Windows 7 - HDD Recommendations

I need a couple of new HDs for a secondary rig that I'm equipping, and that should be simple enough, but when browsing the choices, I start getting confused. This is primarily due to the pricing of various sizes are so close together. For instance, I can get a new SG 500GB like I have now for ~$60, but a new SG 1.5TB for ~$99, and that is after only a very quick search.

Perhaps it's a no brainer, but when looking at the larger drives, with low prices, I get to wondering if there is some other factor to consider? If I recall, there is a problem with booting to a HD of 2TB or more, but what about 1.5TB?

I always get the best buy for the money at the largest storage size.

But make sure it is compatible with your Bios & motherboard, IDE & Sata connections.

Plus prices keep getting lower & storage size keeps getting bigger

And consider the speed (RPM) of the drive and the size of the cache on the drive, to make sure you are comparing apples to apples. Slower drives of a given size are usually cheaper, obviously, than their faster counterparts.

Personally, I would love to get a solid state drive but I'm going to have to wait quite a while longer until prices and capacity on those get a lot more reasonable.

I bought a 1.5 "green" Western Digital about 3 weeks ago. It's working fine. 99.99 at the time thru new egg. The particular model I got was WD15EADS-00P8B0. The 00P8B0 means it has only 3 platters, rather than the customary 4 found in earlier models. This helps it maintain pretty good speed, even though it isn't 7200 rpm.

It has 32 mb cache.


I tested its speed using HD Tune and compared it to the Western Digital 640 gig 2 platter drivei, whcih was about the fastest 7200 rpm drive on the market only 18 months ago.

The 1.5 TB drive's average transfer rate is 86% of the 640 gig drive's result.

The 1.5 TB drive's burst rate is 92% of the 640 gig drive's result.

The 640 has a slightly faster access time: 12.0 vs 13.6

The green drive uses maybe 2/3 the power of the "black" WD drives.

The WD 1.5 runs several degrees cooler in my case and is quieter than the drive it replaced.

All in all, no complaints yet. You will hear people say they aren't as fast as 7200 rpm drives, but it isn't noticeable for most uses. It is noticeably faster than 7200 rpm drives from 2005 or 2006 were.

Sounds pretty nice.

I got a SG 1.5 GB 7200 RPM external USB 2.0 for my laptop to store media files and backup images about 6 months ago on sale at Costco for ~$116, including tax. The USB 2.0 interface slows it down quite a bit but it is adequately fast for my purposes. I certainly wouldn't want to have to run my system off it though. The thing I'm most happy about is the reasonable price for fairly massive storage and that so far at least, it has been reliable, despite a lot of negative user reports on Newegg.

If only for storage, that is adequate, but the last that I heard, the backup software on the SG external was incompatible with XP x64, so I'm assuming that would also be true on Windows 7 x64.

In any case, I'm not looking for an external HD...just a regular old internal SATA. Although I would use it for storage, I also want it to be able to boot either Windows 7 or Linux.

I realize that a lot of people would disagree with me, but I've never had very good luck with WD HDs. I'll probably stick with SG. The only reason that I might consider a WD is to go with the black edition, for the longer warranty period.

I got a 120GB ocz solid series SSD off ebay for $150 put it in my laptop and loaded windows 7 onto it and never looked backed. The speed is incredible and the drive I have is supposedly at the lower end in terms of ssd performance! worth it

Here is my SATA Samsung 1tb HD storage on x64 box been running since Dec 2008 from early Beta Windows 7 to present with Windows 7 x64 Ult.

Newegg, has a killer deal on a 750 GB SATA WD Caviar Black 7200RPM, 32MB Cache HDD... Newegg.com - Western Digital Caviar Black WD7501AALS 750GB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Hard Drive -Bare Drive
The Caviar Black is one of the better performing mechanical HDD's out right now, and free shipping is a nice bene on top of the nice price!