PC World has a comparison between Western Digital and Seagate, comparing their internal, external and home theatre products:
When it comes to storage, Western Digital and Seagate are perhaps the two most recognisable brands in the market. They rival each other in nearly every segment of the storage market and try to outdo each other with innovations in ease of use and power efficiency. We’ve pitched these two storage giants against each other and taken a look at some of the key differences between their products.
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External Storage
External storage is great for backing up personal and corporate data, as well as for transporting large amounts of information from one computer to another. The better choice in this case is a matter of who provides the best security, largest capacities and best choice of connectivity.
Portable
Western Digital and Seagate both offer a variety of pocket external hard drives with differences in capacity and connectivity. We prefer the book-like design on Western Digital’s My Passport range to the FreeAgent Go case. However, unless you need a FireWire 800 connection we would pick the Maxtor BlackArmor (Maxtor is a subsidiary of Seagate). This Maxtor portable hard drive provides government-grade encryption to ensure your data doesn’t get into the wrong hands. We are yet to see anything from Western Digital to match this level of security.
Desktop
Western Digital wins out when it comes to larger capacities, offering its My Book Studio Edition II with 4TB of storage in either a RAID 0 or RAID 1 configuration, along with plenty of connectivity. By contrast, the best Seagate can muster is 2TB of storage from the single-drive FreeAgent Desk. Though Seagate’s offering excelled in our USB 2.0 file transfer tests, the eSATA port on the My Book Studio Edition II provides nearly double the throughput of the FreeAgent Desk.
Network-attached storage
Like solid-state drives, NAS devices appear somewhat of an afterthought for Seagate and Western Digital. Still, both companies compete in this market, with Western Digital’s Sharespace and Seagate’s BlackArmor NAS 440 going head to head. Though undeniably uglier, the BlackArmor 440 NAS device is ultimately the better choice of the two, providing better connectivity and configuration options compared to Western Digital’s SMB-focussed NAS device.
Winner: Seagate
Western Digital rules the coop when it comes to the larger external hard drives, but Seagate’s pocket hard drive and NAS devices provide better security and configuration options over the competition.
