Only 3 years warranty because more is too much hassle, and then in the same breath, drives don't fail in that period? Yeah right! If there is no failure, then there is no hassle! WD should try a more plausible excuse.

That'd be a great drive.....IF they had a better warranty. As it is, I'll probably stick with my Seagate.

Excellant article. I have been shopping around to finish buying parts for my new C2D pc, and have added this HDD to that list.
The best price I found so far was at Zipzoomfly http://www.zipzoomfly.com/jsp/ProductDetail.jsp?ProductCode=10005580
Im entirly puzzled though, because they list it as 8mb cache and this review as well as WD site has it at 16mb. I emailed the store and they replied that it is indeed 8mb. Its the same model number, so Im assuming ZZF is mistaken. Is there any chance there are two versions with the same model number...no way.
I used to be a Seagate fan, but the last one I bought was from the Peoples Republic. Having made it my habit to avoid buying products from there when possible, Seagate is no longer on my buy list.

If the review is so positive then why didn't the drive garner an Editor's Choice award?

Page me when there's a 3 platter 750gb drive from ANYONE under 140$ US (rebate or not)

For single-user systems, the Raptor is RIP.

Raptor only lives on as a workstation/server HDD.

Caviar SE16 is effectively for single-users systems a 150GB Raptor with almost 5 times the capacity for the same cost.

Excellent review Geoff.

It beats the Barracuda 7200.10 in every single test. I'm sold.

I was about to buy a Barracuda 320gb, but now I found the WD 320gb version (WD3200AAKS) on newegg, I'm ordering one as soon as I can.

i wish they would have 500gb raptors. or at least 300

Whats up with the system hardare? Why is the hardware so far behind what we use now?

When asked why it hasn't expanded its five-year warranty to include desktop products, Western Digital told us the additional cost just isn't worth it. Bare drives make up a very small percentage of the market, they say, and the additional overhead and bookkeeping costs associated with longer warranty periods is substantial. Western Digital also claims that its drives have very low failure rates between years three and five.

Additional cost? It seems to me that "bookkeeping costs" for "longer warranty periods" would simply be a matter of requiring more hard drive space inside the company's servers--or maybe just an extra couple of servers--to keep their internal databases around a few years longer. I mean, whether you have to keep track of a 1-year, a 3-year, or a 5-year warranty, you still have to enter such information into your data base at least once, don't you? So, since you already have the info in the database it then becomes just a matter of retaining it longer. Presumably WD isn't hurting for hard drive space...;)

The comment about bare drives making up such a "small percentage" of the market that "it doesn't hurt" WD to triple the warranties for bare drives as opposed to retail doesn't compute...;) First, if it's such a small percentage of the total market why not just drop bare drives completely as opposed to tripling their warranties? Obviously, it isn't that small a market, is it?...;) I think it much more likely that the corporate buyers who buy OEM drives in quantities won't buy them without at least three-year warranties attached, and so WD has to offer them in order to compete in that market.

Secondly, everybody knows--really--that companies do not lower warranty periods simply to defer bookkeeping expenses, regardless of the product in question. They do it to eliminate the replacement costs of such products which far outweighs the added "bookkeeping expense" of retaining warranty info in their databases for longer periods. Dropping the warranty period means that you can not only save database space but you also save replacement costs as well.

The inverse of their statement is actually what's true: if it was indeed true that their failure rate between three years of operation and five years of operation was negligible, that would actually justify the five year warranty, since replacement costs would not be a factor, and it is well known that longer warranties intensify consumer interest in your products from the start.

I'm not exactly sure why their retail drives offer the shortest warranty periods of them all, but I'll hazard a guess that mass retailers like Best Buy and Circuit City, etc., don't like them because these retailers prefer to sell their own 3-5-year "extended" warranties to retail consumers whenever possible. So if retailers tell WD "We prefer shorter manufacturer warranties!", why would WD ever argue with that?...;)

Last, don't the "enterprise" labeled products carry a price premium along with their five-year warranties? If so, then the higher price reflects an estimate of how much the longer warranty is likely to cost WD in the aggregate.

By far the biggest expense related to offering a five year warranty would be the replacement costs associated with that warranty period. My guess is that WD isn't sure what the track record of these drives will be, so they are playing it safe by offering shorter manufacturer warranties for them, at least until some kind of picture emerges in that regard for them. The risk, of course, is that when consumers see identically spec'ed drives sitting on a shelf, and one of them has a one-year warranty and the other has a five-year warranty, and there is little price difference, it isn't difficult to imagine which one will be picked more often...;) I would say that even considering power usage, heat, and noise, the most important consideration for the hard drive consumer above all else would be reliability. Longer warranty periods for the consumer simply mean he has less to worry about when making his purchase.

Awsome review Geoff; thanks ffor the hard work.

When it comes to PC parts, to each their own of course, and i like my Seagates.

However, look at the below statement:

.......249.99. That's about a $25 premium over 750GB Barracudas that pack two years of additional warranty coverage

So, compared to a Seagate, you pay over 10% more, and get 40% less warranty? (Please correct me if my math is wrong)

If we were to average the percentage difference in loss that the Seagate lost in all the above tests, what would it be?

I admit to being a Seagate fan, because 5 years is 5 years.

I just got a WD 120GB SATA back from RMA..........is the warranty up, yes.
Is it between 3 and 5 years old? Yes.
If it was a Seagate, I would keep using it, but as it is, I traded it away.

I can live with a a lil less of all the other stuff to get a LOT more warranty.

The very slight increase in noise and power draw, along with a bit less performance is something I wont notice and I doubt other will either.

For those who need less power draw or noise, they can go solid state.
Need more performance, get a Raptor.

Warranty does not equal reliability, which is why we back up.
However, who wants to pay for a replacement drive

Meh,

Samsung are shipping a 1TB drive with three platters

http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/storage/display/20070611122947.html

I've had more reliability out of the Samsungs than any other brand

The 750GB WD is up on newegg right now, by the way. At the moment it's $229.99 -- exact same price as the Seagates.

Seek noise on the Seagate drives I have is very irritating. The lone Caviar RE16 I have next to them puts them to shame. For this reason these will be the last Seagate drives I buy until I know something has changed. I'm a Caviar man now. Did y'all see those mo'fos takin the checkered flag in the (lack of) noise test? Shizzle my bizzle, dat's fo real.

Am I the only one here almost completely unimpressed by IntelliSeek? The fact that load noise and power only increased slightly is irrelevant - they were pretty darn high to begin with. The way WD has been bigging up this feature, I was expecting a lot better than third place.

Wow, well worth the wait in my opinion. Nice to see power savings, quiet tech and (hopefully) better reliability making a headway along with increased storage.

I was about to buy another coupla Seagates, but think I'll give these drives a whirl instead; quieter and use less power than my 7200.10's.

So what is the subjective difference between seek noise of this drive and its direct competitors?

Great review. I was wondering about the performance of the AAKS versions of the newer WD hard drives. Finally you guys here at TR satiate my curiosity. Thanks guys! Now if only i didn't just buy some SE16 AAKS 500 GB's I'd be first in line for the 750GB's.