Hard drive replacement question

I was thinking about buying 2 external HD's but wanted to explore the option of replacing my internal HD's first perhaps since it's so much cheaper. Looking at 2 units - a pair Western Digital 500GB or a pair of Seagate 750GB. Both are internal - both seem reasonably priced (c. $200 ea. for the WD, c. $350 ea. for the seagate.) Specs are below, it's all jibberish to me though. Any opinions good, bad, or indifferent would be appreciated. If replacing internals is not as good as just buying new externals, feel free to comment on that as well. Thanks in advance.

WESTERN DIGITAL
WD Caviar® SE16 7200 RPM next-generation SATA hard drives feature up to 500 GB of storage and a 16 MB cache for lightning-fast performance. Yes, these reliable drives are fast, but they still deliver technologically advanced acoustics and cool operation. Designed for high-performance computers, multimedia and gaming systems.

Key Features 16 MB cache - Bigger cache means faster performance. A massive 16 MB cache combined with up to 300 MB/s transfer rate make these ultra-fast drives the perfect solution for the fully loaded PC with a fast processor.

Cool operating temperature - WD hard drives are designed to have the lowest power consumption of any high-capacity, desktop-class hard drive which lowers the operating temperature for enhanced drive reliability.

Whisper quiet - These highly reliable drives deliver technologically advanced acoustics. With its WhisperDrive™ and SoftSeek™ technologies, WD has minimized noise to levels virtually imperceptible to the human ear in home and business environments.


Ideal For

Designed for use in the fastest PCs on the market, including high-performance business computers, multimedia and gaming systems
Performance Specifications
Rotational Speed 7,200 RPM (nominal)
Buffer Size 16 MB
Average Latency 4.20 ms (nominal)
Contact Start/Stop Cycles 50,000 minimum

Seek Times
Read Seek Time 8.9 ms
Write Seek Time 10.9 ms (average)
Track-To-Track Seek Time 2.0 ms (average)
Full Stroke Seek 21.0 ms (average)

Transfer Rates
Buffer To Host (Serial ATA) 300 MB/s (Max)
Buffer To Disk 748 Mbits/s (Max)


Physical Specifications
Formatted Capacity 500,107 MB
Capacity 500 GB
Interface SATA 300 MB/s
User Sectors Per Drive 976,773,168


SEAGATE
DESCRIPTION:
With up to 750GB of pure digital storage in a single drive, the Barracuda 7200.10 is the largest, most reliable disc drive around. New perpendicular recording technology supports vertically stored data bits, enabling increased areal density and dependability for workstations and performance PCs. Additionally, the Barracuda 7200.10 is available in SATA 3Gb/s, SATA 1.5Gb/s and ATA/100 interfaces.

FEATURES:


Perpendicular Recording
Perpendicular Recording increases data density while decreasing moving parts for a more dependable drive.
Serial ATA 3Gb/s (300MB/s)
This product is configurable from SATA 1.5Gb/s to SATA 3Gb/s for easy interoperability.
Adaptive Fly Height
Adaptive Fly Height offers consistent read/write performance from the beginning to end of your computing workloads.
Clean Sweep
Clean Sweep automatically calibrates your drive each time you power up.
Directed Offline Scan
Directed Offline Scan runs diagnostics when storage access is not required.
Seagate SoftSonic
Seagate SoftSonic motor enables whisper-quiet operation.
Enhanced G-Force Protection
Enhanced G-Force Protection defends against handling damage.
SPECIFICATIONS:

Capacity and Interface Formatted Gbytes (512 bytes/sector): 750
Interface: SATA 3Gb/s
Performance Max. External Transfer Rate (Mbytes/sec)
Avg. Sustained Transfer Rate (Mbytes/sec) >
Average Seek (msec)
Average Latency (msec) 4.16
Multisegmented Cache 16384
Spindle Speed (RPM) 7200

Configuration/Organization Bytes per Sector: 512
Logical CHS: 16383/16/63
Contact Start-Stops

Reliability/Data Integrity S.M.A.R.T. capable: Yes
Nonrecoverable Read Errors per Bits Read: 1 per 1014

Power Requirements +12 VDC +/-10% (amps typ operating) 2.8
+5 VDC +/-5% (amps typ operating)
Power Management (watts)
Seek 12.6
Read/Write
Idle 9.3
Standby 0.8
Physical Height (mm) 26.1
Width (mm) 101.6 >
Depth (mm) 146.99
Weight (kg) 720

Just thought I'd mention (as something to think about) that I bought a motherboard upgrade for my computer that was recommended to me by the manufacturer's salesperson but which did not in fact fit in my computer. Because I waited more than 15 days to install it, they would not accept it as a return.

FWIW, I have a peripheral hard drive for my photos that works great. In fact, when I installed it I learned that it's actually recommended to have your photos on a separate hard drive (but I forget why)....

You can purchase external USB / Firewire enclosures that include fans, and then install your own "internal" hard drives in these enclosures. You can also purchase a separate tower that is built just for housing hard drives. Start with two drives and fill it out with more as you necessary. I purchased two 300GB Seagate drives recently. One is redundant for the other. I synchronize them periodically with a Windows XP tool called "robocopy". It is free from Microsoft, and works as I expect. It only updates files that are different (including removing files from the mirror that were removed from the source). This is not a block level mirroring tool. It is file-by-file sychnronization, and requires manual execution, but it works for me at the moment. I have roughly 130GB of image files (approximately 11,500 images) and store them primarily in raw format.

I just bought a MAXTOR 600GB ONETOUCH III TURBO external drive. Has two 300GB drives in one enclosure and can be configured for Raid 1 (mirrored). They also have a 1TB model with two 500gb drives.

http://www.techonweb.com/products/productdetail.aspx?id=C76497

I have owned five Maxtor drives in the last three years, and all of them have failed within 14 months of purchase. One failed at 11 months, fortunately for me that meant it was under warranty. The others were not. I have seen a lot of Maxtor drive complaints here and on other photography sites over the last two or three years.

Maxtor was purchased by Seagate last year. I hope Seagate improves their reliability. Seagate and Western Digital seem to have the best service record from what I have seen.

I read a review of these two drives a couple of months ago in a CPU magazine. They were looking at the performance of the drives in the 500GB+ and the Western digital outperformed this seagate model. In fact the numbers you posted support this. It is mostly a result of the increased drive size. Sorry, I don't have the issue available right now.

A USB/Firewire connection is much slower than SATA. Understanding Bill's problems, I would suggest getting the drives inside the box resolved first, and then following up with external drive (backup) improvments.

Thanks everyone for the info and suggestions. Mel, I think I agree with you on replacing the internal drives first and then buying externals for back-up. I think it may be time to buy the drives and then call Geek Squad to come put them in for me. I'm sure it's probably not hard if you know what you're doing, but if i knew what I was doing I wouldn't be asking all this questions.

I added a second hard drive to my computer this weekend. The digital pictures were really eating up real estate on the original. When I bought the hard drive, I asked the salesman at Microcenter which of the hard drives they had returned the least. Strangely, he said that the Maxtor USED to be the least returned hard drive, but now the Western Digital had the honors. He did not even want to discuss the Seagate. I have used several different makes of hard drives over the years and have not had one fail yet, knock on wood!!!!! Since I will need an external hard drive to back up this monster, I also asked about the external drives. He still recomended the Western Digital.

I was rather amused to see that Western Digital was still using the Cavier name. It must be nearly 20 years since I bought my first Western Digital Cavier hard drive, probably a monster for the day at 20 MB.