Evaluating my drives ST3500320AS vs WD6400AAKS

[MadMax2911]

Hi Guys I am Evaluating my two fastest hard drives for performance and stability.

I have heard that the seagate drive listed here has had some problems with some early drives going defective. I heard the drives built before 2008 were going bad on many users. I however, have not had this exact experience, yet. I did update the firmware to SD1A from SD15.
There is a link to the problem here-->>Firmware Update for ST3500320AS, ST3500620AS, ST3500820AS, ST3640330AS, ST3640530AS, ST3750330AS, ST3750630AS, ST31000340AS and here as well to find out if the drive is affected-> http://seagate.custkb.com/seagate/cr...931&NewLang=en

SPECS, PERFORMANCE AND OBSERVATIONS
SPECIFICATIONS FOR THE ST3500320AS
Capacity:500GB Interface Type: SATAII at 3GB/s Cache memory:32 MB NCQ:yes
Anyway, this hard drive does still work and I am evaluating the performance and stability of this drive. Performance wise this drive is comparable to the WD6400AAKS except in a few areas like the Average read of 88.3MB/s I like the average read of the WD drive which is 95.6MB/s I found reviews of these drives on the net at this address->Seagate Barracuda ST3500320AS SD15 7200.11 and here-> The Roughneck: Seagate Barracuda 7200.11--500 GB : A Quartet Of 500 GB HDDs Under $60
I need to note the seagate seems to be a bit power hungry as noted in the reviews listed earlier. I also read that these drives run rather hot to the touch wait let me see..No its not really that hot while doing a light workload. Maybe if I stress it out with a benchmark or something it may warm up a bit, but nothing to worry about. The Seagate drive is in the EP45-UD3LR computer which is experiencing random freezing of IE8. There are other issues which will be discussed later.

I have a ss of the Seagate on HdTach attached.

The WD6400AAKS on the other hand has some flaws as well, like its Random access of 16.5ms(see note below about the possibility of incorrect results due to drive condition) AFAIK random access speed does affect the responsiveness of the PC. But while using this drive in my DS3R build it responds fairly quickly. I did find a review that states the random access is lower, than what I stated (12.5milliseconds) Oh they are using unformatted drives according to the link that follows. Here is a link-> http://www.extremetech.com/computing...0aaks-review/3 Granted it is not as fast as a Raptor drive, but who has the money for one of those (or even a SSD for that matter)? Not to mention the recent prices for hard drives soaring

I have a screenshot of the WD in action in the next post for comparison purposes. I may also install other testing programs as well for more evaluation, later.

I welcome any and all input from the audience, thanks
Madmax2911

[MadMax2911]

Re: Evaluating my drives ST3500320AS vs WD6400AAKS

Here is a ss of the WD6400AAKS tested on Hdtach. One note on benchmarking is the Computer needs to be doing very little work other than the benchmark. Any programs that start with windows and run in the background need to be stopped. For this test I also disabled the paging file, too.
There are no firmware problems to report for this drive.
SPECS, PERFORMANCE AND EVALUATION
Capacity:640 GB Interface Type:SATAII 3gbps Onboard Cache:16MB NCQ:no Power Consumption:8.3W full load
Average Read:95.6MB/s There is a link to a full review here-> http://www.extremetech.com/computing...0aaks-review/3 On the second page there is a comparision between the two drives I am discussing here(the seagate may be a 1TB drive noted).