External USB drive comparison Seagate vs. Western Digital

UPDATE 8/6/09 THE CONTROLLER CARD FOR THE WESTERN DIGITAL DRIVE HAS GONE BAD AFTER THE ONE YEAR WARRANTY HAS EXPIRED. AFTER PLACING THE DRIVE IN A NEW ENCLOSURE THE DRIVE IS STILL USEABLE AND WESTERN DIGITAL DOES NOT SELL REPLACEMENT CONTROLLER CARDS.

THE SEAGATE DRIVE IS VERY NOISY AND SLOW WITH USB, BUT THE 5 YEAR WARRENTY IS SOMETHING TO CONSIDER.

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I strongly recommend WESTERN DIGITAL over sad Seagate

Western digital smokes my Seagate drive and has much less problems. The Seagate often goes to sleep and does not wake up, forcing me to unplug and then plug it several times to get it to wake up. If I even tap the Seagate drive it turns off.

Both external drives are connected to my wonderful amazing Mac Mini which I can't recommend enough for it's ultra small form and extreme power after upgrading to 2 gigs of ram.

here are the Xbench test scores of the two drives.

Results For Seagate Freeagent Desktop USB 34.50
System Info
Xbench Version 1.1.3
System Version 10.4.11 (8S2167)
Physical RAM 2048 MB
Model Macmini1,1
Drive Type Seagate FreeAgentDesktop
Disk Test 34.50
Sequential 22.76
Uncached Write 45.84 19.11 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 45.05 18.45 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 8.90 1.41 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 51.69 20.89 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random 71.21
Uncached Write 66.74 1.00 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 69.12 15.59 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 75.28 0.50 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 74.41 15.31 MB/sec [256K blocks]

Results for Western Digital 3200 USB/Firewire 89.65 3x faster using firewire cable
System Info
Xbench Version 1.1.3
System Version 10.4.11 (8S2167)
Physical RAM 2048 MB
Model Macmini1,1
Drive Type WD 3200AAJS Externa
Disk Test 89.65
Sequential 79.17
Uncached Write 75.31 31.39 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 76.01 31.12 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 76.25 12.07 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 91.12 36.82 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random 103.32
Uncached Write 149.36 2.24 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 115.64 26.08 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 83.19 0.55 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 88.09 18.13 MB/sec [256K blocks]

UPDATE 8/6/09 THE CONTROLLER CARD FOR THE WESTERN DIGITAL DRIVE HAS GONE BAD AFTER THE ONE YEAR WARRANTY HAS EXPIRED. AFTER PLACING THE DRIVE IN A NEW ENCLOSURE THE DRIVE IS STILL USEABLE AND WESTERN DIGITAL DOES NOT SELL REPLACEMENT CONTROLLER CARDS.

THE SEAGATE DRIVE IS VERY NOISY AND SLOW WITH USB, BUT THE 5 YEAR WARRENTY IS SOMETHING TO CONSIDER.

Picasa 3 beta review

This is a very exciting new freeware program from Google and available for the Macintosh platform after being Windows only for some time.

If you have a large library of images and trouble finding the exact one you want this may be a great solution for you.

Expression Media has been my media management software of choice for some time now. Once it was purchased by Microsoft the customer support failed and upgrades became expensive with little noticeable improvement. That said it still does some operations better like saving different catalogs.

Picasa is free which is the main big plus about this program. The face recognizing feature works well. I am just starting to use this program and will give you more details later. Their support is very good with an update occurring very quickly after I discovered a file recognition problem it was fixed within a week.

Picasa can be downloaded here http://picasaweb.google.com

update: still having file recognition problems