>Quiet, cheap, very fast and ridiculously capacious - what more do you need?

Reliability

Reliability is what counts here more than a few seconds in copying a file.

1.4TB is a shitload of data to lose, and you probably have to buy 2 of them to RAID the buggers.

Would that not suggest that there is a difference in the read / write speeds of the 2 drives, in that either the Caviar has a faster write speed or the Seagate has a faster read speed?

SG provides a 5 year warranty on all products, regardless of user type or geographical location. "Instaswap" is available from Seagate retailers (if you purchased it from there) if you verify the fault with SeaTools.

Seagate provides a new 5 year warranty on all units they RMA. As the warranty is from MANU date and the high turnover of stock it's usualy close to this date. If for whatever reason it's not you can just use the original RMA from the Seagate website and your reception date as the new warranty period.

Western Digital drives are more dependable in the longterm - Sure, you may get more performance and capacity out of the Seagate, but the WD I bet you will last far longer. Ever since about 2001-2003, Seagate drives have gone downhill in quality in the longterm. They operate exceedingly well when you first get them, but I've seen Seagate disks fail. just *FAIL* for no clear reason. When replaced with a WD in the same operating conditions, the WD lasted far longer.

I've always had the above... including replacing a drive that was 6 years old (a 40Gb one) with one that was twice the capacity....

I'll be getting a 1.5Tb to replace in my Apple Time Capsule!

In the transfer tests from one drive to another the first drive is the C: drive that is running Vista. The second drive listed is a data drive/Slave/euphemism of choice.

MTBF is something that I cannot test and neither can I verify the manufacturers' figures. To the best of my recollection every drive manufacturer has had a dodgy patch when drives fail horribly. They have all had problems and have all come through them and I would be loath to recommend one make over another. Wimpish I know but if your photos and music go up in smoke after two or three years do you much care about getting the purchase price of the drive refunded?

1) Capacity is mentioned in decimal sizes by hard drive manufacturers in order to up the apparent spec without adding additional cost.

Operating Systems count sizes in binary amounts, 1000 bytes is of no use in a binary counting system, whereas 1024 is much easier to use in binary. 1KB = 2^10 or 1,024 bytes, 1MB = 2^20 or 1,048,576 bytes, 1GB = 2^30 or 1,073,741,824, 1TB = 2^40 or 1,099,511,627,776 bytes, and finally 1.5GB in binary is 2^40 + 2^39 or 1,649,267,441,664 bytes, which when abbreviated into human readable form looks like 1,649GB or 1.6TB for short. Of course, HDD manufacturers should use the binary capacities as the listed capacities but they don't since selling to chavs always reduces to the lowest common denominator of understanding. They use the decimal capacity since it looks like you get more for your money.

2) Reliability is a factor of many things. Quoting the MTBF of hardware is (for me) useless since WTF does 1,200,000 hours mean time to failure mean??? Come on, that's like 120 years! As if! Reliability can in no way shape or form be predicted accurately for an individual component much less an individual drive. Over the years (I bought my first HDD in 1986) I've had varying degrees of success with Western Digital, Seagate, Maxtor, Samsung, Hitachi, Connor, IBM, Quantum, and the god-awful Fujitsu. I can honestly say by far the most important item for maintaining a reliable drive is to make sure it never runs hot. If it does, it WILL fail, and usually pretty quickly. If a standard desktop drive runs in a 20°C ambient environment, is kept stable, and not subjected to undue physical stress, it will last (and I have drives to prove it, from various manufacturers) at least 5 to 8 years if not substantially longer. Just for your edification all drives I currently use are never turned off, they run without power management 24x7x365. Perhaps the absence of in-rush current stress is giving me a better experience. Also, I best mention I will probably now suffer a bunch of sudden failures simply because I wrote this comment.

As an aside, I can't wait for SSDs to become mainstream since that will seriously increase reliability, performance, power efficiency and will reduce noise pollution (ever heard an SSD? I thought not).

Over at Newegg, the 1+ TB drive that has the best buyer reviews is the WD caviar black drive. I bought one just over a week ago for home, and I don't notice any additional noise,