Western Digital Prepped to Surpass Seagate HD Shipments in 2010

[Rob Williams]

For the past couple of years, Seagate, thanks in part to its success in the desktop PC market, has held its ground well ahead of Western Digital. If trends seen over the past year continue into 2010, though, it will soon be WD well ahead of Seagate, and the reason is just the opposite... WD does well in the mobile market, which continues to grow at a rapid rate.

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You can read the rest of our post here.

 

[Optix]

When I replaced the hard drive in a customer's laptop with an 80GB WD Caviar Blue and threw Windows XP on it I couldn't believe how fast the install went. The laptop specs were far inferior to my old rig but the install still went blazingly fast compared to my 80GB Seagate Baracuda, even though it was 5400 RPM compared to 7200.

After seeing that I figured it was time to give WD a try and am very happy with the Caviar Black in my new rig.

 

[Kougar]

When I replaced the hard drive in a customer's laptop with an 80GB WD Caviar Blue and threw Windows XP on it I couldn't believe how fast the install went. The laptop specs were far inferior to my old rig but the install still went blazingly fast compared to my 80GB Seagate Baracuda, even though it was 5400 RPM compared to 7200.

After seeing that I figured it was time to give WD a try and am very happy with the Caviar Black in my new rig.

That's because rotational speed is only half the picture... platter density is the other.

As a practical example, look at benchmarks featuring older generations of Raptor drives... They are all 10,000RPM, but because of the low platter density, traditional 7200RPM drives began to offer higher throughput while the Raptors could only offer lower latency. This forced Western Digital to upgrade the drives every several years as densities inevitably increased... The original VR150M Velociraptor versus the current VR200M models, for example. It's not just a capacity increase, it's a tangible performance increase!