Good article. Indid. the WD1002FBYS(FE3) drive is 80% more expensive than the WD1001FALS(Black) drive, so the choice is obvious.

I appreciated this article very much because I have begun to size up HDDs for a home movie server. This is one HDD application in which the big drives really show their worth. At 40 Blu-ray movies per TB, it is clear that one would have to think in terms of a four 2TB drive server to store 300 Blu-rays, plus assorted music and other files, using current Blu-ray file compression standards. I wish you would add similar measurements for the few 500 GB per platter drives just now on the market from WD, Seagate and Samsung to those you reported in this article. My goal is to have a server that runs as coolly and quietly as possible while serving at least three simultaneous streams.

A very timely article since I am running out of space on my 1 TB external hdd and I need something fast for an internal setup. I will be looking to grab me a WD1002FBYS though the Black looks quite good as well.

OK, so here I am asking the same thing - are numbers from this article comparable to numbers from 640GB article?

1TB WD FBYS is way too expensive for me, and Hitachi ain't available yet, so I'm looking at WD FALS drive now.

But compared to WD Blue/Black 640GB drives (WD6400AAKS/WD6401AALS) it's a bit more expensive (per GB) and seems that it's still slower than those two.

So can someone just tell me, when looking at performance vs price-per-GB, would it better to buy 1TB WD1001FALS or one of the 640GB WD drives? If it's mostly the same, than I guess I'll get 2x 640GB, just cos it's still two drives..if one goes out..

Actually every single drive in the review is obsolete. 500GB platters kill them on mfg. cost, power, heat, noise, speed. They just win all around. None of those drives use 500GB platters, which at this time are sold only in a few new 1.5 and 2.0 TB drives from WD and Samsung. They should eventually roll out at 2-platter 1TB version which would mop up everything in the review.

Look forward to a review of 1.5, 2.0, and 1.0TB drives that use 500GB platters.

It's very sad the behaviour of th Samsung drive. Can you ask Samsung a comment?
I have a lot of Samsung drives, with different Firmwares, can you please ask them for the program to upgrade or downgrade them? I tried but they refused to give me unless i call but I'm not a good English speaker (not even writer)
Which where the two firmwares? And for the 640GB also.