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#31
I've heard good and bad about all of them.
From my SF specs:
"Hard Drives Samsung F3 1TB (3), Several others - WD, Seagate, Hitachi, ... "
Personally i wouldn't buy/trust a refurbished HD, but maybe that's just me.
I also tend to "retire" a HD before it dies, due to increased capacity and lower cost.
The flood price increase has put a halt to that for now...
Totally agree
I was looking into getting some multi TB HD's when the flood hit and prices skyrocketed.
I'm still waiting for pre flood prices, but I'm not in a "failure" situation...
For HTPC, seems there is never enough capacity
I have a 640gb and I don't even use 200gb of it. So the 500gb would be fine, but who knows for how long. I'm upgrading my computer completely so I'll probably end up playing more games.
I've had pretty much every brand of hard drive fail on me, but the most that have died on me in the last 10 years is Western Digital.
Now, I am not saying WD is bad since you have to factor in the amount of WD drives I have bought vs other brands.
I've bought around 50 WD drives in the past 10 years as well as 2 Seagates, and 3 Samsungs. WD is my personal drive of choice, but I'll buy a Seagate if the price is good.
I run my system 24/7 with all 6 Hard drives spinning. System used to have 9 Hard drives, but I was buying 2TB drives when they were on sale and replacing the smaller drives.
I recently had to remove a Seagate 1.5TB drive when I installed the Crucial 128GB SSD since I only have 8 SATA ports: 1 SSD, 6 HD, 1 DVD-RW.
Right now, the 128GB Crucial seems to be on sale quite often for $99. It was $99 yesterday at Buy.com, but is now $125 today.
Check Amazon, Newegg, and other retailers if you are planning on shopping online for one.
Amazon currently has the 256GB Crucial on sale for $239 with Transfer kit (the drive alone was recently on sale for $199, which is a helluva price, sold out before I could order one), I ordered one yesterday along with a cheap SATA PCI-e card so I don't have to remove another hard drive.
I'll be putting some games and apps on the 256GB
The sweet spot for pricing right now is the 128 GB drive size. That's more than enough for the OS and your applications.
There are SSD sales going on at Newegg nearly all the time.
60 gigs is enough for Windows and all apps for most people. 80 or 120 would be big enough for virtually everybody. I use only 29 gigs out of 80 available on my SSD.
Games can go on a spinning drive with no performance hit.
Intel, Samsung, and Crucial are 3 good SSD brands.