Seagate Barracuda VS Western Digital Caviar Black

ice-note

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Feb 5, 2013
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I'm looking to store my games (from Steam) onto a high speed hard drive. Both are at 7200 RPM and both have 64MB of Cache.

The major difference is, at a Microcenter near my house, the Seagate has 2TB compared to the WD's 1TB. Obviously that's a lot of space for gaming, but obviously I plan on putting movies, music, pics and so on, too.

Which is better? I already have an SSD for boot, so this is for game loading, only. So, I would like to have a drive that reduces load times. I've heard nothing but good things about the Caviar Black, but the Barracuda's extra TB is pretty hard to ignore.
 

ntscot

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Mar 10, 2013
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Nice post - I just mentioned in another post that I would pick the Caviar Black without hesitation over Seagate!

I have owned alot of HDDs in the past five years (Two 1TB Seagates, Two 1TB Samsungs, Two 2TB WD Greens, Two 2TB WD Blacks, Three 2TB Samsungs, Three 2TB Seagates, Four 3TB Seagates) and have alot of personal experience with these drives.

In my experience, Seagates run a lot hotter. I had four Seagates sitting side by side in my tower and they were so hot i had to install another fan in the front to keep them cool. There was already a fan behind the four drives.

WD Caviar Blacks were truly amazing in terms of performance. Even though they were 7200RPM and so were the Seagates, I could feel that the Caviar Blacks were just so much faster. If it is fast disk speeds you want, I wouldn't hesitate recommending the WD Blacks.

When I had to buy Four 3TB disks, there were only Seagates at the time. If WD had their 3TB Caviar Blacks at the time, I would have gone the blacks and happily paid the premium because I loved my 2TB Caviar Blacks.

It all comes down to whether you want performance or size. If you are using the drive as a storage, then go the Seagate as you'll get more TB compared to a fast 1TB Caviar Black for the same price. But if you are after speed, go the Caviar Black and you won't regret it :D
 
As you can see, its a divisive topic :D.
IMO, 7200RPM drives are for all intents and purposes identical (except some cases like the WD Red and Enterprise grade drives). Seagate and WD both are on par with each other in terms of reliability, I have plenty of drives from both (Hitachi and Toshiba as well) that survived a few years in a musty shed and are still running.
Get whichever is cheaper or offers the better value, which in this case is the Seagate considering you get double the capacity for the same price. I havent regretted buying my Seagate Barracuda 1TB.