Best Hard-drive for under $150

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sdat1333

Weaksauce
Joined
Feb 5, 2005
Messages
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Alright heres what I want:
Best performing HD under $150. SATA or SATAII Preferred. Raptor really isnt an option cause i cant live iwth just 36 Gb. At least 250gb storage preferred. Good warranty. And does 16mb cache help much?

Thanks
Sean
 
You will get two answers DiamondMax 10 16mb or WD2500KS 16mb. I'm currenlty debating betwen the two but I think I'm going to go with the WD because it seems to be quieter.
 
Supposedly it does. So far both drives I mentined come real close to the performance of a raptor. Read the buyers guide up top.
 
sdat1333 said:
Alright heres what I want:
Best performing HD under $150. SATA or SATAII Preferred. Raptor really isnt an option cause i cant live iwth just 36 Gb. At least 250gb storage preferred. Good warranty. And does 16mb cache help much?
Thanks
Sean
Click to expand...

You can get a 250GB Seagate 7200.8 for about $120. It's a great hard drive -- quiet, fast enough, and has an unbeatable warrenty. The 16MB of cache is pretty useless unless you're hung up over 5% here or there.

Personally, after having two Maxtors go bad in the last few years, I don't trust them. The way I figure it, I'll never notice a 5% performance difference in real life, but I sure as hell will notice it when the drive goes bad a day after the warrenty is up.
 
rhashem said:
You can get a 250GB Seagate 7200.8 for about $120. It's a great hard drive -- quiet, fast enough, and has an unbeatable warrenty. The 16MB of cache is pretty useless unless you're hung up over 5% here or there.

Personally, after having two Maxtors go bad in the last few years, I don't trust them. The way I figure it, I'll never notice a 5% performance difference in real life, but I sure as hell will notice it when the drive goes bad a day after the warrenty is up.
Click to expand...
You can buy the 16mb cahce ones for 125 from newegg and it also has 50GB more than the 7200.8.
 
well noise isnt a HUGE issue for me, i mean if it wont be louder than my PSU im fine
So between the WD and the maxtor, the maxtor actually looks better cause it has NCQ and its cheaper. But is the Caviar better quality? Or will the seagate beat both of them?
 
sdat1333 said:
But is the Caviar better quality? Or will the seagate beat both of them?
Click to expand...
Fill out the reliability survey on www.storagereview.com to gain access to the survey results if you want to know.
I could look it up for you, but I'd rather nudge you to punch in the info on your drives and improve the survey database by increasing the number of reports.
 
sdat1333 said:
well noise isnt a HUGE issue for me, i mean if it wont be louder than my PSU im fine
So between the WD and the maxtor, the maxtor actually looks better cause it has NCQ and its cheaper. But is the Caviar better quality? Or will the seagate beat both of them?
Click to expand...

NCQ is no real benefit to desktop users. The only area you would see an improvement from NCQ is in a multi user scenario where multiple people are accessing the hard drive at the same time. In other words its not something you want or need with a desktop hard drive.
 
You can get a 300GB Maxtor DiamondMax10 w/ 16MB buffer for $146 on ZZF, right here Awesome performance and capacity, but you will compromise on heat and noise. This is the cheapest 300GB drive on ZZF, the fact that it's also the fastest 300GB drive is mere icing on the cake. The Seagate 300GB goes for $159, a premium for thier five year warranty. You can pick up a MaxLineIII which couples the same best in class performance as the DM10 with a five year warranty that rivals Seagate, but it commands a flagship price of $174 :eek:

In 250GB, things are a little more complicated. Maxtor stills rules on price, with a 250GB drive for $114, but WD has a 16MB drive (WD2500KS) with a slight performance edge on performance in SR's new DriveMark 2006 suite and MUCH cooler/quieter operation for $126. Cooler and quieter may be worth the extra dollars.

If five year warranty is your goal, you're limited to Seagate or MaxLine. $124 for Seagate 250GB, $127.50 for MaxLineIII 250GB. MaxLine is faster, Barracuda quieter.
 
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