Results of read-only comparison between between Western Digital WD10EARS-00Y5B1 and Seagate ST31000358AS hard disk drives (HDD).
Test System
Phenom II X6 1055, 8 GB DDR3 1600, 890 GX board SATA3 6 Gbps
Linux Mint (Ubuntu 10.10) – Kernel 2.6.35-23-generic #41-Ubuntu SMP Wed Nov 24 11:55:36 UTC 2010 x86_64 GNU/Linux
Gnome Disk Utility Read Benchmark
[table “2” not found /]
Western Digital Green 1 TB
Seagate ST7200-12 1 TB
hdparm Read Benchmark
Western Digital WD10EARS-00Y5B1 hdd
$ sudo hdparm -tT /dev/sda
/dev/sda:
Timing cached reads: 6714 MB in 2.00 seconds = 3358.17 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 326 MB in 3.01 seconds = 108.40 MB/sec
Seagate ST31000358AS hdd
$ sudo hdparm -tT /dev/sdb
/dev/sdb:
Timing cached reads: 6786 MB in 2.00 seconds = 3394.21 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 374 MB in 3.01 seconds = 124.25 MB/sec
Temperature
The Seagate ST31000358AS hdd is cooler on my test set-up with temperature going up to +10 C above ambient, while the Western Digital Green WD10EARS-00Y5B1 hdd going up top +13 C over the ambient temperature.
Conclusion
The Seagate drive is significantly faster than the WD Green drive of the same capacity. The Seagate drive though is faster, but is noisy – when the spindle spins the noise can be annoying at time. WD Green is whisper quiet and consumes less power. The WD Green hdd is slightly warmer in operation compared to the Seagate 7200.12.
My recommendation is the WD Green HDD WD10EARS-00Y5B1, the speed is adequate for a average desktop, low power and silent. If you are looking for performance use this WD Green WD10EARS-00Y5B1 with a SSD as a boot disk.