acyuta :
Sorry but no WD Caviar Blacks for me after using Intel SSDs. I last bought a Black (2TB) in early 2011. With a SSD as a system drive, I can easily use Seagate 3TB/4TB as storage drives. As I see it, Seagate 4TB is $165-170 compared with $260-270 for WD 4 TB Black. Even the slower WD Red 4TB is for $200. Ok, so WD has a 5 year warranty for blacks but they have started sending out refurbished drives now as replacement. That USP also goes. Till 2011, they used to send new ones for Black RMA.
I kind of agree. Not so much that SSDs are going to be replacing 2TB+ HDDs any time soon (give it a few more years), but that Seagate has much better offerings at much lower prices.
The real issue with WD today is that you have their Blue series which is reliable but expensive, and cannot be used in a RAID. Then you have the Black series which is crazy expensive for what it is, but they are reliable, performant, and RAID-able. And then you have a slew of drives in the Green, Red, AV-GP, and 'mainstream' series which are all glorified trash, and even though they are more affordable, they still manage to be $10-20 more expensive than others.
Now I am not saying that Seagate is perfect either. They too have issues with their low-tier drives. The difference is that you can get a mid to high level Seagate drive without issues and still save some $30-100 per drive compared to a similarly performing WD Blue or Black. You typically don't get as long of a warranty with them (3-5 years vs 5-7 years), but it is often an issue of a longer warranty you need vs a shorter warranty that you are much likely to need. Personally I would rather the latter rather than the former.