It would be safe to say that 80% of disk
operations are reads, making sustained writing not as
important in most scenarios. In other instances, though,
such as copying from disk to disk, formatting or creating
new files or when swap memory is used, write speed is
important. Write will invariably be slower than read, but
these disks both keep it pretty close to their read speeds.
The degradation is predictable, and realistically the only
way to improve desktop performance is via a striping
solution or using faster 10,000RPM disks. You can definitely
see the higher density of the Seagate at work here, same as
with the reading processes. We don't see the full 33% that
you'd expect, but it is noticeable.
Final Thoughts
These drives, while not spectacular, are
nothing to be disappointed by. The relative speeds of these
disks put them on par with other drives of their size.
Despite having a 4 platter design, the large amount of data
available puts their performance levels (initially) well
above a small desktop HD, making disks like these a fairly
good fit for both an OS and a data drive.
I was very surprised to see that the
performance difference between the two was very slight.
Despite having a 25% difference in capacity and a 33%
difference in data density, the WD drive managed to shoe in
on some areas and matched the Seagate drive very well. Raw
performance did put the Seagate drive on top, and the 500GB
size is hard to beat, with only a very few models on the
market offering that. Once 3-platter designs for 500GB
become more readily available, we'll probably see revisions
of these models with higher densities..
Although you will still have to pay a
premium for drives these large, they are not a bad deal
either at
~$185 for Western Digital’s 400GB drive, and
~$290
for Seagate’s. Come to think about it and we used to pay a
similar amount of money for a hundred gig disks just a few
years ago.
At the end of the day, you couldn’t go
wrong with either drive. Both have been receiving rave
reviews since their release, and from our own experience we
feel they are quality built drives. Perhaps something to
consider is Seagate’s generous 5-year warranty versus
Western Digital’s not too shabby 3-year warranty. But having
that said, and unless you have the money to spend on a
faster Raptor 10k+ rpm drive, we would pick either of these
as our primary or storage hard drive any day.
