Advice for 2nd Hard Drive

[Stevarian]

Hi, it has been a long time since my last visit here, so I am definitely out of the loop on current hardware.

My current system has been working well, but now my 640 GB Western Digital drive is starting to get filled up, and I am thinking of adding a second drive...for adding some new games, storage etc.

I was thinking of something around $100 or so, that has decent performance and storage. I see several good comments about the WD Black 1TB...but read a review that they are noisy. I have tended to buy WD in the past....but am open, as long as the drive is reliable. Thanks!

 

[bAMtan2]

if you have anything you want to keep, first backup what you have. so you need one disk for that. then, if you want more space, you can get a third disk, or make the second one big enough. if you care about the stuff on the new disk(s), you also need an extra disk to backup those. yes it's a pain, but yes it's less pain than recovering from data loss.

the WD black clicks louder, more like a coffee machine. but you dont need a 7200rpm drive unless you know you do.

all hard drives suck and break, so don't plan on getting a reliable one.

if you don't want to spend much money or effort, get the cheapest 2tb, make one big partition, and use macrium free to make a full image of your main disk each week.

 

[Stevarian]

Thanks...I pretty much have stuck with 7200 rpm drives my last couple of builds, even though I don't necessarily stress my machines anymore...I used to overclock...the Hitachi 2tb 7k3000, sounds like a good drive and newegg has for $139....about the same price as the 1tb WD black....

 

[pwrusr]

I'm going to recommend a 2TB low power drive for storage and use your current drive for a boot drive.
Alternatively you could buy a SSD for a FAST boot drive and have a second slower BIG drive... That's my current setup in my rig. 256GB SSD with a 2TB 5900RPM Seagate. I find this setup to be the best personally.

 

[Stevarian]

I will likely do an SSD when I build a new system, probably later this year, but for now I just need something to tide me over...it sounds like a big, low power drive would work. Would the lower speed make much difference in things like MMO's like Guild Wars 2? Or Diablo 3? Those would be the games I will be installing in the near future....

 

[pwrusr]

I will likely do an SSD when I build a new system, probably later this year, but for now I just need something to tide me over...it sounds like a big, low power drive would work. Would the lower speed make much difference in things like MMO's like Guild Wars 2? Or Diablo 3? Those would be the games I will be installing in the near future....

Use the BIG drive as your storage drive and the smaller faster drive for OS boot & Programs drive.

 

[westrock2000]

The current 1TB+ drives actually have very good performace due to the density of the platters (head doesn't have to move very far). You will have some latency due to heads moving around. Lower RPM drives will be a little worse, and you'll notice it the most when you start doing multiple things at once. This is where an SSD shines the most. For instance encoding a video, copying a folder from one computer to another while playing music on iTunes and surfing the web can be a little rough on a platter drive.

But even just normal run of the mill 1.5-2TB drives that are around $100 can easily transfer at 100MB+ per sec which is usually plenty (and can saturate a gigabit network).

Small file transfer is still going to only be 1-2MB per sec, but such is the life of a platter drive.

But if your 640GB is several years old from back when they needed 3 or 4 platter to get 640GB, then any current 1TB+ drive will be an upgrade as now they use 1TB per platter.