I am building up my new HP Z400 workstation at work, which is awesome BTW but I won’t get sidetracked on that right now. But I am stuck on which HDD to pick the 500 GB WD Black WD5001AALS with 32 MB of Cache or the Samsung Spinpoint F3 HD502HJ with 16 MB of Cache. I will be using two of these drivers in RAID1, and the Samsung drives are what shipped with two of the HP units, now I have next to no personal experience with Samsung drives so it is very hard for me to trust them as I have always used WD or Seagate in the past and since right now I am not a huge fan of Seagate I have been sticking to WD. But I gave his Samsung a fair shot and figured I would benchmark it and the results somewhat shocked me as this drive produced the highest average read speed I have ever seen on any HDTach benchmark, here were the specs from my HDTach bench…

Random Access: 13.8 ms
Average Reads: 124.2 Mb/s
Burst Speed: 248.5 Mb/s

I was mainly taken back by the average read speed as prior to testing this drive the fastest non-SSD drive I have benched IIRC was a 500 GB Seagate 7200.12 which was hitting around 105 Mb/s for average read speeds. I was also somewhat surprised by the burst speed as well which is approaching the limit of SATA 3.0. So after this I figured I might take chance with Samsung and since they will be in RAID1 I do not have too much to worry about. But then a few 500 GB WD Blacks arrived and since I have read so many good things about them I had to bench one and see the results which again are below…

Random Access: 12.0 ms
Average Reads: 80.2 Mb/s
Burst Speed: 228.2 Mb/s

Now I was a t first disappointed by the average read score but I am pretty sure that the Samsung is so high due to it being a single platter where as the WD is two? I am basing this solely on the weight of the drive alone. But the WD does have a fairly lower Random Access time which from what I understand if where you will see more of a performance increase; it also has a 32 Mb cache rather than the 16 Mb of the Samsung.

So my bottom line question here is what makes a bigger/more noticeable difference for day to day computing having a drive with a lower RA time or one with a higher average read speed? And also will the Cache make any real difference? I have just heard so many positive things about the WD Black line both performance and reliability wise that I want to use them, but at the same time the Samsung really surprised me with the numbers but at the same time I am a little hesitant to trust my data to the but at the same time how will I ever know what I am missing if I never try them out. That since they will be in RAID1 All I am really looking for is to get the best performance edge not matter how small and really just want to know which one would how better results (or maybe they would not even be noticeable results) for a machine that I use for my job that needs to be a multitasking, fast responding beat, which the Xeon W3520 2.67 Ghz Quad Core with hyperthreading and 9 GB of DDR3 1333 take care of for the most part, but again I am always looking to squeeze any extra performance out of my system so please let me know what you think here.