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Help with HDD choice for gaming.

S

Snowy2012

n00b
Joined
Nov 18, 2012
Messages
22
Hi,

I am just about to get a new PC (5820k @ 4.4Ghz/GTX 980/16Gb DDR4).

The primary boot/OS drive (win 7) will be a Samsung Evo Pro 512Gb. This will host my opsys and all my applications (Photoshop etc...)

I want a secondary mechanical drive to store all my games and I am trying to decide between :

1. 3Tb WD Caviar Green Intellipower (WD30EZRX)

2. 3Tb Seagate Barracuda ST3000DM001

3. 2Tb Seagate SSHD Hybrid (8Gb) ST2000DX001

4. 2Tb WD Black WD2003FZEX

I am not too worried about only having 2Tb rather than 3Tb as I have lots of external storage for backup.

I am guessing the loudest will be Option 4 and the quietest will be Option 1. I am worried that Option 4 will be too loud and that Option 1 will be too slow to run the games off.

Any ideas please ?
 
I use option 4 on my 3770K setup and option 1 on my new 4970K machine (the 2TB version).
My main games reside on SSD's and the rest of my games are on the spinners.
 
I have a Samsung ssd as a second boot of win7
My main gaming rig I run a Seagate 1 tb 7200.11 drive 1 tb.
I just deiced today and got a Seagate 2 tb sshd drive to replace my standard drive.
Son is getting 1tb his 500gig full from steam account.

I wanted something simple but fast. I did not want to make a ssd drive and then have to move files and folders off to a second drive.
I will get the drive Tuesday and see how it goes.
 
Snowy2012 said:
Hi,

I am just about to get a new PC (5820k @ 4.4Ghz/GTX 980/16Gb DDR4).

The primary boot/OS drive (win 7) will be a Samsung Evo Pro 512Gb. This will host my opsys and all my applications (Photoshop etc...)

I want a secondary mechanical drive to store all my games and I am trying to decide between :

1. 3Tb WD Caviar Green Intellipower (WD30EZRX) Don't do it, be serious, not silly.

2. 3Tb Seagate Barracuda ST3000DM001 Risky drives, they are fast enough but have high failure rates

3. 2Tb Seagate SSHD Hybrid (8Gb) ST2000DX001 Limp dicks compared to the final option below

4. 2Tb WD Black WD2003FZEX Now, you're talking, best option on this list

I am not too worried about only having 2Tb rather than 3Tb as I have lots of external storage for backup.

I am guessing the loudest will be Option 4 and the quietest will be Option 1. I am worried that Option 4 will be too loud and that Option 1 will be too slow to run the games off. Please stop worrying about noise, if you can hear the black running, it means it is doing its job, besides, you will have headphones on playing your games.

Any ideas please ?
Click to expand...

Go have a read here: http://hardforum.com/showpost.php?p=1041366572&postcount=7
my edits to your post in RED
 
Good points :)

However, I have just thought of another scenario :

I don't really need a secondary drive inside the PC for archiving - I have a 4tb external usb3/esata drive for that.

So, perhaps I could NOT put any secondary drive in and, instead, get rid of the Samsung 512Gb 850 Evo Pro and replace it with a 1Tb Samsung 850 Evo (MZ-75E1T0BW) - That would work out about the same cost as the Evo Pro + a secondary drive.

1Tb would be more than enough for me to store all my apps and games and any projects I am working on get archived to my external drive and the cloud when they finish anyway.

So, the question I would ask is : Is there a big difference in performance between the 512 850 Evo Pro and the 1Tb 850 Evo (Non-Pro model) ??

Waddya reckon folks ?
 
None that you would notice. At least as far as gaming is concerned.
 
I've not had great luck using Greens in anything that gets used on a routine basis. It's fine for what amounts to glacial storage, but past that, they seem to have some very aggressive power-saving profiles and you can really notice it in drive response. The Black your paying extra for speed in what amounts to a storage drive, so I don't know if that's worth it - I guess it depends on how much more they are charging for the Black label - if you plan on playing games from here, then yeah.

I don't really know why you would consider a hybrid drive either, since you already have an SSD primary drive.

Honestly, when I'm looking for a storage drive: I go with whatever capacity I need that's on sale at the time. When you are just using them for bulk storage, you can afford to treat them as a commodity item, because the only really defining statistic (apart from failure, which is sometimes hard to glean and probably has more to do with where you buy it and how it's shipped than the make/model) is the capacity.

Going to your latter post about dropping the storage drive all together:

The latest crop of SSDs are all fast. Very fast. If your talking gaming and semi-typical computer use (your not hosting a high volume database, for instance), then, yeah, I don't think you'd notice any difference between any decent "this-gen" SSD, and maybe not even with some from one or two generations back.The Pro line your paying a lot for high write-durability mainly. Your probably going to have upgraded that drive before you could write exhaust even the non-Pro version, let alone the Pro version.
 
There is the 850 EVO and the 850 Pro. Something like an Evo Pro does not exist.
For desktop workloads the performance of 850 EVO (500 GB or larger version) can even exceed the 850 Pro because the drive is mostly writing to its SLC cache.
Both drives are quite new, so nobody can make significant comments on which drive has less bugs and which has higher reliability,
If you are writing constantly or more than maybe 100 GB/day, the Pro is the way to go.

I use a ST3000DM001 as a gaming drive with an SSD cache. Well, I had 3 of those drives (1 home, 2 office) and one of those had to be RMA'd with some reallocated sectors.
But this was an older version of that drive. The two remaining drives have the same version and are fine. One of them now has 15000 hours.
I recommend to backup whatever is on the drive, but that is something that should be done regardless of the brand.

If I would buy a new 7200rpm drive I probably would get a WD Black. But I did not read any reviews recently.
 
Last edited:
1: WD4003FZEX (extremely fast, reliable) or WD4000FYYZ (extremely reliable, fast), just choose your poison (between more reliability or more speed) because both drives are good.
 
The faster random access times make the WD Black the clear winner for smoothest loading of the bunch.
 
Just make sure it's one of the new WD Blue/Black drives with 1tb platters, they really do a great job with games and don't suffer from head parking or whatever.

I love the Blues because they are cheap and super quiet but if Blacks with 1tb platters had been available back when I was in the market for my gaming HDDs, I'd have picked them without hesitation (the 5 year warranty and slightly better access times make the small premium perfectly acceptable)
 
omniscence said:
I use a ST3000DM001 as a gaming drive with an SSD cache. Well, I had 3 of those drives (1 home, 2 office) and one of those had to be RMA'd with some reallocated sectors.
But this was an older version of that drive. The two remaining drives have the same version and are fine. One of them now has 15000 hours.
Click to expand...
I sent three back just last week. One was only 2 months old.
 
I opted for a 250 840 EVO primary and a WD 2TB Black as 2nd. If I had thought about it at the time I would have went with a 1TB Evo drive as the sole drive.
 
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