Hi, I'm testing two hard disks and in two days I've to decide which one of them keep and which one return to the seller.

One of them is a WD Scorpio Black while the other is an Hitachi Deskstar.
Both are SATA II, 160 Gb, 7200 rpm

Using apps like Hard Drive Inspector which are the more important things to see ?

The second one is more recent but has an higher G-Sense Error Rate.
Is this an important aspect ?

Also the load cycle is much different.
The WD has a value of 2475 while the other has a value of 46704.

Can You give some info/advice ?

thks, GG

Try MHDD 2xF4 (deault).

Is there not an higher level way to probe for main differences in terms of sanity ?

Se hai MOLTI soldi da spendere, si. Diversamente ti devi accontentare di MHDD e dello SMART (per quello che serve). Purtroppo questi discorsi sono da "bar sport" se non hai le attrezzature necessarie - cionondimeno il drive se non ha problemi di superficie puo' essere tranquillamente usato.

If you have PLENTY of money to spend, yes. Otherwise you must accept MHDD and SMART reports (for what it can do). Unfortunately, without proper gear all this kind of requests/arguments are pointless "chit chat" - nevertheless, without surface problems, the drive can be used without worries.

Trust MHDD to find media problems, firmware problems, hardware malfunction, everything will show up during scan as irregularities. SMART these days is mostly useless (as drives tend to lockup without warnings) and specialised tools are waste of money if you don't have experience or training.

What is your decision factor? Read speed? Write speed? Life expectancy?

As I see it, laptop drives (in laptops) will likely die due to being knocked around...no matter which model of drive you choose. So, keep a good backup.

In regards to speed, the differences between the two is likely so small that your time spent trying to figure out which one is better will never be regained during the life of the drive.

From the data recovery front, I'd prefer to have the Hitachi to work on, but that isn't an issue as I'm sure that you will have it backed up.

_________________
Luke
Recovery Force Data Recovery

At the end I've decided to keep the Hitachi only for the less number of "up" hours and start/stop times, also if I think that under the aspect of performance the WD was slightly better.