Caviar Blacks: still top tier?

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Silverpike

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Feb 16, 2011
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So I'm looking to buy a bigger HD, and the last time I bought one was a year before this stupid Thailand flood. I'm very unamused by the current HD prices. :mad:

I'm looking for a budget/performance HD. Last I saw the WD Caviar Blacks were great buys. Is this still the case? I'm probably looking at a 7200RPM drive at this point.

Comments appreciated.
 
I would look hitachi 7k3000 for good performance. Although there is a new seagate drive with 1TB platters that is faster I still have not taken Seagate off the don't buy list since I RMA like 5 Seagates to 1 drive of any other manufacturer at work and have done this for 3 to 4 years straight. WDC blacks are not bad however I think they have fallen behind a little in performance and certianly the hitachi drive is better when it comes to raid.
 
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Just bought a couple of Caviar Black. Feels pretty fast to me. I'm giving up on Seagate after so many years... just too high a failure rate.. but big capacity HDD is just too expensive right now... got to buy a couple more.. wish I didn't have to..
 
I've currently got two Seagate Barracuda 1TB and i find them quite fast. I don't have a large black drive but my 500GB i use for my main drive is friggen great. I've never actually benched them but loading up games is just as fast as my old dead raptors. Even when i load up folders with 5000+ images it can sort by date and bring up uncached thumbnails in just a few seconds.

I'm also told the Samsung F drives are very fast, but are currently going to about 150 bucks as opposed to the 80 bucks they were before thailand flooded over.
 
Jay69 said:
Just bought a couple of Caviar Black. Feels pretty fast to me. I'm giving up on Seagate after so many years... just too high a failure rate.. but big capacity HDD is just too expensive right now... got to buy a couple more.. wish I didn't have to..
Click to expand...

The only significant advantage of the WD Black is its relatively quick random access speed (versus other 7200 RPM hard drives). Unfortunately, WD has not updated the platter layout of the Black in more than two years: All of the current Blacks still use 500GB platters whereas other brands now use platters that are larger than 500GB in some of their drives. As a result, the current WD Blacks have relatively slow sequential transfer speeds by current standards.
 
Unfortunately, WD has not updated the platter layout of the Black in more than two years: All of the current Blacks still use 500GB platters whereas other brands now use platters that are larger than 500GB in some of their drives. As a result, the current WD Blacks have relatively slow sequential transfer speeds by current standards.
Click to expand...

This is what I am talking about. WDC blacks use 500GB platters while new drives from Hitachi and Seagate use 666GB to 1TB platters and have done so for some time. Although WDC owns Hitachi's drive division now. I have not heard of any Governement intervention in either Seagate's purchase of Samsung or WDC's purchase of Hitachi.
 
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