WD Caviar Black vs Barracuda 7200.12

[smackdaddy]

I'm looking at these two drives as well, and did read the article that was posted above that gave the edge to the WD Black. However I saw a more recent article that gave the edge, pretty convincingly to the 7200.12. http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/article/739/10

I'd say its somewhat of a toss up but I'm going to pull the trigger on the Seagate. My 150GB Raptor bit the dust today, so this will be a replacement. Possibly 2 of these in Raid-0.

 

[smackdaddy]

is the 500GB Seagate 7200.12 a single 500GB platter? If so I think that's the way to go for my Raid -0 config. There's also a $10 coupon code for newegg that gets the drive for $49 shipped. EMCLTNS33

 

[MikeRK]

the Seagate 7200.12 1TB has various firmware versions around. The latest? CC44 has 18.5ms access time -that really sucks. Not sure why they downgraded access time. Anyway I sent them back to my supplier who didn't believe me until they tested them, swapped them out for Blacks - avoid 7200.12 big time... Mike

 

[typerazor]

Currently ZZF has the 1TB black for 69$ after rebate and cashback, I prefer WD for their higher IO but they do run a bit warm.

 

[ahem]

If u need perfomance = WD. If u need reliablilty = Seagate. Why not try hitachi?

 

[pepperpig]

I would be a little cautious with using RAID 0 with the WD Black caviar though. I don't know about Seagate but i've read somewhere that using the normal Black caviar in RAID 0 config is less stable or something. SOmething to do with there being a RAID edition WD which is more suited for RAID. Its slightly higher price. Anyone can confirm this?

EDIT: FOund the link
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2328784,00.asp

 

[hok]

I think those guys need to retest or something... my RAID 0 config and tests killed single drive performance... i was also using an intel on board controller...

 

[cjl]

Caviar blacks are fine in RAID - the drive itself can't tell if it is in a RAID config or not. The RE drives are a bit more reliable, to somewhat offset the reliability hit incurred by running a system with RAID 0, but the Caviar blacks will do just fine.

 

[pepperpig]

How significant is the reliability hit?

 

[jsc]

One measure of hard drive reliability is mean time before failure (mtbf). Unfortunately, that is based on some sort of statistical calculations that I have no freakin' clue about.

Case in point: the WD 1 TB RE3 drive has a 1,200,000 hour mean time before failure (mtbf). That's about 135 years of continuous operation. I am willing to bet that WD did not design it in the 1870's, build ten of them, run them continuously, have five fail by this year, and so declare a 1.2 million hour mtbf.

I think the WD Black's have around a 300,000 hour mtbf.

 

[soberspine]

i just ordered a new 1 TIb seagate 7200.12 because it is alot cold and silent than caviar black. now i have 750 gigs 7200.11, and its working just fine for over an year or something. my question is that now i have the chance, should i make an upgrade to the firmaware to the 7200.11 ? and another question should i put my OS on the new HDD?

 

[ericball]

Just to add my two cents. I have 4 1TB Seagate 7200.12s, 2 of which have failed in the first 3 months of ownership. I beg you to not give them any of your hard earned money. I have owned 10 or so WD drives over the last 12 years, 0 failures, 0 problems. The last time I will try Seagate.

 

[soberspine]

you couldnt say that 2 days ago . i already ordered mine and its on the road so i cant cancel the order.

 

[cjl]

Just to add my two cents. I have 4 1TB Seagate 7200.12s, 2 of which have failed in the first 3 months of ownership. I beg you to not give them any of your hard earned money. I have owned 10 or so WD drives over the last 12 years, 0 failures, 0 problems. The last time I will try Seagate.

Zero failures with WD for the past 12 years? Really?

That's actually pretty surprising - they had a MAJOR reliability problem several years back. Recently, they've been a lot better (and there was a while when I would recommend them over pretty much anyone else). I have 3 WD drives (and a Seagate) in my computer, and all have been flawless. That having been said, Seagate's 7200.12 series is pretty darn good - I have a Barracuda XT (same generation, though it has the same guts as the Constellation series of enterprise drives rather than the 7200.12, so it isn't quite the same drive), and a friend has a pair of 7200.12s, and they've been flawless. I've been looking at the 7200.12 a lot too, and they seem to have basically fixed the reliability problems (and yes, there will always be some bad drives, but I haven't seen evidence of a reliability issue on the scale of the 7200.11 disaster, especially moose*).

Of course, it remains to be seen whether Seagate will be able to pull off another drive as reliable as the Galaxy (7200.10), which was a great drive. I have a friend who has 6 (yes 6 - 4 500GB and 2 750GB) Galaxies running in his computer, and all are still flawless 3 years after he got them.


