1TB HD

I presently run both Black edition and Green Power models with a Vista dual boot set up on a GP model while the 64bit 7 is sitting on a Black edition. The two main internal storage drives are presently Black edition Sata III drives with the 64mb cache 6.0gb/s transfer rate on the Sata III bus however.

The host drive is the Sata II typically seen while Sata III is backward compatable for use. For several newer boards being seen out now however only Sata III ports are present. You may want to consider going with a Sata III drive if you plans to custom build a new case any time soon where the S3 ports are present.

As far as the Green Power models while Vista was only recently added back onto one those are best suited for storage devices typically being the more energy efficient rather then performance line as seen with the Blue/SE and Black edition or even RE models.

As far as brands Hitachi is more recent name and far from the best as far as quality when placed against the two leading contenders being Seagate and WD. I've been running WD drives since the 90s as well and only saw one stuffed when loaned out to someone who never cleaned up his case and simply cooked the then 6yr. old drive!

(Someone known here got stuffed when buying a few hitachi drives apparently or so was the complaint heard)

Aint got a clue said:

i looked at the Western Digital Caviar Green but i have heard they are really slow and are unreliable. ideally i need something fast with good access time. There doesn't seem 2 be very many options though.

I have a 2TB WD Green for storage and I wouldn't call it slow or unreliable

Another drive worth considering are the Samsung F3. Fast, reliable and they run very cool in comparison to the WD's and Seagates.

smarteyeball said:

Aint got a clue said:

i looked at the Western Digital Caviar Green but i have heard they are really slow and are unreliable. ideally i need something fast with good access time. There doesn't seem 2 be very many options though.

I have a 2TB WD Green for storage and I wouldn't call it slow or unreliable

Another drive worth considering are the Samsung F3. Fast, reliable and they run very cool in comparison to the WD's and Seagates.

I wish newegg had had the summer sale going on for the next day on the 2tb GP model back when getting the 1tb GP drives instead. That was before deciding on the present board and buying a pair of 1tb 6.0gb/s drives and simply setting up a pair of those.

When first installing 7 onto the Sata III version of the Blaack edition 1tb drives and later seeing 7 go onto the Sata II version no noticable performance difference was seen for that while access time for storage may tend to be slightly more responsive then seen with the GPs. That's nothing to write home about however.

ssri said:

Mellon Head said:

I have a couple of the WD 1 TB Greens and they work just fine for data backup and storage. Mine run at 5400 to 7200 it seems, but I don't know how the speed shifting works. Data retrieval is only slightly slower than my two 500 GB Blacks.

I stopped using Seagates altogether a couple of years ago, but I've been using WD drives for over ten and never had a failure.

Funny, I've been using Samsungs and WDs for the past seven years. I can say that the Samsungs have held up well, whereas I've had WDs (3) with bad sectors, corrupted FATs and outright failure, go figure.

I've never tried a Samsung, but I've heard some good things about them.

With respect to the Western Digital Caviar Green versus the Caviar Black....the main point of the green drives is power savings. However, I think from reading that the power savings comes down to about 6 watts of power....which compared to the rest of everything in the computer is kinda the equivalent of a "fart in a hurricane".

The other thing with the "green" series drives is that you would expect them to be cheaper. But typically at NewEgg, the drives are usually within $20 of each other....1 might be $79 and the other might be $99. Probably compared to the rest of your components, that's not a ton of savings either.

Personally, I would go with the Black series. #1) You get a bit more performance #2). More importantly...you get 5 years of warranty rather than 3. To me, that makes it the clear winner.