Seagate Vs Wd External Hard Drive

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  1. Seagate Vs Wd External Hard Drive 2018
  2. Seagate Vs Wd External Hard Drive
  3. Seagate Vs Wd External Hard Drive
  4. Wd Vs Seagate Reliability 2019
  5. Wd Vs Seagate External Hard Drives 2018

Best External Hard Drive: LaCie vs WD vs Seagate vs Toshiba vs HGST Kimberly Alt Updated: September 10, 2020 8 Comments To sustain this free service, we receive affiliate commissions via some of our links. Western Digital Red Credit: Seagate Western Digital Red Hard Drive. Capacities: 1TB-14TB. Expect to pay: $100-$800. Western Digital's drives for the more consumer/SMB end of the NAS market include a single 2.5 inch model at 1TB, and a variety of sizes for more standard 3.5 inch drives. Removing the cover of the Seagate Backup Plus Slim 2 TB, we found a 2.5' Seagate/Samsung hard disk drive, model ST2000LM003. It features a SATA-600 interface, 32 MiB cache, and spins at 5,400 rpm. Western Digital and Seagate both offer a variety of pocket external hard drives with differences in capacity and connectivity. We prefer the colourful designs of Western Digital's My Passport range (Amazon), though Seagate's Backup Plus Portable drives (Amazon) aren't bad looking either.

[nextpage title='Introduction']

Users are always damanding more and more storage space, not only inside their computers, but also as portable external hard disk drives. Nowadays, 2 TB portable external drives are becoming popular, and we will test two models: the Seagate 2 TB Backup Plus Slim and the Western Digital 2 TB My Passport Ultra. They are both compact drives and make use of the USB 3.0 interface. Let's check for the results!

PreviewProduct
Seagate Backup Plus Slim 2TB External Hard Drive Portable HDD – Blue.
WD 2TB Black My Passport Portable External Hard Drive - USB 3.0 -.

Portable external hard drives make use of 2.5' hard disk drives internally, which is the same kind of hard drives used in portable computers (desktop hard drives are usually available in the 3.5', which is obviously bigger). The power for those drives come from the USB port itself.

The following table shows the main characteristics of the devices we are testing.

ManufacturerModelModel #Nominal CapacityPrice
SeagateBackup Plus SlimSTDR20001022 TBUSD 100
Western DigitalMy Passport UltraWDBMWV0020BBK2 TBUSD 100

Now let's take a closer look at the tested drives.

[nextpage title='The Seagate Backup Plus Slim 2 TB']

What is the latest version of adobe acrobat. The Seagate Backup Plus Slim comes only with a manual and a USB 3.0 cable.

Figure 1: accessories

Figure 2 shows the Backup Plus Slim 2 TB. It is really slim, measuring 4.5 x 3.0 x 0.5 inches (114 x 76 x 13 mm) and weighing 5.7 oz. (161 g). The top cover is made of aluminum.

Figure 2: the Seagate Backup Plus Slim 2 TB

At the rear of the unit is the USB 3.0 port, as shown in Figure 3. The activity LED is on the top part of the device.

Figure 3: rear

Figure 4 shows the bottom of the drive.

Figure 4: bottom

[nextpage title='Inside the Seagate Backup Plus Slim 2 TB']

Removing the cover of the Seagate Backup Plus Slim 2 TB, we found a 2.5' Seagate/Samsung hard disk drive, model ST2000LM003. It features a SATA-600 interface, 32 MiB cache, and spins at 5,400 rpm. The drive is connected to a removable USB 3.0 interface.

Figure 5: top cover removed

Figure 6 shows the bottom of the hard disk drive.

Figure 6: bottom

External

As seen in Figure 7, the interface that converts the SATA-600 drive to USB 3.0 is very small and can be removed from the drive.

Figure 7: USB 3.0/SATA interface

[nextpage title='The Western Digital My Passport Ultra 2 TB']

The Western Digital My Passport Ultra 2 TB also comes only with a manual and a USB 3.0 cable.

Figure 8: accessories

The drive has a plastic case with the USB 3.0 and the activity LED on the same side. The My Passport Ultra measures 4.3 x 3.2 x 0.8 inches (110 x 82 x 20 mm) and weighs 8.2 oz. (233 g).

Figure 9: USB 3.0 port

Figure 10 shows the bottom of the device.

