Why would i want the more expensive hard drive?

I highly doubt you’d be getting $65 more performance from the higher priced drive since their specs are essentially the same.
Sometimes, retailers just get a really good deal on some products.

always know the warrenty as well. sometimes 5 or 10 bucks more for peace of mind can be worth it. but i have to agree with heritic. often times the stores are hoping you dont research. your best bet for pricing would be nextegg.com or use froogle.com

They appear comparable enough to me. Save some money.

That’s neat! I didn’t know google had a price engine as well.

Thanks a lot guys, i knew the specs looked similar.

In the computer industry it is a well established fact that the newest and greatest price suffers at least a %10 markup for the convenience of delivery the absolute best on the market.

The thrifty electronics shopper will always choose last month’s new model or last years new model to save $‘s.

The increased capability of the newest and best makes is %1 better than the previous models but they try to capture the person that doesn’t care about price for at least %10 more price.

Hope this helps.

froogle is in beta but i found it to be very useful. glad i could point you in the right direction.

Some people prefer one brand to another, so that could be a reason for the price difference. More likely though is the warranty: the more expensive drive has a 5-year warranty, the cheaper one is only three years. I don’t know if the extra two years of warranty is worth $75 to you.

The real actual reason for that price difference is that the more expensive one is “enterprise-class” which means that it has a much better mean time before failure MTBF. You would want to buy this drive if you’re going to use it for servers or backups. Given the lifespan of the drive it might actually be cheaper in the long run if you need it to last that long. I suggest reading Google’s study of hard drives.

Honestly though unless you’re using it for backups I’d just go with the cheaper one.

@timtrueman There is acutally no difference in this case in MTBF. 1.2 million for WD and 1.2 for the Samsung. Of course Samsung could be lying.

You are right that the WD is enterprise-class, but the feature difference is the ability of the WD to work well in a rack environment will higher levels of vibration, higher operating temps, etc. MTBF numbers may be off though because ”there is not one unique definition for when a drive is faulty.”

Still no reason a consumer would want the Western Digital