HotHardware does a 2TB hard drive shootout

If you are in the market for a desktop or NAS/Server hard drive, you’ve no doubt been checking out some of the 2TB drives pictured above.  HotHardware just reviewed most of the majors in the market from Western Digital, Seagate and Samsung.  

There are 10 pages of hard drive testing glory, but like a lot of people, we’re most interested in the results:

Ultimately, our picks for each class of drive are as follows. For general-purpose drives, you’d think it would be a no-brainer and we’d pick the Seagate Barracuda LP 2TB($139) for its relative high performance and great value. The problem is, it has a much lower load/unload rating of 50,000 cycles, versus 300,000 cycles for the other general-purpose drives–the Seagate Barracuda LP 2TB uses the older Contact Start-Stop (CSS) technology to park its heads, while the other drives use the more updated and more reliable Ramp Loading technology. Once we took the Seagate Barracuda LP 2TB out of the running, it was a very close call between the Samsung EcoGreen F3 2TB($179) and WD Caviar Green 2TB ($139.99), but we ultimately chose the Samsung EcoGreen F3 2TB because of its speedier overall performance. For the performance drives it was a much tougher call; but with almost identical overall performance, the Seagate Barracuda XT 2TB ($275) edged out the WD Caviar Black 2TB ($279), due to the Barracuda XT’s lower price tag and lower power consumption (see the specs tables on page three of this roundup). For the enterprise-class drives, it’s a runaway, with the WD RE4 2TB ($285) as the undisputed performance leader that also has high reliability ratings.

They also give the Western Digital AV-GP($173) high marks in media centers for being quiet and able to withstand high temperatures.

FWIW, I bought two WD Caviar Green w/64MB cache ($139) for my home NAS and they’ve been perfect so far.  via Engadget