) and OS on Primary Kingston 240GB SSD.

Can't decide between these two 1TB Drives:
HGST Travelstar 7K1000 Model: HTS721010A9E630 (0J22423) 1TB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache - $69.99CAD
or
WD Blue 1TB 5400RPM, 8MB Cache Model: WD10JPVX - $59.99CAD (w/ MIR)

It will be secondary drive mostly for storage and downloading of Photos (sometimes editing in Lightroom and PS) some music and files. I would take reliability over performance (but close 2nd). I've had two of the Samsung's fail (first under warranty and 2nd as replacement), so I dont want to take another chance.

I really like the speed and cache of the HGST but I feel that with the WD 5400 RPM drive it will be more reliable. Unfortunately I have to decide today to get the $59 WD Blue drive with $20 Mail in rebate.

Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks very much!

 

[farnell121]

I would go HGST. The company works closely with Western Digital so they are very reliable HDD's with a low fail rate, definitely not off brand at all! For the extra $10 you are getting the same quality of drive, with much much faster read/write speeds. Even if the TravelStar was only 5400RPM's that extra cache makes a huuuuge difference in speed, trust me.

I have used HGST's for a looong time, I use them in my laptops, and have 6 of the 320GB 7200RPM ones in my server.

 

[Mmachina1]

I would go HGST. The company works closely with Western Digital so they are very reliable HDD's with a low fail rate, definitely not off brand at all! For the extra $10 you are getting the same quality of drive, with much much faster read/write speeds. Even if the TravelStar was only 5400RPM's that extra cache makes a huuuuge difference in speed, trust me.

I have used HGST's for a looong time, I use them in my laptops, and have 6 of the 320GB 7200RPM ones in my server.

Thanks farnell121. Looking around the web and with your response I'm pretty much convinced now on the HGST. It will be replacing a Samsung Spinpoint MP4 (HM640JJ), which was also a fairly quick drive with 16mb Cache and 7200RPM. I should be stepping up with the new drive plus it has the 3 year warranty over the 2 year with WD. I think it would do nicely.

Thanks for helping me decide!

 

[farnell121]

Glad to be of service