Hard Drive Advice

Hi Folks.

With prices being so low at the moment I was thinking of getting another hard drive and would like some advice.
At the moment I have 2xSamsung HD501LJ drives.
One is half full of my Vistax64/Windows7 7127 dual boot plus a growing collection of games.
The other has all my music, photos and movies on it and is over half full and growing rapidly.

So I'll need more space eventually. Also I notice that my HDDs let me down in WEI.
So would a faster and/or larger drive see any speed improvements?
I have been looking at a Samsung 1TB Ecogreen F1 HD103UI which is a great price.
I could use that for my OSs and as my primary drive and use the other two for storage and backup.
What do people think or recommend?
Would a faster drive for the OSs show any speed improvements in reality?

Thanks, John:)

PS I have an AsusP5Q pro

Thanks for your replies people.

It certainly looks like a solid state drive would be the way to go but the pricing structure is chaotic and very expensive.
I can pay £300+for a 30GB SSD. I can pay £300+ for a 80GB SSD or even a 120GB SSD.
Also the read/write times vary widely and don't seem to be price related.

I can get the Samsung traditional HDD I mentioned in my op for £70+

Do you not think I'd see any difference if I went for a traditional type of HDD? I think SSds are out of my price range at the moment.

Thanks again, John:)

Depends what you use your machine for. If you play games on it then dont go for the ecogreen. But I do recommend the samsung 1Tb drives, I have 3 and they're fast. My supplier recently knocked the price down still further to under £60. Incridible value considering what such a drive would cost 10 years ago.

Hi,

The Samsung spinpoint are quick drives, but heavy on the juice.
They are also good value per gb.

PCPRO June issue recommended the Seagate 7200.11 640gb as the best for a combination of performance and power consumption - but they are pricey for the size. 6 watts at idle.

WD Caviar Green is noticeably slower - but not too bad for a drive with green credentials - 4watts at idle. Also good value per gb.

Not sure about the Samsung Ecogreen 1tb - there will certainly be a performance penalty.

They did test the Samsung Ecogreen 500gb, it is a little quicker than the WD Green 500gb , but much slower than the larger Seagate 7200.11 640gb and only 1 watt saved.

Thanks Guys, much food for thought.

It looks like SSDs are the only way of making a real improvement in performance.
Although I noticed that Swarfega has a couple of Raptor drives in some kind of RAID array. Do they make a lot of difference?
I'm not familiar with raid but I suppose I could learn. Also I've seen a Velociraptor drive that is supposedly very fast indeed.
My usual retailer (Scan) has a 74GB Raptor for £73 and a 150GB Velociraptor for £122.
What about one of these as my system drive. Would that be worth doing?

My storage issue is not that pressing, I still have plenty of room on my two Samsungs and I suppose I could just wait or get the newer, faster, F1 1TB drive.
I'm tempted to do this soon as I feel that prices are bottoming out now and will go up as the economy picks up.
On the other hand SSDs will certainly drop as the technology becomes more commonplace.

Oh, Captain, I can access Newegg online here but with the exchange rate plus VAT tax I don't think I'd see much difference. I attach a couple of screen snips from Scans website. As you can see the prices are very high and I can't understand why they differ drastically for what looks to be similar components.

Thanks to you all for your input, john:)