Figure 10: bottom

[nextpage title='Inside the Western Digital My Passport Ultra 2 TB']

Opening the WD My Passport Ultra 2 TB, we found a 2.5' hard disk drive, model WD20NMVW, with the USB 3.0 interface embedded on its printed circuit board. It has 8 MiB of cache and spins at 5,200 rpm. An interesting detail is that this drive is 15 mm thick, while common 2.5' drives are 9.5 mm or 7 mm thick. This is because this little drive has four platers inside.

Figure 11: the hard disk drive

Figure 12 shows the detail of the drive. Notice that it has rubber pads at the sides; they help absorb vibrations and even small impacts, which is an excellent feature to have on a portable hard disk drive.

Figure 12: circuit board

[nextpage title='How We Tested']

We tested both the drives using DiskSpeed32 and CrystalDiskMark programs. They were connected to a USB 3.0 port. The only variable component between each benchmarking session was the HDD being tested.

Hardware Configuration

  • Processor: Core i7-4770K
  • Motherboard: ASRock Z97 Extreme4
  • Memory: 16 GB G.Skill Sniper (DDR3-1600/PC3-12800), configured at 1,600 MHz
  • Boot drive: Kingston HyperX 3K 480 GiB SSD
  • Video card: Gigabyte GeForce GTX 750
  • Video resolution: 1920×1080
  • Video monitor: Phillips 236VL
  • Power supply: Corsair CX500M

Operating System Configuration

  • Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit SP1

Software Used

Error Margin

We adopted a 3% error margin in our tests, meaning performance differences of less than 3% can't be considered meaningful. Therefore, when the performance difference between two products is less than 3%, we consider them to have similar performance.

[nextpage title='DiskSpeed32″]

DiskSpeed32 is a disk drive benchmarking program that makes a read test of the entire drive, thus taking a long time.

The graph below shows the burst read speed for each tested hard disk drive, in kiB/s.

THe WD My Passport Ultra was 14% faster in the burst speed test.

The next graph shows the maximum sequential read speed for each tested drive, in kiB/s.

Both the drives reached the same performarmance in this test.

The following graph shows the average transfer speed in kiB/s. This is the test that really matters in this software.

In this test, the Seagate Backup Plus Slim 2 TB was 16% faster than the WD My Passport Plus 2 TB.

[nextpage title='CrystalDiskMark']

CrystalDiskMark is a disk drive benchmarking program that measures the write and read speed in different block sizes. We compared the results in sequential read and write, and in 512 kiB and 4 kiB block sizes read and write. We configured it for five repetitions of each test of 1 GB of random data.

The graph below shows the sequential read speed for each drive, in MiB/s.

In the sequential read test, the Backup Plus Slim was 21% faster than the My Passport Ultra.

Seagate Vs Wd External Hard Drive 2018

The next graph shows the write speed of sequential data, in MiB/s.

Also in the sequential write test, the Seagate Backup Plus SLim performed 22% faster than the My Passport Ultra. Descargar acrobat para windows 7.

The following graph presents the read speed in 512 kB blocks, in MiB/s.

Both drives performed equally in the 512 kiB random read test.

The following graph presents the write speed in 512 kB blocks, in MiB/s.

An in the 512 kiB random write test, the two units also performed the same way.

The read speed in 4 kB blocks, in MiB/s, is shown in the next graph.

In the random read test with 4 kiB blocks, the My Passport Ultra was 15% faster than the Backup Plus Slim.

Latest safari for windows. The following graph presents the write speed in 4 kB blocks, in MiB/s.

In the random write test with 4 kiB blocks, the WD My Passport Ultra 2 TB was 29% faster than the Seagate Backup Plus Slim 2 TB.

[nextpage title='Conclusions']

In our tests, the Seagate drive was a little faster in sequential tests, but the WD model was a little faster while accessing small blocks of data. Thus we can consider it a technical tie.

The Backup Plus Slim takes advantage of being, as its name says, slim. This can be important if you have to carry it with your laptop in a briefcase. It is also lighter than the WD My Passport Ultra. On the other hand, the WD My Passport Ultra fits inside its casing using four rubber pads, which makes it, at least theoretically, more resistant to small impacts.

Keykey typing tutor 1 0 4. Costing exactly the same, we can only conclude that both the Seagate Backup Plus Slim 2 TB and the WD My Passport Ultra 2 TB are excellent portable external hard disk drives.

PreviewProduct
Seagate Backup Plus Slim 2TB External Hard Drive Portable HDD – Blue.
WD 2TB Black My Passport Portable External Hard Drive - USB 3.0 -.

