[H]ard|Forum [H]ard|Drive buying guide

General considerations
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Quiet
Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 Perpendicular Recording <400gb
200/250/320/400GB PATA/SATA
Pros: Competitve pricing at those capacity points, and quieter than even the Samsung P series
Cons: Unknown reliability at this time, although Seagate is generally known for this. Perpendicular recording is still a new technology

Honorable Mention
Samsung SpinPoint P series
P80 80/120/160GB PATA/SATA
P120 200/250GB PATA/SATA
Pros: Some of the quietest drives available, often cheaper than competition, solid 3 year warranty.
Cons: Limited maximum capacity of 250GB. Slower than flagship 7K drives. Samsung does NOT offer advance warranty replacement.



Performance

Western Digital Raptor
WD1500ADFD / WD1500AHFD 150GB10K SATA
Pros : WD's latest iteration of the Raptor achieves a 150GB capacity, uses native SATA electronics, and delivers the best storage performance money can buy, blowing past all ATA comers by comfortable margins and even defeating all 15K SCSI drives in three of SR's five single user tests. Prices have dropped significantly since release, with average price around $250, and sales to even as low as $200.
Cons : You can buy more drive for your money, storage-wise. it is still a SCSI-like drive with <5.0ms seeks, and the deep rumble is not for everyone. In terms of price/gigabyte, it holds a slight premium over the WD740GD, but for the extra speed it is well worth it.

Honorable Mention
Western Digital Raptor
WD740ADFD 74GB 10K SATA
Pros : This latest iteration of the 74gb Raptor, based on the 150gb Model, is the fastest under $200 SATA drive available, excellent 5 year warranty. A worth upgrade from any other drive, save the 150gb model, as these are delivering blazing desktop performance.
Cons : ~4x the cost per gigabyte of consumer drives and a limited capacity of 73GB. These may be unimportant if you are buying a second drive for storage, but if this is your only drive, this could be a concern.
Also, they are still significantly louder (think deep rumble instead of chirp or chatter) during seeks than most all 7200 RPM drives,

Raptor Performance Comparsion



All-Around, &#8805; 300GB
Western Digital Caviar
SE16 320/400GB SATA
Pros : Great performance thanks to 16MB buffer, with pricing more competitve as time goes by. . A RAID Editions are available in 400GB and 500gb, with an increased (3 vs 5 year) warrenty, and additional features for RAID sets. Not recommended for desktop use, however. Current Caviar drives are quite competitive in noise and heat output
Cons : These drives are NOT available on PATA. If you need PATA support, look to Seagate. Although they have the same Caviar moniker, the 400gb and 250gb models are significantly different in performance, due to the lower platter density on the 250gb model. Still bested in $/gig by current Maxtor and Seagate

Honorable Mention
Seagate Barracuda 7200.10
750gb and (soon) 960gb Perpendicular Recording drives.
What can I say? They are simply the highest capacity drives on the market right now. Not that great in terms of $/gig, but if you have density requirements, these are your kings.


All-Around, &#8804; 300GB
This catagory is a toss-up between the Maxtor Diamondmax 10, and the Seagate Barracuda 7200.10

Maxtor Diamondmax 10/Maxline III
250/300gb PATA/SATA
Pros: Still holding their own against the newer drives from Seagate and WD, and with price cuts to boot
Cons: These drives tend to run a bit hot, and will a bit higher power demands than other 250gb and 300gb drives.

Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 Perpendicular Recording <400gb
200/250/320 SATA
Pros: Very fast in this arena, quiet, and seagate has shown very competitive pricing for the lower capacity drives. All of the can be had for less than $100.
Cons: Unknown reliability at this time, although Seagate is generally known for this. Perpendicular recording is still a new technology. PATA appear to be more expensive in the channel



What happened to the Hitachi Deskstar?
It has not kept up with the price drops of Maxtor, or the very low introductory prices of the 7200.10 series from Seagate. Plain and simple, they are not attractive drives for the money currently.



Budget
Samsung Spinpoint P series 160gb
At $60 for a 160gb drive, this is the budget choice of the moment. Quiet and cool running, these are the drives you can drop in and forget when you're building a budget box for yourself or others.
As a budget drive, I see no cons for this choice.

Honorable mention
Hitachi Deskstar
7K80 80GB SATA
At around $40 as well, this delivers pretty darn good performance and a solid 3 year warranty. The 7K80 drive is 3gbps and NCQ ready. Really, I would rather save lunch money for a week and grab the double capacity drive for $20 more, but that's just me



NOT RECOMMENDED DRIVES
Some noticeably absent drives, and why they didn't make the list

Maxtor DiamondMax drives with 8MB buffers PATA/SATA
There are simply better drives. Maxtor has slashed warranties to one year on many of their desktop drives, you can buy faster drives in the same price range, and they typically exhibit a fairly high noise profile. These drives become competitive again if you can get them for less than 40 cents/GB (160GB for $40-$60 after rebate for example), but drives from Hitachi, Samsung, and Seagate are better assuming that price is roughly equal. Maxtor's 16MB drives deliver much better performance for little to no additional cost.

Western Digital Raptor
WD360GD 36gb 10K SATA
The 73GB Raptor's little brother is significantly slower (often merely equal to much cheaper per GB 7200RPM drives) and has only half the capacity, at a much higher cost per GB. To be avoided. No amount of RAID-0 will make these drives equal to a single 740GD or 1500ADFD.
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