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Seagate Vs Western Digital & Other Questions
I'd like to buy another few storage drives, nothing less than 1TB each drive.
I've heard a pretty much 50 / 50 debate on either manufacturer. I've personally went with WD for almost all my life, I experimented with maxtor once and of course the one time I did deviate from the WD path, the drive failed and it didn't take very long.
I read somewhere (Ah no sources!) that seagate uses better tech in their HDD manufactuering and thus have better drive performance. Is that true? Does it make a difference? Go with whats cheaper?
Also, I've got a tip on a 6950 2GB edition XFX for $150 or should I just suck it up and buy a 7850 for $175 on newegg?
EDIT: Thx in advance for all the help
Comments
I've found there to be very little difference in performance of HDDs - as long as you are looking at like spindle speeds, all the drives will be within a very narrow margin of performance - or at least once you compare them with SSD speeds, the differences between HDD speeds really seems insignificant, and you really just look at them as bulk storage devices where the speed is more or less inconsequential.
There have been some reliability differences. Google published a nice report a couple of years ago regarding reliability, and mentioned that some vendors were better than others, but declined to list vendor names. Storelab did a report a couple of years ago that did release vendor names, but not necessarily by model type: Tom's has an English summary, where they concluded Hitachi were a bit more reliable than most, and Seagate a bit less than most - but the report is a couple of years old and doesn't differentiate between the various models, so I don't know that I would go out and buy Hitachi exclusively (or avoid Seagate) just based on it.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/hdd-reliability-storelab,2681.html
For bulk data, I usually just go with pretty much whatever is cheaper, although I do have a brand preference for WD if all other things are equal - since I've had relatively good luck with them. That being said, I haven't had "bad" luck with any vendor aside from the old IBM Deskstar brand, which doesn't exist in that incarnation any longer, and WD Raptor models, which I've had quite a few go bad early on and now I avoid them, but that hasn't pushed me away from WD's other models and I'm particularly hopeful about the Red line. If another brand is cheaper I don't really have a big issue going with them. It seems most HD's have about a 3% failure rate, which goes up by about 10% each year until the third year, where it starts to double each year after that, and that's pretty consistent across all brand names. Once you start looking at the various models within each brand, the results get a lot more finicky - just because one model of a particular brand does well in either performance or reliability doesn't mean all models will perform or be as reliable equally well
If reliability is a ~huge~ concern, well, that's what RAID 1/5/10 are for, and plan on replacing your drives every 3-5 years regardless of if you think they need it or not. All HDDs will fail, it's just a matter of when. Our main servers at work run on RAID10 and get new hard drives every 3 years - the old drives get put to use as shelved data backups. Our remote site servers get drives every 3 years as well, but those we can't run RAID for various reasons, so we keep those sites virtualized and backed up regularly, so that replacing the unit (either hard drive or entire machine) is just a matter of copying over a Virtual Machine and pressing "Play".
For my PC's at home, we just have a couple of NAS'es that we keep our important stuff sync'ed to, and occasionally I'll back up my installed games and such to an old drive and keep it unplugged and in a drawer.
For the video card:
Anandtech comparison: 7850 vs 6950
For $25 difference, I would go 7850 - better power consumption which leads to lower heat/noise overall, and while most titles are pretty similar, you can see a big difference in DX11 or titles that use Tessellation, and the 7850 has the advantage there by a nice margin.
Thanks for the detailed reply. On one hand I hate that computer parts are so temporary but then again, I can't remember the last time I kept a main gaming PC for longer than 2 years. Summary:
Get the 7850
Buy the best priced HDD and stay away from Hitachi and Seagate.
Roger that. Kind of funny that I found large amounts of people supporting every brand, I guess that's just how human statistics work. I bet we could find a large group of people that said McDonald's breakfast was a healthy meal.
HDD are so refined at this point getting a dud is pretty difficult. WD is the #1 HDD manufacturer without a doubt and offers a wider portfolio, but some in that portfolio are not so great. Reading customer reviews really gives an indication on the failure HDDs that made it through for that particular product. When buying an HDD, Customer Reviews are probably the best way to purchase them as there is no consistentcy of a manufacturer releasing great products. Seagate and WD are pretty much down the street from one another.