WD vs Seagate - which is "faster"?

WD tends to be ahead of Seagate in terms of performance on drives of the same 'generation.' WD does not have a hugely profitable SCSI line like Seagate or Maxtor - WD lives and dies by consumer sales. To this end, they have sought to differentiate their consumer offerings from the competition. The 8MB buffer was one of these innovations, and with it, WD's hold on performance leadership in the desktop arena was absolute, until Hitachi released the 7K250. Even now, WD is a pretty close second on performance in the 7200/8MB/250GB flagship category.

This doesn't mean Seagate makes bad drives. You will have to run benchmarks to tell the difference in performance between comparable Seagate and WD drives, and Seagate is synonomous with reliability. They also have a reputation for quiet drives. However, Seagate just doesn't deliver the desktop performance of Hitachi and WD.
 
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