* Moose was the internal name Seagate had for the original 7200RPM 250GB per platter design, which was the early 7200.11 series, and was incredibly unreliable. It was followed by Brinks, which had ~333GB per platter, and was slightly better (though still horrible).

 

[ericball]

Anyhow in recent memory I've had a 20GB, 4x120GB(2 sata, 2 ide), 2x320GB, 2x750GB, and 7x1TB (order for friends and the like, none mine unfortunately, 5 are in 1 array! ), 0 failures. I also have had misc. drives ranging between 800MB and 10GB that worked before I ditched em. Maybe I skipped the unreliable batch? Who knows.

My third drive just started reporting errors in my 1+0 array today... A call to Seagate just to inform me that Seagate does not support RAID arrays, kind of horsesh*t. Anyhow, I'm just going to continue to RMA until I'm frustrated enough to buy something else or put my 2x750 WDs that I replaced. Good luck with your 7200.12s, I hope they turn out better than mine.

 

[magneezo]

I have a Seagate ST3750528AS which is the Barracuda 750 w/32 mb cache. It came standard in my computer that I picked up on Dec. 20th. I was rather surprised to find such high cache HDD on a stock machine (especially a Gateway)
as I was ready to plunk down $99 for a WD Caviar Black 100TB 32mb but
I don't really need to now since I learned the spec on my stock ST is adequate.
The only downside I'm having is the Hard Disk only reaches a 5.9 mark on the performance index. I've read where Vista wouldn't go over 5.9 on HDD but that was supposed to be resolved in Win 7?
Forgive me, but I'm a new convert....fresh off the XP trail as I skipped Vista altogether.
I'm really digging the new OS but there are some new things in it I'm not quite familiar with
Thanks for any suggestions

 

[ericball]

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, I believe Windows 7 goes up to 7.9. My 4 hard drives in Raid 1+0 report a 6.2 rating. I'm not sure if your single drive will be capable of getting above 5.9, but I don't have a similar drive to check. Hope that helps.

P.S. Windows 7 is awesome after suffering through Vista for two or so years.

 

[Silicon Geek]

It sounds like you just need to go with your gut, and it also sounds like you've already got it figured out. Hint: When inDoubt, bet on black.

 

[elfworks00]

I ordered a 1.5 TB Seagate Barracuda hard drive from Tiger Direct. The first one and the 2 replacements they sent all failed the Sea Tools LDS test as well as the Long Generic test. Almost 2 months and I still don't have a drive that works.

 

[VbNetMatrix]

I've ordered 4 Seagate 7200.12 750gb from TigerDirect
3 of them failled the long test provided by seagate.

Let's hear the problem here because Seagate refuse to acknowledge the problem and refused to let me talk to their programist.
(I'm a programist myself)

The test per say didn't fail. The test got interrupted by memory corruption.
The memory was tested with MemTest 386, the program run in DOS, loading from a Linux Boot disc provided by Seagate.

I've tried the test on 3 different machine.
1 Intel Dh55HC motherboard (Satat II)
1 HP Dc7100 Motherboard (Sata I)
1 HP Dc7600 Motherboard (Sata I)

When the drive succeed to complete the test, it DOES pass the test. but hear me out, as this can be a sign of a much worse problem then just physical problem

---it seem---
The test program query the drive to fill his buffer and send back the information. at some point (randomly) the buffer return twice the amount of Data the drive buffer can hold. Where this data is coming from ? The Test program doesn't have a secured data lenght pointer, and so, the memory overload and the program crash, dumping HEX code on the screen.

This bug occur as followed:
drive 1: 7 fail test over 10
drive 2: 3 fail test over 10
drive 3: 5 fail test over 10
drive 4: 1 fail test over 10

Seagate COULD fix the problem by fixing the memory pointer and making it FIXED Sized secure, but that would only prevent the test program to crash, leading to a false sense of security. the random occurance of the "double" buffer size would still occur.

In other word, Seagate WILL probably FIX the crashing issue of the test program, but since they won't let us know what WAS wrong with the buffer, I would not trust that drive.

Unless seagate make a general public annoncment of what was WRONG with the drive (probably another firmware issue)
I would never trust seagate again.

They never acknoledge in public the problem on the 7200.11, that make me very sceptic about the compagny honesty.

 

[Guest]

One thing I do when I'm trying to decide what to buy is look at the customer ratings on places like newegg; this is only good if a bunch have been sold, and of limited use anyway, but if it's got a 5-star rating and 500 people commented, I think it's probably a reliable product.

