HDD Recommendations

[seekermeister]

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?

 

[DocBrown]

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

 

[harpua]

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.

 

[ignatzatsonic]

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.

 

[harpua]

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.

 

[seekermeister]

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 W7 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 W7 or Linux.

 

[seekermeister]

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.

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.

 

[icyitscold]

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 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

 

[DocBrown]

Here is my SATA Samsung 1tb HD storage on x64 box been running since Dec 2008 from early Beta Win7 to present with Win7 x64 Ult.

 

[Darryl Licht]

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!

 

[seekermeister]

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!

Thanks, but for reasons that I shall not go into, I never do business with Newegg.

 

[DocBrown]

How about Fry's Electronics

Fry's Electronics | Internal Bare Drives=

 

[seekermeister]

I have nothing against Frys, but that HD is refurbished and only has a 16mb cache.

 

[DocBrown]

I have nothing against Frys, but that HD is refurbished and only has a 16mb cache.

That was only the first one in the list, read all of there HD's available on the site !

 

[poptart]

I have read through these posts and am still not sure what to do.

I would like to replace my current drive with a bigger one.

I have attached system information.

Any ideas?

 

[pparks1]

Thanks, but for reasons that I shall not go into, I never do business with Newegg.

That's too bad...but I guess all of us can have bad experiences. Personally I almost exclusively buy everything from NewEgg as my experiences have all been good (except for one...but it was really my fault in the end).

 

[pparks1]

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.

Western Digital and Seagate are usually the brands that I purchase. I've been diehard Seagate for a few years...but recently had an issue with the new 7200.12 1TB drive in my new box (averaged about 35ms access time). It seemed to be an issue with just that drive in that box. In other boxes the drive was fine. Other drives in the new box are fine. So, I just moved my Seagate over to my Linux machine and put a Western Digital Caviar Black in my new box.

The seagate was faster overall in benchmarks. The W.D. has the 5 year warranty.

The new 2TB Caviar Black is faster than a Velociraptor with 6x the capacity according to Maximum PC.

 

[DocBrown]

I have read through these posts and am still not sure what to do.

I would like to replace my current drive with a bigger one.

I have attached system information.

Any ideas?

Poptarts HD

PRODUCT NAME
BARRACUDA 7200.9 160GB UATA/100
PRODUCT CODE
ST3160212A
MANUFACTURER'S CODE
ST3160212A
EAN-CODE
MANUFACTURER
SEAGATE
PRODUCT GROUP
HARD DISCS
PRIMARY COUNTRY
Universal
CAPACITY (GB)
160 GB
HARD DISK RPM
7200 rpm
CACHE
2048 kB
SEEK TIME
11/12 ms (read/write)
EXTERNAL DATA TRANSFER RATE
100 Mbytes/s
INTERNAL DATA TRANSFER RATE
65 Mbytes/sec
FORM FACTOR (Hard discs)
3,5"
HEIGHT
1"
AMOUNT DISKS
2
CONNECTIVITY
Ultra ATA/100
SPECIFICATIONS
S.M.A.R.T - Y
WEIGHT NETTO (g)
690
DIMENSIONS (H x W x D cm)
2,61 x 10,16 x 14,699
INSTALLATION TYPE
INTERNAL
In Stock
NotSKU
PERIOD OF ONSITE WARRANTY:
-
PERIOD OF WARRANTY
3 Y
PACKAGE SIZE
20
PALLET SIZE
800



This is an IDE HD, do you have any SATA HD connections on your motherboard ? Make & Model of your motherboard ?

Help us help you better by filling in your system specs info.


" Doc "

 

[DocBrown]

PopTart System Specs :

OS Name Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium
Version 6.1.7600 Build 7600
Other OS Description Not Available
OS Manufacturer Microsoft Corporation
System Name POPTART
System Manufacturer GATEWA
System Model W3503
System Type X86-based PC
Processor Intel(R) Celeron(R) D CPU 3.33GHz, 3333 Mhz, 1 Core(s), 1 Logical Processor(s)
BIOS Version/Date Intel Corp. GC11010M.15A.0009.2006.0420.1045, 4/20/2006
SMBIOS Version 2.4
Windows Directory C:\Windows
System Directory C:\Windows\system32
Boot Device \Device\HarddiskVolume2
Locale United States
Hardware Abstraction Layer Version = "6.1.7600.16385"
User Name Poptart\Steve
Time Zone Eastern Daylight Time
Installed Physical Memory (RAM) 2.00 GB
Total Physical Memory 1.86 GB
Available Physical Memory 1.00 GB
Total Virtual Memory 3.72 GB
Available Virtual Memory 2.78 GB
Page File Space 1.86 GB
Page File C:\pagefile.sys

 

[DocBrown]

How Big of a Hard Drive do you want or how much money do you want to spend ?


There are a lot of options, you can choose ?

" DoC "