Best Overall 1TB Drive?

I prefer Seagate, but WD fanboiz will come and start complaining about firmware issues.

Look at Samsungs. They have a Spinpoint and a 5400 EcoGreen.
 
The OCZ Colossus

1TB ssd goodness. (you said nothing about price is $2500 in your budget?)
 
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I'm pleased with WD1001FALS so far though I'm not sure if it's the "best".
 
I'd think about a Seagate .12, but I wouldn't touch a .11 drive. Western Digital is probably a better choice at the moment. As far as Samsung goes, I don't have any experience with them. Honestly, I'm probably going to buy three Hitachi 7K1000.B drives and JBOD them or run them as three individual drives.
 
Aside from the occasional bad model, hard drive brands are mostly preference and loyalty. Just stick with a brand you prefer. One minor exception (which applies to me) might be if you want to use cheaper non-RAID-certified disks in a RAID5 array, in which case go with WD since you can enable TLER on their consumer drives.

Aside from that, decide if you want to get a better performing 7200RPM drive or a cooler and quieter running 5400 or 5900 RPM drive.
 
The general consensus around here on performance:

1. Caviar Black
2. Samsung F1
3. Hitachi 7K1000.B
4. Seagate 7200.12

Cool and quiet:

1. Samsung EcoGreen F2
2. Caviar Green
3. Seagate Barracuda LP
 
not to steal the thread, but can someone answer me a question on these 1TB drives? which would be good for just storing games, music, ect.?
 
jjager85 said:
not to steal the thread, but can someone answer me a question on these 1TB drives? which would be good for just storing games, music, ect.?
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depends on what you mean by storing, if your talking about a game image, or a game install. if your, talking about game installs id go with a faster drive like the Blacks, if its just to store raw data like pictures or movies, or game images the slower cheaper drives are good enough. but if your accessing it alot and dont want the hard drive slowing down your games loading any more than needed you want the higher performance drives
 
I'd recommend Samsung, WD, or Hitachi. Three brands I've had and haven't had any drives really die before their time.

Edit: Looks like Seagate already has 1TB .12s out, didn't know that. Hitachi's 7K1000.C will be out sometime soon (500GB/plat).
 
DougLite said:
The general consensus around here on performance:

1. Caviar Black
2. Samsung F1
3. Hitachi 7K1000.B
4. Seagate 7200.12

Cool and quiet:

1. Samsung EcoGreen F2
2. Caviar Green
3. Seagate Barracuda LP
Click to expand...

Do people really put the 7200.12's down that low? I thought they were pretty quick, any benchmarks?
 
Well ive always been a seagate fan but the Firmware issues really bothered me and was a PITA to deal with.
Also ive been transitioning from Standard HDDs to Green HDDs for the power savings, and I really like the WD Caviar Greens.

It just depends on if you want Low Power or high performance.
Either way the WD seems to be the top drive choice right now.
Samsungs are right there too.
Seagates....still a good company and have the best RMA process IMO, but I would rather not have to deal with Firmware or RMA so im sticking with WD for now.
 
I'd agree with any of the above, unfortunately just never had any luck with the Hitachi 1tbs. Would definitely go black for now.
 
+1 for the Seagate 7200.12 drive. 2x500 gig platters beats 3x333 platters. That said, I also have a WD Black which I use as a backup drive/main system is on the Seagate. The Seagate runs about 5-6 C cooler and is a bit quicker in the benchmarks. Idle temp: 32 C (room temp is 78 F) which is a full 6 degrees cooler than my other 1 TB WD1001FALS HDD which idles around 38 C. Both drives are in the same case behind the same 120mm fan literally side-by-side.

Comparing this to my other 1TB drive, a WD1001FALS (WD Black 7200 RPM/32 Meg cache with 3x333 platters) using hdparm under Linux x86_64, the Seagate drive is a bit quicker. Here are the results, first the Seagate (results are averaged of three runs):
Code: 
# hdparm -Tt /dev/sda
Timing cached reads:   14765 MB in  2.00 seconds = 7382.33 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads:  367 MB in  3.01 seconds = 121.82 MB/sec

Now the WD drive (results are averaged of three runs):
Code: 
# hdparm -Tt /dev/sdb
Timing cached reads:   12991 MB in  2.00 seconds = 6495.33 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads:  308 MB in  3.01 seconds = 102.33 MB/sec

So roughly 14 % faster on the cached reads and 19 % faster on the buffered reads.

BTW, I have several .11 Seagates that were affected in that firmware issue that are 100 % fine (two 640's and one 750).
 
graysky said:
+1 for the Seagate 7200.12 drive. 2x500 gig platters beats 3x333 platters. That said, I also have a WD Black which I use as a backup drive/main system is on the Seagate. The Seagate runs about 5-6 C cooler and is a bit quicker in the benchmarks. Idle temp: 32 C (room temp is 78 F) which is a full 6 degrees cooler than my other 1 TB WD1001FALS HDD which idles around 38 C. Both drives are in the same case behind the same 120mm fan literally side-by-side.

Comparing this to my other 1TB drive, a WD1001FALS (WD Black 7200 RPM/32 Meg cache with 3x333 platters) using hdparm under Linux x86_64, the Seagate drive is a bit quicker. Here are the results, first the Seagate (results are averaged of three runs):
Code: 
# hdparm -Tt /dev/sda
Timing cached reads:   14765 MB in  2.00 seconds = 7382.33 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads:  367 MB in  3.01 seconds = 121.82 MB/sec

Now the WD drive (results are averaged of three runs):
Code: 
# hdparm -Tt /dev/sdb
Timing cached reads:   12991 MB in  2.00 seconds = 6495.33 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads:  308 MB in  3.01 seconds = 102.33 MB/sec

So roughly 14 % faster on the cached reads and 19 % faster on the buffered reads.

BTW, I have several .11 Seagates that were affected in that firmware issue that are 100 % fine (two 640's and one 750).
Click to expand...
I'll agree that the 7200.12 delivers great linear transfer performance, but Seagate drives have faltered for several generations now on seek performance and buffer strategy. I'd still pick WD Caviar Black, Samsung F1, or Hitachi 7K1000.B for random access performance on the desktop (booting OS, loading programs, games, etc)
 
I've always been under the impression that seek time/random access times were the most important statistic.
 
Blackstone said:
I've always been under the impression that seek time/random access times were the most important statistic.
Click to expand...

That's because you're absolutely right. They are.

Do not buy any Seagates if you value your data. Their QA and QC is nonexistent, and until the 7200.12's have been out a year without multiple reports of spontaneous failure and extremely short lifespans, nobody with a brain should even consider recommending them.

The Samsung F1 is the absolute tops right now. Anyone not putting the F1 on top, doesn't know what they're talking about. It's packing a 7 year warranty.
If it wasn't Newegg and their fail shipping, I'd say take advantage of the "buy an F1 1TB, get a free F1 500GB" deal. But with Newegg's shipping, both are likely to arrive dead or with their warranties voided.
 
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