Generally, the Western Digitals have better consumer ratings on newegg than the Seagates. For that reason, all else being equal, I tend toward WD. But then, I got stuck on WD when the Raptors came out, so I'm biased that way.

I have 2 640GB Black Caviars in Raid 0, works great!

Hello Marcus, I am thinking of buying two 640GB Black Caviars and running in RAID 0 as you have. I have talked to people in other Tech places on the net and most tell me that if I am going to run RAID at all I should get the new Black Caviar RE type hard drive. They say that regular SATA drives drop out of RAID frequently and errors abound when running them. I am running Windows XP Home, My Chip and Motherboard are the AMD AthlonXP3200 and the Socket A, ASUS A7N8X-E Deluxe. It is capable of RAID 0 and 1. I am not sure if RAID 5 is availible on the disk of drivers. Someone suggested I run that for some reason that I do not remember. Anyway, Since you are running the 640GB Black I wanted to ask you if you have run into any problems thus far. I am a little worried about running RAID at all since I have never used it before. I already puchased two Caviar Green 500GB hard drives, but now I find out that the Green's are not very good at all in RAID since they basically run at 5200 nearly all the time. So I am thinkning of getting the 640GB Black as you are running.

hafengr
Pittsburgh, PA

 

[kingjamesking]

I have both the WD Caviar Black 1TB and the Seagate 7200.12 1TB drives in the Mac Pro system. WD Caviar is the boot drive and the 7200.12 is the storage. The Seagate is much much more quieter the the Caviar and I have not had problems with either.

I recently needed to add more drives and decided on some reviews to get anoter WD Caviar Black. The first one made a much more obnoxious chunky noise than the one I have as boot drive. I could not get it to format and had to return it to the store. I installed the second WD Caviar Black drive after getting it replaced, it too made more noise than my WD Caviar Black boot drive however it did format and did a backup for 2 days. After 2 days the SMART Status said the drive was failing and it would basically lock up disk utility.

I once again returned it and refused to buy another WD Caviar black, I don't like thier noisey operation and failure rate. I then purchased another Seagate 7200.12 and installed flawlessly with operation so quiet you can't even hear the backup operation between the 2 Seagate drives.

If my primary boot drive ever crashes i am definately going to nother Seagate.

 

[scienceboy]

Ok. Here's my thoughts on WD Caviar Black versus Seagate Barracuda 7200.12. I have a lot of experience with drives and RAID 1 configuration for small business.

Both brands have 5 year warranties. However, the WD Caviar Black is approved for 24/7 use. If you read the Seagate warranty, the standard Barracuda drive warranty does not cover commercial use (translation not for any business use). In addition, the Seagate Drive Selection Guide indicates Barracuda drives are only rated for "on as needed, 8x5" usage. That's 168 hours per week of rated usage for WD Caviar Black versus 40 rated hours per week for Seagate Barracuda. If you need 24/7 usage with Seagate, you must buy a much more expensive (and difficult to find) Seagate Barracuda ES drive or Seagate Constellation drive.

I have had a regular Seagate Barracuda (7200.12) fail in less than 30 days. SMART indicated imminent failure after about 20 days of usage.

I have had 2 WD Caviar Black drives. No problems. I have had an OEM WD Caviar blue drive with 12-month warranty, fail after 13 months. I would never own any WD drive other than a Caviar Black.

The WD Caviar Black is a more expensive drive compared to a Seagate Barracuda for the same capacity. If you can get a retail WD Caviar Black for close to the same price as a Seagate Barracuda of same capacity, go with the WD Caviar Black.

 

[tnelson]

HeyEverybody, after reading the entire list of posts I think I have a unique quandry. I orderd a bare bone set from TigerDirect and the original order was for a WD Caviar Black 500GB SATA HD. Well, when i got my stuff everyting was there except the WD HD. They said it was back ordered. When I finally got my shipment it was a 500GB Seagate Barracuda 1200.12 16mb HD. Did I get screwed or what? I would respect your opinions.

Tracy

 

[glVertex]

I had my first computer 12 years ago and have used around 10 different computers since, both personal and work. The only problem I had with a hard drive was with a Seagate Barracuda, it occasionally failed and refused to work until I applied some pressure on the power connector. Now it seems to me that the failure rate of HDDs today is much higher than that of those manufactured earlier, someone with more experiences please confirm. Also, I noticed there is a change in the way Seagate HDDs' country of origin are labeled, it now reads "Product of China" instead of "Made in China". However, on the nylon bag there is a sticker that reads "Content made in China" (or similar to that).

After reading all of your comments I feel a bit nervous as I am building a new system for personal use and already bought a new Seagate 7200.12 but yet to get all the components to test it.