Buying new drives.... IS there much between manufacturers

Peeps

Looking to purchase some new drives and i am wondering which brand to look for

my choices are

http://www.ebuyer.com/319641-seagate...ve-st2000dm001

http://www.ebuyer.com/394549-wd-2tb-...drive-wd20ezrx

http://www.ebuyer.com/390985-wd-red-...sata6-wd20efrx


Some drives like the WD red are designed for 24/7 use. is that for continuous writing or just being powered on. my PC is never turned off so will this be a better solution than others?

Seagate offer a 1 year warrenty and WD give 2 years.

any advice please would be great.

It depends really on what your intended use for them is

If you are looking at a drive purely for storage, then the WD Red or Green might be better suited as they have longer warranties, though are designed for different applications. I'd say if you're accessing the data frequently then a Red might be better than the Green.

Worth noting though that they both have slower spin speeds than the Seagate drive, so not likely to be as quick.

The main different is RPM. Green/eco drives run at c. 5900 rpm and so are quieter, lower power and cooler. Normal drives run at 7200rpm and so are louder, higher power and hotter.

Then again, Google have shown that heat isn't worth worrying about when it comes to hard drives, so it really comes down to noise and power usage. And the latter is fairly inconsequential when you're thinking about small numbers of drives.

Ultimately it matters little. I don't personally believe that there's much difference internally between the different brands of drive, whether they're red, black, blue, or whatever colour of drive WD has invented this week.

My main concerns are: eco/non-eco, price, warranty. And that's about it.

Naturally people will have anecdotal evidence of one particular brand being unreliable or whatever, but I've never seen anything statistically suggesting that.

No real difference between manufacturers and you don't really have much choice these days anyway.

Speed, warranty and price are the deciding factors for me when looking at HDDs nowadays.

I've just gone seagate because it was cheaper than the rest. Honestly, it is slightly quicker than my WD drive, but not noticeably. Both are quiet and I can't say I can pick out the sound over my fans.

If it is quicker, that's likely because of platter density, which is more a question of date of manufacture than who the manufacturer is.

I got them 2 months apart new.

Manufacturer/Brand are more important if you are buying SSD because of their choice Controller Chip mostly is effecting the maximum read/write speed
On the other hand, the classic disk based HDD shouldn't be effected much by the brand so I think it is safe to say the cheapest one you can find :)