Need a new hard drive - can anyone recommend?

Hi,

First of all, let me apologise for posting this here, but the PC review forum is like a ghost town. I need a new hard drive for my PC, because the old one is currently in the process of biting the dust. Since it's generally the same technology, with the form factor being the only major difference I thought some of you might be willing to share your expertise.

Anyway, I need a drive that is >500GB, with good seek times and reasonable cache size. It's going to be used for programs, games and media storage because I have my OS installed on a dedicated 60 gig SSD.

SSD drives are probably out of my price range. I just saw a post above about hybrid drives but know nothing about this technology and am not sure how affordable it is.

So far I've looked at a couple of websites in the UK and it looks like a 2TB HDD can be picked up for around £70. I am willing to import from the US if need be.

A big than you to anyone who can recommend a particular make or model, together with a short justification.

Thanks for your time.

 

I recommend the WD Greens. Like the WD200EARS or whatever it's called.

Usually on sale for $~80 and good performance with 64mb cache. It's slow at 5400RPM but you said it's for storage so that's a good fit.

 

Go with WD 2tb Ears or samsung F4 2tb, both are 5400rpm drives, low cost and ideal for pure storage.

For programs, games and apps I woul probably go with WD black caviar 2tb or samsung F3 1tb.

 

I'm looking at these two right now:

Spinpoint F3

WD Caviar Black

They appear to be more or less the same, with the buffer size in favour of WD (64mb vs 32 mb) . I'm not sure if it justifies the price, which is some 2/3 higher than the Samsung.

Also, the Samsung interface says 'SATA', while the WD is SATA 600 - are these the same? One of the reviews for the WD says "will have to buy another motherboard that has sata 3, just to see the full speed of this hard-drive"....

 

Yeah looks like the Spinpoint is a SATA II and the WD is a Sata III. The Sata III will be faster but only if you have a SATA III interface. Otherwise it will default to SATA II speeds. Better off with the WD since it's more futureproof.

EDIT: oh wow, didn't realize the big price difference. But again, it's still more futureproof.

 

can a HDD saturate SATA2 interface speed ?

 

Out of price I would go with the samsung f3, when it was released was among the fastest 7200 rpm drives, and its cheaper, there are faster drives like 2tb black, but more platters, also more nosie, more expensive.

 

I have a 1 Tb spinpoint F3 in my desktop and it is very fast (although it can't match my momentus XT for startup times). It has an average read speed over 110 mb/s. However, there is no reason to get a SATA III platter based drive, as they can't currently use all of the bandwidth. Only SSDs really benefit from SATA III.

 

Nope. Nope it can't. But something tells me you knew that.

@OP for with a Spingpoint 1TB, if I am not mistaken it should be one of the fastest 7200 RPM hard drive available on the market.

 

I have been happy with the 500GB F3 Samsung drives in the past. Recently picked up some 7200.12 500GB Seagate drives and have been impressed with the speed (reliability is something else...). Crystalmark shows 115mbps read and write.