Which 750GB 7200RPM drives?

Hello everyone,

Which of the following two laptop hard drives do you recommend? They are very similar in specification. There is a $20 difference in cost between them. Would that worth the warranty difference?

Western Digital Scorpio Black 750GB, 7200rpm, SATA 3GB/s, 16MB Cache, 5-Years Warranty, WD7500BPKT ($110)

or

Seagate Momentus 750GB, 7200rpm, SATA 3Gb/s, 16MB Cache, 3-Years Warranty, ST9750420AS ($90)

Thanks!

 

The $20 difference is worth much more for the performance and reliability you will get from the WD drive vs. the Seagate.

The WD Scorpio Black is my only recommended mechanical HDD as of a few weeks ago. (When a 4th Seagate Momentus XT Hybrid croaked).

 

Thank you. Based on you comment, I picked up the WD Scorpio Black.

Blessings.

 

Great choice! You really can't go wrong with a Western Digital drive. I would have recommended the same one as Tiller did.

 

Wow. That is one incredibly reliable drive then lol.

 

The drive arrived yesterday from Amazon. I'm not sure if it is normal but it is twice as loud at idle as the drive it replaces. I'm glad the drive has a five year warranty because I can feel it vibrate... the motor must be very durable!

I have another question... I have two USB2.0 2.5mm enclosures. I connected the drive to one and try to access it using both Vista and Windows 7. The operating systems saw the drive but I was not able to access it. The same for the other enclosure. I can see the drive, but when I click on it, I get an error message. This is after I initialize the drive and format it. It just showed up as "Local Disk..." with no size information. I wonder if this is a problem with the drive or the enclosure itself? I have no problems with 2.5" 640GB drives using those enclosures.

I used Acronis to restore the backup partition to the new drive from the old drive. Acronis hangs at 9% for hours on end on both operating systems.

Should I go out and buy another enclosure?

Thanks.

 

It may very well be the enclosure, but I would be more concerned with the HDD vibrating.

RMA for a better behaved one. (And you'll also know if it was simply the enclosure or the drive that was at fault).

 

Thank you. It may be the drive. I decided to just install the drive on my new laptop and restore the partition using a boot CD. It took a little bit longer to restore the partition. The system was very sluggish compared to the older drive. When I resize the partition using Euseus Partition Manager, it hangs the computer at the 8% mark. It is still running and has been at 8% the past couple of hours. The hard disk light is blinking, but nothing happens. I've done this often with other drives and resizing takes half an hour at max, especially when the drive is almost empty.

I will probably return it tomorrow and exchange it for a replacement.

Blessings.

 

Make sure they do a return and not an exchange (you still want to have the option to return the next one too if it is from the same batch).

Hope the new one works as well as mine do.

 

Just a quick question, what's the difference between a return and an exchange? If it is a return, I will need to re-order?

Thank you.

 

In my experience; lets say X number of days to return and the 'exchanged' one is also defective but it is past the total 'X' number of days to return it within; then you need to deal with the manufacturer and that could take a month or more (while you have no money and no drive to show for it).

 

Thank you. I got it. I always assumed that the exchanged drive would reset the 'X' number of days to return, but I guessed that is not always the case.

Cheers.

 

Since you bought the hard drive from Amazon, their return/exchange policy (especially for PC components) is very lenient. If you had not had the pleasure to return items to Amazon before, you should have zero problems creating an RMA with them and getting a replacement.

The best part about Amazon that I absolutely love is the fact that you will not have to pay return shipping. Amazon will e-mail you a pre-paid shipping label that you cut out and tape to the outside of the box. Within a few days, they'll have your replacement shipped out with virtually no hassles.

I will say this: I enjoy shopping at Amazon moreso than Newegg. It seems to me that Newegg has really fallen off with their price competiveness, inventory and overall customer service.

About the 7,200RPM hard drive though. If you've never had a 7,200RPM hard drive before, they will be slightly louder than their 5,400RPM cousins. While performance increases with 7,200RPM spindle speed hard drives are quite nice, the drawbacks are more noise, slightly higher operating temperatures and perhaps more vibration.

 

Thanks Garetjax. I like Amazon more than Newegg because of their return policy. Even if an item costs a little bit more on Amazon, I get it there because I know the return process would be painless. They give me 30 days to package up the item to send it back. I will be heading to the post office at the end of this week to return the first drive.

The second drive came. I put it in the computer case immediately and did the restore process. No hangs. The fan on the laptop is louder than the drive... but I wished it was quieter because I'll be taking it to all my classes the next few years. I don't want people to think that my computer is a little air conditioner ;-) The speed is much nicer than 5400RPM drives, applications come up a lot faster. So now it seems like the first drive that arrived was a dud.

Overall, I'm quite happy. I only wished there are 2TB laptop drives.

Blessings.