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Page 1 of 5  The most popular and best value for money section of the desktop drive market today is the 300-500GB segment. And with that in mind we thought we’d take a look at two 400GB stable mates from Western Digital and Seagate and see which gives the best bang for your buck.
The drives we’re looking at today are the Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 400GB SATA-II-300 (Model ST3400620AS), and the Western Digital Caviar SE16 400GB SATA-II-300 (Model WD4000AAKS). Both drives have very similar specifications, both operate at 7,200rpm, use the Serial ATA-II interface, have a 16MB cache buffer and both are very low noise, almost silent in fact. Both the Seagate and Western Digital sell online for just under AU$180, so the only way to really differentiate between the two is on their performance. Seagate and Western Digital 400GB SATA-II Drives  Before we start with the performance tests, it should be noted that the Seagate drive does have NCQ, Native Command Queuing, and while this won’t (or shouldn’t) affect raw data throughput tests, it may affect other tests that involve multiple and random file read/write operations. I guess we’ll have to wait and see if it actually makes a difference though. Another point to note is that this Seagate drive, like most other Seagate SATA-II drives, is by default set to operate at SATA-150 speeds, you have to remove a jumper at the rear of the drive to enable SATA-II-300 speeds, so be sure you do this if you get yourself a Seagate SATA-II drive. The Test Machine: ASUS P5N32-E SLI nForce 680i Motherboard Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 CPU 2GB (2 x 1GB Sticks) Corsair PC2-8500 Twin2X DDR2 RAM Antec Basiq 500W ATX PSU Western Digital 250GB Caviar SE HDD (System drive, also used for comparison) - WD2500JS
We will be using the following benchmark software for testing the drives:
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