what is the best 500GB or 1tb Internal Hard drive?
WD caviar black. or RE4 if you want to get an enterprise drive
The one that's on sale and has a nice discount.
No. Just... No.
Western Digital is the way to go. Just make sure you get a drive in the box unless you have the proper cables/screws.
Like Commissar said, either the Western Digital Caviar Black or RE4. The RE4 is probably actually better than the Caviar Black because it should have a lower failure rate.
There's also the Western Digital Velociraptor, which is going to be the fastest hard drive on the market, but it's not that much faster than the Caviar Black anyway, and they're much more expensive. They're probably also less reliable just because they spin at a higher RPM. I would not suggest a Velociraptor unless you already have an SSD and still have money to spend after you already have the best of the best components with a custom water cooling loop and an ultra high resolution monitor or monitors.
I really don't think it makes a difference what drive manufacturer you choose. I'd just take the one with the longest warranty because it doesn't matter what anecdotal evidence you have about the quality of drives. All manufacturers have drives that fail and all manufacturers probably have roughly the same failure rates, give or a take a little. But what actually matters is if something does happen, will you have a warranty to cover it?
Put it this way, if Seagate or Western Digital have 5,000 drives that failed within 2 weeks, that sounds really bad. If they were all from the same or sequential batches and you bought 10 drives at once and all 10 failed within those 2 weeks. You'd probably say Seagate or WD has absolutely terrible build quality and that their drives suck, etc.
But now let's say that per those 5,000 drives that failed, they shipped 500,000 drives in total. That's a 1% failure rate, which is extremely low and more than reasonable. If they shipped 1,000,000 per 5,000 that failed then that's a 0.50% failure rate.
At the end of the day a lot of it just comes down to luck. Sometimes you'll just happen to get a drive from a bad batch. It doesn't mean a certain manufacturer has bad drives overall.
While that can be true, I've heard of Seagate drives failing a lot more often than Western Digital. Reputations are built for a reason. They aren't just conjured up out of thin air.
Seagate 1TB/platter drives or the new WD 4TB Black. Either are good.
In the past 20 years i have bought 4 seagates and 2 western digitals. The two western digitals died after 3 years where as all 4 seagates are working fine with 2 of them over 6 years old.
The reason reputations are built is because of peoples insecurities. They are insecure in their decision to purchase product A because what if product A is crap? If so then that would make them an idiot because only idiots buy crappy products right? So in their quest to satisfy their insecurity and prove that their purchase was the right purchase, they go on the internet and shout that their product is the best, and as any idiot will tell you he who shouts the loudest is correct.
So I agree they aren't just conjured up out of thin air, like most forms of discrimination they are conjured up in the minds of insecure people.