Last update on 2021-01-05 at 12:04 / Affiliate links / Images from Amazon Product Advertising API

When it comes to choosing a 3.5-inch platter HDD for your PC build, you have two main options. Both Seagate and Western Digital have established names in the industry, but gamers tend to prefer Western Digital's Caviar line of drives over Seagate Barracuda. Microsoft fingerprint reader mac. There are a few good reasons for that.

Seagate Vs Wd External Hard Drive

To fully understand why most gamers and PC build enthusiasts prefer Western Digital drives, we have to take a look at the history of HDDs.

A post shared by FAFHA ELEKTRONIK (@fafhaelektronik) on

The Barracuda HDD Line's Spotty History

Before 2007, both Seagate and Western Digital drives were recommended equally in computer builds. In 2007, Seagate introduced its new line of Barracuda 7200.11 HDD, which ranged in capacity from 160GB to 1.5TB. These drives introduced several severe firmware bugs that caused rampant drive failure.

  • Disks could error and not show or utilize all the cache
  • FLUSH_CACHE commands time out when NCQ is used
  • Speed test measures only 45-60 MB/s when it should be closer to 100-110MB/s
  • Disks may be inaccessible when PC powers on

The last bug on this list is the most critical one, as the computer BIOS can't detect it after a reboot. Seagate HD users complained heavily on Seagate's support forums to the point that Seagate began heavily moderating these threads. Fed up PC enthusiasts took their discussions to third-party forums on the internet to discuss these issues. The issue was so prevalent that a guide teaching people how to recover their Barracuda 7200.11 drives popped up in 2009.

A post shared by Leandro Ramos (@professorramoscom) on

The result is a tarnished reputation among PC build enthusiasts, who remember the nightmares of having a hard drive failure. Seagate eventually took the Barracuda line off the market temporarily to 'streamline' it in 2012.

Seagate faced a class action lawsuit over its 3TB consumer hard drives in 2016. The lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court for Northen California and cited reliability data from Backblaze. Backblaze is a cloud storage and back-up provider. Backblaze says the Seagate 3TB HDD in its fleet of back-up drives failed at much higher rates than other drives.

The issue got so bad that Backblaze began phasing out that model of hard-drive from their cloud storage system in 2015. Backblaze data said that 32% of the Seagate drives deployed in 2012 failed by 2015. Only 68% of drives deployed that year were operational after three years, which was below the 80% rate for other manufacturers.

Seagate brought the brand back in 2016 with its 16th generation of drives available in capacities between 500GB and 8TB. But many early PC build enthusiasts remember the trouble earlier generations caused and have trouble recommending these drives over other manufacturers like Western Digital or Samsung.

Seagate Barracuda vs. Western Digital Caviar

Because of the issues outlined above, most PC build enthusiasts will heartily recommend Western Digital drives over Seagate's Barracuda line. There have been fewer complaints online about Seagate's new Barracuda hard drives released after 2016, but public opinion has not recovered.

Western Digital divides its line up into various colors including Blue, Black, Red, and Purple. These colors denote differences in the drive's transfer speeds and available cache.

Seagate Vs Wd External Hard Drive

Let's take a look at the differences between the WD HDD colors

WD Blue

Wd Vs Seagate Reliability 2019

  • Transfer Speed: Up to 175 MB/s
  • Cache: 32/64 MB

WD Black

  • Transfer Speed: Up to 218 MB/s
  • Cache: 64/128 MB

WD Red

Wd Vs Seagate External Hard Drives 2018

  • Transfer Speed: Up to 178 MB/s
  • Cache: 16/64/128 MB
External

As seen in Figure 7, the interface that converts the SATA-600 drive to USB 3.0 is very small and can be removed from the drive.

Figure 7: USB 3.0/SATA interface

[nextpage title='The Western Digital My Passport Ultra 2 TB']

The Western Digital My Passport Ultra 2 TB also comes only with a manual and a USB 3.0 cable.

Figure 8: accessories

The drive has a plastic case with the USB 3.0 and the activity LED on the same side. The My Passport Ultra measures 4.3 x 3.2 x 0.8 inches (110 x 82 x 20 mm) and weighs 8.2 oz. (233 g).

Figure 9: USB 3.0 port

Figure 10 shows the bottom of the device.

