Need new hard drive - WD or Hitachi

[Sneak]

I need more hard drive space and want to add 250 gigs. This system of mine will be upgraded sometime after the first part of the year, new Mobo, CPU and memory. So for sure the drive needs to be SATA II so it will actually be faster with the new Mobo. Right now my system has only SATA I.

This new drive will be used for MP3's and Games and some storage of things. Have been browsing around here reading and reading reviews. The WD 2500KS with 16 meg buffer seems like the ticket but the Hitache SATA II 250 gig drive with 8 megs seems fairly highly rated. The Hitachi is the newer one and I can't remember the model number. Seems to have native SATA II and NCQ.

Is the WD drive Native SATA or bridged? Does that really matter? and as far as the WD not having NCQ, I understand that is only good on a networked drive and in my stand along machine will mean nothing. Do I have that right?

Right now am not interested in Maxtor or Seagate. Any comments and info would help. I do wish that WD had a larger Raptor out there but it seems that will be next year and only 150 megs. I have two Raptors right now in Raid 0 and they are fine.

[DougLite]

For media storage, it really doesn't matter how the drive performs. I would consider factors such as power consumption/heat, noise, and cost before performance in this application.

WD has the coolest drives, although Hitachi is very close here.
Samsung makes the quietest drives, although once again Hitachi is pretty close. Seagate can be, depending on what AAM mode a Barracuda ships in.
Cost wise, Maxtor and Hitachi have the only new 250GB SATA drives below $110 on ZZF right now.

I think you'll be quite pleased with a 250GB T7K250. Those knuckleheads at StorageReview ran the 7K400 with TCQ on, which explains my panicking over Hitachi performance when the TB4 previews were released. The results with TCQ off made Hitachi drives look a lot better performance wise. Need to change the Buyer's Guide :o Also, the T7K250 should be even better than the 7K400, as it holds the line on seek performance while simultaneously increasing dnesity, something Seagate wasn't able to do :mad:

[dandragonrage]

Samsung. WD drives are extremely unreliable in my experience.

[Dr. DVS 1]

Samsung. WD drives are extremely unreliable in my experience.

WD. Samsung-anything-with-a-motor-in-it is unreliable in my experience (20+ years) ;)

[davidlem]

ALL drives are extremely unreliable! Just when you get comfortable because your drive(s) has been running without trouble - BOOM! Without backups nothing is safe.

Like Doug said, for what you're doing it really doesn't matter.

[HDBox2d1]

Western Digital has been treating me fine.
Until this month i have Always used Hitachi drives.
We will see i guess.