Hard disk recommendations (2TB) SATA III

[Night Hawk]

The discussion is not really about whether to buy SATA 2 or SATA 3. For the most part, sata 2 drives are not available. Or if they are, they are priced higher than the sata 3 drives. It's about which sata 3 drive to buy.

As far as motherboards go, sata 3 ports are compatible with sata 2 drives, so i find it strange why motherboard manufacturers don't just put all sata 3 ports on the boards.

Apparently you haven't been looking for board lately. Most newer boards coming out now see nothing but Sata III ports. When going through various AM2/AM2+/AM3 as well as other AM3/AM3+ models I've been finding most seeing only Sata III

True. Most drives I installed have lasted 3 years. I typically replace drives at least every three years, but that is mostly due to increasing capacity needs.

And finally I've made a decision - I'm going to get a ST3000DM001 - Just one - and replace one WD15EADS drive. A 1.5TB capacity increase, and at a cost of only 3 extra watts. I've gone through all my data and identified what really needs the performance, and I can fit that on a 3TB drive. This means it will add less than $8 per year to my power bill.

The WD drives I've been putting in various builds over the years are still in use. Drive life depends largely on how well you maintain the system they are used on like keeping temps down as well as keeping the OS running smoothy to avert things like hard boots.

WD used to see a 5yr. limited on their drives and now sees a 3yr. limited for most models being mostly sata. Seagate offers a 1yr. limited and is generally priced higher making you wonder which is the better deal.

I was considering a WD Black Edition 2.5tb as an additional internal drive to store system images and VMs on to keep the second OS drive free but wasm't too impressed by what the next version will be bringing and opted to run a much smaller OS part for another OS where I can still run VMs there. I frowned on the 3tb GP model for internal use.

By creating the much smaller root and swap partitions for one project the rest of the drive can still hold a few images solving that one. But as one mechanical engineer advised backing things up on several smaller drives in a bit more reliable then having only one or two larger capacity drives to some extent.

Anyways let us know how that works out for you.

 

[TanyaC]

Apparently you haven't been looking for board lately. Most newer boards coming out now see nothing but Sata III ports. When going through various AM2/AM2+/AM3 as well as other AM3/AM3+ models I've been finding most seeing only Sata III

Yes, you'd be right for AMD boards. The last time I considered an AMD board was around the turn of the century - perhaps even longer. And when I was fixing computers for customers I never sold one AMD board (unless a customer specifically asked for it), and only ever replaced one.

However, I have recently bought some Z77 Extreme 4 ASRock motherboards when I upgraded some CPU's to I7-3770K's. At the time I looked at all of the ASUS, Gigabyte and ASrock offerings, and I don't recall seeing any that were sata 3 only. But then, I may have missed one, as I was focused on the "absence" of graphics.

Lol, could it be that Intel boards are lagging behind... Errr... sorry, don't want to start an AMD Vs Intel discussion.. I'm getting off topic.. Sorry.

 

[Night Hawk]

Gigabyte was one that took the lead on seeing a pair of S3 ports when Sata III capable models were first coming out. I was through with one brand of board and was looking over the present board for seeing just two S3 ports. After that when looking to replace a dead board on the last build back in 2010 some of the latest out then had just started seeing Sate III without any Sata II ports.

If you look at the latest AM3+ boards the vendors are now stocking you'll see most are simply Sata III. But this for the time being seems to be for the newer AMD boards. The ICore 7 and other Intel models looked over will still tend to see 4 S2 and may have upto 6 S3 ports while all still see the S2 present on them.

 

[vaidas3]

I am fond of the Samsung F4 drives. They are great for media storage and are surprisingly fast.
I've got 3 or 4 of them in my machine,

its sad that samsung no more manufactures HDDs they sold their HDD business to seagate..

i think only two players left in HDD segment seagate and wd.. less competition is bad thing.

 

[Night Hawk]

Hitachi is another more recent entry in the ball park as far as drive manufacturers. Hewlett Packard must have drives being made for them with their own stamp on them. HGST, IBM, Lenovo, Axiom, Cisco Systems, fujitsu, Iomega, LaCie, Maxtor?!(Still in business?! horrifying! ), Promise Technologies, Quatum, Ricoh, Toshiba, and then Samsung, WD, Seagate comprise just about the full list.

Note several only produce external drives usually rebranding someone's else to stick inside an external casing of their own. Others are mainly laptop drive producers or simply having them made for their desktop/laptop line-ups. The reasin you hear about WD and Seagate more then any of these others is from custom case builders who simply choose a brand they order.

 

[Zepher]

Quantum, Maxtor, and Samsung were bought by Seagate.
Hitachi bought IBM's disk division and was recently bought by Western Digital.
Not sure if Fujitsu was bought out, but right now there are only 2 drive manufacturers, 3 if Fujitsu is still by itself.

All of the others in your list use one of the above manufacturers.

Edit: Fujitsu sold its drive business to Toshiba, which only makes enterprise and laptop drives.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_defunct_hard_disk_manufacturers

 

[Night Hawk]

As I was saying many simply rebrand drives as their own for say external drives with their own labeling and for OEMs like HP you know already they don't make their own drives! What have you always seen in a new HP?

Generally a WD drive is typical with them as well as Dell and others. Packard Bell always ran with Seagate as one old name there. The new startup companies as well as older companies that didn't keep up are simply bought out. CompaQ bought out by HP, DEC by Ashton, and so forth.