Help me choose a HDD

[shortstop20]

I'm looking for a 1TB drive to put in my rig. I've been looking at these two.

Newegg.com - Western Digital Caviar Black WD1001FALS 1TB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drives - Internal Hard Drives

Newegg.com - Western Digital RE3 WD1002FBYS 1TB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive - Internal Hard Drives

Why is the second one so much more expensive?

I would be using the drive for data backup(music, songs, movies, documents, etc.) Eventually I will add another one and create a RAID 1 array with them.

Which of these two drives would you recommend or maybe a different drive?

The Seagate 1.5TB drive is tempting, but the firmware issues are scaring me. Any comments on that?

Newegg.com - Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 ST31500341AS 1.5TB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive (bare drive) - Internal Hard Drives

 

[Nubbleet]

I say go with the Caviar Black 1TB, you will get great performance out of it. The RE3 is Enterprise level.

 

[Press_Corpse]

The second drive is a server edition. It is used for, you guessed it, servers. Basically it is more expensive because they put more time and effort to make it more reliable because server drives are usually running 24/7 and getting constantly worked because of RAID 6/7.

Personally, I have a Western Digital black 640gb (This) and it works flawlessly. If I were you, I would snatch that 1TB WD drive and save up some extra cash for a SDD once those prices come down.

Hope this helps,
Chris

 

[terror-alpha]

The RE3 doesn't work too well until you raid it. If you want to get it, you can just put it in RAID 0 with itself, which you can do on ICH10R and most other raid controllers. then it will outperform the Caviar black, but not by a crazy margin.

I have a Caviar black in 4 partitions running all my os's. Windows vista ult 64, windows 7, ubuntu 9 and another os.

 

[hikaricloud]

I own the 1.5tb seagate, and it's brilliant. Works amazingly well, and it's pretty speedy as far as drives go. At the moment, I have it in 5 partitions: One for Vista64, one for Win7, 2 for pagefiles, and one for storage. Works great.

To touch on the firmware issue, it wasn't as big of a deal as it was made out to be. Some drives were affected, and Seagate had updated firmware for these drives. What happened was people didn't read the instructions and would just arbitrarily update their firmware in a panic, which Seagate stated on that page would brick the drive.

EDIT: Looking again, the 1tb caviar is a good deal since it has a 10% off promo code, you may want to jump on that.

 

[philbar71]

ya def go with the Caviar black. i just replaced my raid 0 array with this,

Newegg.com - Western Digital Caviar Black WD7501AALS 750GB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Hard Drive - Internal Hard Drives

it's alot faster than my old raid'ed seagate 80GB barracudas.

 

[hikaricloud]

I would hope so, considering the 80gb have an 8mb cache, lol.