Hard Drive Differences

[IBM]

Just looking at these two 500Gb WD drives from Scan....someone point out the difference, apart from price and the .1ms speed difference?

500 Gb Western Digital WD5000AAKS Caviar E16, SATA300, 7200 rpm, 16MB Cache, 8.9 ms
http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Produ...oductID=530765

500 Gb Western Digital WD5000YS RE2, SATA300, 7200 rpm, 16MB Cache, 9 ms, NCQ
http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Produ...oductID=377802

[Agent]

The main difference is that the latter is a 'server' drive, or mission a critical one. They have a higher MTBF (mean time between failures).

[Mossy]

500 Gb Western Digital WD5000YS RE2

This drive is a Raid Edition drive it is configured to run faster in Raid than the other drives.

I heard that they don't seem as quick as single drives though. (may be wrong)

[saltynay]

get either samsung spinpoints for speed or Seagate barracuda's for speed and reliability the samsung's are the fastest currently available and the seagates have the longest warranty

[IBM]

While I'd be unhappy with a slower drive out of RAID, I'd be happy with the higher MTBF...plus I'll probably stick a second one in sooner or later and push it over to RAID 0....

Thanks guys

Paul....watch out for the order shortly ....along with all the other stuff....

[idlewild]

Theres a few differences. The main point you need to know is it implements TLER (Time limited error recovery). It limits the time spent by the drive trying to recover from an error, if it's taking too long then it stops the operation and relies on a raid card to log the incident or resend the data.

These drives shouldn't be used with a raid controller. There are a couple of other features that WD claim, such as better performance in high vibration environments but I doubt it makes all that much of a difference.

[Zak33]

I had two of these a fortnight ago....320gig versions.

http://forums.hexus.net/showthread.php?t=108395

The AAKS versions are desktop drives, with a 3 year warranty, and I found them to be slightly faster than the YSRE2 drives whihch are Enterprise drives (meaning work related for servers) in almost everything for normal PC work.

The exception was that the YSRE was quicker replicating files onto itself.

However....those Enterprise drives have my much beloved Molex on them, the AAKS has the new SAT Apower lead only....which I dislike as it falls off!

[Queelis]

get either seagate spinpoints for speed or Seagate barracuda's for speed and reliability the samsung's are the fastest currently available and the seagates have the longest warranty

Err.. spinpoints are samsung

[saltynay]

sorry was thinking about my later part of the sentence I touch type doesn't mean I actually read what I am typing

[Zak33]

Samsungs are not the quickest currently available in my opinion, though it was only 320's I used. My recent Samsung Spinpoint 320 was slower than all the drives I've used recently.
I'd say Seagate Barracuda's are fastest overall....however:

I'd love to say Seagate's are most reliable, but that's not what a recent Hexus Forum vote concluded.....most reliable was Samsung by a mile. Seagate was vited diwn quite heavily.

Western Digital Enterprise ALSO have a 5 year warranty, same as Seagate.

I'm not helping....am I?

[saltynay]

The samsungs were the fastest on the benches only by a couple of nano seconds over the seagates though I will always stick with seagate's haven't had one fail I did get one which was likely too so I sold it on ebay never got a message saying it was crap so i guess it turned out to be a small error

[mike_w]

I'd love to say Seagate's are most reliable, but that's not what a recent Hexus Forum vote concluded.....most reliable was Samsung by a mile. Seagate was vited diwn quite heavily.

True, but don't forget that, if memory serves, Seagate sell more hard drives than anybody else. In other words, more Seagate hard drives might fail by virtue of there simply being more Seagate hard drives. Factors like that mean the results are probably going to unfairly skew the results.

I've used a few (3?) Seagates in the past, and they're still going strong (oldest is quite a few years old). I bought a Western Digital last time, and haven't had any problems.

To be honest, unless you're doing hard drive intensive stuff, I don't think you're going to notice the differences in performance.

[Zak33]

True, but don't forget that, if memory serves, Seagate sell more hard drives than anybody else. In other words, more Seagate hard drives might fail by virtue of there simply being more Seagate hard drives. Factors like that mean the results are probably going to unfairly skew the results.

I've used a few (3?) Seagates in the past, and they're still going strong (oldest is quite a few years old). I bought a Western Digital last time, and haven't had any problems.

To be honest, unless you're doing hard drive intensive stuff, I don't think you're going to notice the differences in performance.

I agree....I love them, and have only had good...even when I needed firmware upgrade support, they were a great company to deal with.

But the Hexus poll showed them to be less than popular on reliability.....

I still buy them...I love them but the WD AAKS drives are close to as fast in my experience and seem to score higher on peoples reliability experiences

[ash_rm]

I'd agree that the WD AAKS are excellent, very fast, quiet and run cool.

Personally I've not been that impressed by Samsung or Seagate for all round performance with their recent offerings but have never had any reliability issues with either which is the main thing.

[prits_88]

i've heard that NCQ actually at this current time makes the drive slower.
technology hasnt advanced far enough for it to be used efficienty.
type in "ncq" on wikipedia and see for yourself

[Thorsson]

It's odd but every time I see a multi-HDD review a different drive finishes top. I've come to the conclusion that my next HD purchase will be based on getting as many GB as possible for my budget £s, and then RAID the disks.

I back-up my vital data, so RAID0 doesn't scare me.