Figure 10: bottom

[nextpage title='Inside the Western Digital My Passport Ultra 2 TB']

Opening the WD My Passport Ultra 2 TB, we found a 2.5' hard disk drive, model WD20NMVW, with the USB 3.0 interface embedded on its printed circuit board. It has 8 MiB of cache and spins at 5,200 rpm. An interesting detail is that this drive is 15 mm thick, while common 2.5' drives are 9.5 mm or 7 mm thick. This is because this little drive has four platers inside.

Figure 11: the hard disk drive

Figure 12 shows the detail of the drive. Notice that it has rubber pads at the sides; they help absorb vibrations and even small impacts, which is an excellent feature to have on a portable hard disk drive.

Figure 12: circuit board

[nextpage title='How We Tested']

We tested both the drives using DiskSpeed32 and CrystalDiskMark programs. They were connected to a USB 3.0 port. The only variable component between each benchmarking session was the HDD being tested.

Hardware Configuration

  • Processor: Core i7-4770K
  • Motherboard: ASRock Z97 Extreme4
  • Memory: 16 GB G.Skill Sniper (DDR3-1600/PC3-12800), configured at 1,600 MHz
  • Boot drive: Kingston HyperX 3K 480 GiB SSD
  • Video card: Gigabyte GeForce GTX 750
  • Video resolution: 1920×1080
  • Video monitor: Phillips 236VL
  • Power supply: Corsair CX500M

Operating System Configuration

  • Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit SP1

Software Used

Error Margin

We adopted a 3% error margin in our tests, meaning performance differences of less than 3% can't be considered meaningful. Therefore, when the performance difference between two products is less than 3%, we consider them to have similar performance.

[nextpage title='DiskSpeed32″]

DiskSpeed32 is a disk drive benchmarking program that makes a read test of the entire drive, thus taking a long time.

The graph below shows the burst read speed for each tested hard disk drive, in kiB/s.

THe WD My Passport Ultra was 14% faster in the burst speed test.

The next graph shows the maximum sequential read speed for each tested drive, in kiB/s.

Both the drives reached the same performarmance in this test.

The following graph shows the average transfer speed in kiB/s. This is the test that really matters in this software.

In this test, the Seagate Backup Plus Slim 2 TB was 16% faster than the WD My Passport Plus 2 TB.

[nextpage title='CrystalDiskMark']

CrystalDiskMark is a disk drive benchmarking program that measures the write and read speed in different block sizes. We compared the results in sequential read and write, and in 512 kiB and 4 kiB block sizes read and write. We configured it for five repetitions of each test of 1 GB of random data.

The graph below shows the sequential read speed for each drive, in MiB/s.

In the sequential read test, the Backup Plus Slim was 21% faster than the My Passport Ultra.

Seagate Vs Wd External Hard Drive 2018

The next graph shows the write speed of sequential data, in MiB/s.

Also in the sequential write test, the Seagate Backup Plus SLim performed 22% faster than the My Passport Ultra. Descargar acrobat para windows 7.

The following graph presents the read speed in 512 kB blocks, in MiB/s.

Both drives performed equally in the 512 kiB random read test.

The following graph presents the write speed in 512 kB blocks, in MiB/s.

An in the 512 kiB random write test, the two units also performed the same way.

The read speed in 4 kB blocks, in MiB/s, is shown in the next graph.

In the random read test with 4 kiB blocks, the My Passport Ultra was 15% faster than the Backup Plus Slim.

Latest safari for windows. The following graph presents the write speed in 4 kB blocks, in MiB/s.

In the random write test with 4 kiB blocks, the WD My Passport Ultra 2 TB was 29% faster than the Seagate Backup Plus Slim 2 TB.

[nextpage title='Conclusions']

In our tests, the Seagate drive was a little faster in sequential tests, but the WD model was a little faster while accessing small blocks of data. Thus we can consider it a technical tie.

The Backup Plus Slim takes advantage of being, as its name says, slim. This can be important if you have to carry it with your laptop in a briefcase. It is also lighter than the WD My Passport Ultra. On the other hand, the WD My Passport Ultra fits inside its casing using four rubber pads, which makes it, at least theoretically, more resistant to small impacts.

Keykey typing tutor 1 0 4. Costing exactly the same, we can only conclude that both the Seagate Backup Plus Slim 2 TB and the WD My Passport Ultra 2 TB are excellent portable external hard disk drives.

PreviewProduct
Seagate Backup Plus Slim 2TB External Hard Drive Portable HDD – Blue.
WD 2TB Black My Passport Portable External Hard Drive - USB 3.0 -.

