Tech Support Guy banner
Status
Not open for further replies.

Buying new HDD

999 views 10 replies 3 participants last post by  dohteM 
#1 ·
Hey guys. I'm currently considering buying a couple of hard drives to upgrade my old ones. What I have in mind right now are these:

For The partition I install windows on: 300 Gb WD VelociRaptor 16 Mb buffer 10.000 RPM

http://store.westerndigital.com/sto...goryID.13228800/parid.13092500/catid.13094900

And for storage : 2 Tb WD Caviar Green 32 Mb buffer 7.200 RPM

http://store.westerndigital.com/sto...tegory.21536100/parid.13092500/catid.13094900

I've been using Western Digital for years and never had a major problem with them. If you guys know of any better products, let me know.
 
#2 ·
To get truly awesome performance, drop the raptor and spend $225 on an 80GB SSD. Install Win7 and your apps only. No data or games.

You're spending $200~240 on a to velociRaptor whose only leg up on the normal 3.5" desktop drives is half the latency.

http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/...arts/h2benchw-3.12-Read-Access-Time,1007.html

Some review: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/2tb-hdd-7200,2430-9.html Notice the Raptor is upper end, but is usually behind the latest drives. I've seen a real-world review somewhere (stopwatch to load OS, apps, scan virus, etc)

This SSD is 80GB, $225. More than enough space for a boot drive: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...67023&cm_re=x25-m_80gb-_-20-167-023-_-Product

Latency is less than 1ns, Random Read & writes are murder. Heres a chart: http://www.anandtech.com/show/2948/3

2TB drives are a bit on the dangerous side... higher than normal failure rates. Make sure you have a backup unit. Or go with some 1TB units.

With a good desktop setup, a SSD will boot Win7 in about 7~10sec. Look at the intel or a drive using Sandforce. Intel's drives have a good track record.
 
#3 ·
Thank you Compiler. Yes SSD drives are really good and I might get them instead, But I was looking at Hitachi website earlier and found some cool HDDs running at 15k rpm:

http://www.hitachigst.com/portal/site/en/products/ultrastar/15K600/

As for the 2TB hard drive, I really do need 2TB. This is what I have right now: 140GB 10krpm x1 - 1TB x2 - 1.5TB X2 - 2TB x1. And they are almost full so I'm gradualy upgrading them and losing the lower cap ones.
 
#4 ·
Faster the HD, hotter they get and the returns are not that great. No HD touches an SSD. And when it comes to huge data files (movies, music)... the need for a 15K RPM HD isn't really there. Such drives are for servers doing tons of IOPs.
 
#5 ·
And those 15K drives are SAS drives, you'd need a special and expensive controller to use them.

FYI, I have an older pair of 74GB Raptors that I've had trough 2 builds, they were fast for their time, but even in RAID their performance is rivaled by some new 7200RPM drives. SSD blow away even the newest VelociRaptors.

SSD is the future of drives because thats where the performance is, capacity is still low and expensive but having the 2TB will make that a non-issue.
 
#6 ·
Very well. I think I will get a SSD for my boot drive then. Still, I'm having difficulty choosing between them. I don't want alot of space, but I want the fastest thing in the market and according to these series of benchmarks that Compiler provided:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/2948/4

OCZ Vertex LE and two other OWC drives are pretty much the best in the business apparently, but quite expensive.

I might order the Intel X25-M that Compiler also mentioned:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...67023&cm_re=x25-m_80gb-_-20-167-023-_-Product
 
#7 ·
The intel drives have been on the market the longest, they are currently 2nd Gen (G2) and you know for certain it supports TRIM (required Win7 for native TRIM support). Many of the SSDs on the market do not support TRIM.

The PCMark score is handy, but mostly useless. What do those numbers mean to you? Its like comparing car engines and deciding to choose the car& engine that has the highest RPMs... but how fast can the car actually go? Real-world time is what counts.

The intel drives are NOT the fastest... but the TRIM, tools, reliability, price and Random performance puts it on the top of my list. The OWC mercury 50~100GB drives are promising... very high Random R/W... but where do you buy these? How much are they? newegg, tiger direct... none. And OCZs are also in the same boat, most Etailers have the lower end models in stock... TRIM is questionable.

But looking at this: http://www.anandtech.com/show/2948/2 intel has very slow Sequential writes, but its READs are near the top again.

At 80GB, its nowhere near as expensive as the 120~160GB drives on the market. You do need to plug in the drive and confirm its "BIOS" Firmware version... PC-Wizard will tell you without installing drivers. before formating ans using the intel drives..
1 - Make sure you load the latest FIRMWARE (CD-R required, takes about 1-2 minutes)
2 - Turn on AHCI (not helpful with HDs, but SSDs - its a good idea, recommended)
3 - Install the OS and your APPs. Turn off indexing and then System restore once you have done the updates and the system is running good.

On my desktop, my Win7 partition is about 50GB in size. With the OS and ALL my apps, the space used it 12GB. When I made my backup mirror image of the partition, its under 5GB compressed. All my games and data files sit on a another partition. I don't have an SSD yet... $$$$. But I love using notebooks and desktops that do have them.

The last Intel SSD I bought were $300 and $290(OEM), 6+ weeks ago. Then I bought an off-brand version of the intel (same exact drive) for $240 - doesn't include the 3.5 adapter... but I used one from the retail intel-intel box. $225 is an excellent deal. About a year from now, an 80GB G3 should be about $123~150 :)
 
#9 ·
As I posted, retail version has the kit. The info is also on the new-egg link.

I'm about to order one for a client for his notebook he ordered. OEMs stick in any-old SSD drive which are usually cheap ones with junky cheap controller, no trim by Samsung. *sigh* they do very good with memory and Hard Drives, excellent with TVs and monitors, but with SSDs - they're garbage.
 
#10 ·
Hey, I've run full AV scans on some notebooks with those intel drives. It took about 2mins to complete. Back then they had hard drives, it used to take 16~22minutes to do the same thing. Very nice.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
You have insufficient privileges to reply here.
Top