Last update on 2021-01-05 at 12:04 / Affiliate links / Images from Amazon Product Advertising API

When it comes to choosing a 3.5-inch platter HDD for your PC build, you have two main options. Both Seagate and Western Digital have established names in the industry, but gamers tend to prefer Western Digital's Caviar line of drives over Seagate Barracuda. Microsoft fingerprint reader mac. There are a few good reasons for that.

Seagate Vs Wd External Hard Drive

To fully understand why most gamers and PC build enthusiasts prefer Western Digital drives, we have to take a look at the history of HDDs.

A post shared by FAFHA ELEKTRONIK (@fafhaelektronik) on

The Barracuda HDD Line's Spotty History

Before 2007, both Seagate and Western Digital drives were recommended equally in computer builds. In 2007, Seagate introduced its new line of Barracuda 7200.11 HDD, which ranged in capacity from 160GB to 1.5TB. These drives introduced several severe firmware bugs that caused rampant drive failure.

  • Disks could error and not show or utilize all the cache
  • FLUSH_CACHE commands time out when NCQ is used
  • Speed test measures only 45-60 MB/s when it should be closer to 100-110MB/s
  • Disks may be inaccessible when PC powers on

The last bug on this list is the most critical one, as the computer BIOS can't detect it after a reboot. Seagate HD users complained heavily on Seagate's support forums to the point that Seagate began heavily moderating these threads. Fed up PC enthusiasts took their discussions to third-party forums on the internet to discuss these issues. The issue was so prevalent that a guide teaching people how to recover their Barracuda 7200.11 drives popped up in 2009.

A post shared by Leandro Ramos (@professorramoscom) on

The result is a tarnished reputation among PC build enthusiasts, who remember the nightmares of having a hard drive failure. Seagate eventually took the Barracuda line off the market temporarily to 'streamline' it in 2012.

Seagate faced a class action lawsuit over its 3TB consumer hard drives in 2016. The lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court for Northen California and cited reliability data from Backblaze. Backblaze is a cloud storage and back-up provider. Backblaze says the Seagate 3TB HDD in its fleet of back-up drives failed at much higher rates than other drives.

The issue got so bad that Backblaze began phasing out that model of hard-drive from their cloud storage system in 2015. Backblaze data said that 32% of the Seagate drives deployed in 2012 failed by 2015. Only 68% of drives deployed that year were operational after three years, which was below the 80% rate for other manufacturers.

Seagate brought the brand back in 2016 with its 16th generation of drives available in capacities between 500GB and 8TB. But many early PC build enthusiasts remember the trouble earlier generations caused and have trouble recommending these drives over other manufacturers like Western Digital or Samsung.

Seagate Barracuda vs. Western Digital Caviar

Because of the issues outlined above, most PC build enthusiasts will heartily recommend Western Digital drives over Seagate's Barracuda line. There have been fewer complaints online about Seagate's new Barracuda hard drives released after 2016, but public opinion has not recovered.

Western Digital divides its line up into various colors including Blue, Black, Red, and Purple. These colors denote differences in the drive's transfer speeds and available cache.

Seagate Vs Wd External Hard Drive

Let's take a look at the differences between the WD HDD colors

WD Blue

Wd Vs Seagate Reliability 2019

  • Transfer Speed: Up to 175 MB/s
  • Cache: 32/64 MB

WD Black

  • Transfer Speed: Up to 218 MB/s
  • Cache: 64/128 MB

WD Red

Wd Vs Seagate External Hard Drives 2018

  • Transfer Speed: Up to 178 MB/s
  • Cache: 16/64/128 MB

WD Purple

  • Transfer Speed: Up to 178 MB/s
  • Cache: 64/128 MB

Aside from the notable transfer speed and cache differences, WD also offers different warranty periods for each of these. The WD Blue has the shortest warranty at 2-years with 300,000 cycles and comes in both 5400RPM and 7200RPM varieties.

The WD Black has the most extended warranty at 5-years with 300,000 cycles. The WD Red and Purple lines both have 3-year warranties, but WD Red HDD has an estimated 600,000 cycle life. That's because the drive spins at a slower 5400RPM and is intended to be used as extra storage or in a network-attached storage (NAS) system.

If you are building your PC for gaming, make sure you get a 7200RPM WD Blue drive. If you have a bit more budget for the WD Black HDD, it is an excellent upgrade over the WD Blue because of its better transfer speeds and more extended warranty period.





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