Looking to get a new HDD. 500GB - 1TB. Any Recommendations?

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CLock3

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I'm in the market for a good HDD at a decent price. I was hoping some people here would have some good recommendations for quality drives. I've got two Samsung 250gb Spinpoints right now. One is used for the OS, and the second is used for Documents (music, movies, etc.). Well, the documents drive is basically full, and I'm in need of something larger. I'm not sure if I should go all out and get a 1TB drive. Depends on price I guess. I've seen some 500gb drives for around $60, which seems decent. I've only looked at Seagate and Western Digital drives, as they seem to be the highest quality. Long story short, I'm wondering what everyone would suggest for the best drive for the price, between 500gb and 1tb. Thanks in advance for any help. I appreciate it.
 
The 1tb spinpoint is a great price/$$ ratio and pretty good performance. The WD 640's are very fast and cool - I would go with one of them unless you think you might fill it up fairly quickly:) The main thing to look for imho is high density platters - a smaller number of higher density platters will usually be faster and cooler than a lot of lower density platters. 300+gb/platter is good with the current state of technology.
 
My 2 cents... as BikePilot mentioned above lean toward drives that are 300+gb per platter.

If you are looking for performance, the WD640gb black or the WD1TB black.

For storage, the WD10EADS is great - runs very quiet, cool, low power use. A lot of folks poo-poo the "green"5400rpm drives, but the WD10EADS is not a bad performer (quite a bit better than its predecessor) - it is 3 platters and 32mb cache. It benchmarks better than 7200rpm laptop drives, and its performances compares well against 7200rpm single platter 250gb drives. Some of its metrics, such as access time is only a bit slower than the Samsung 1TB Spinpoint 7200rpm drive.
 
Haha, alright, thanks for the suggestions everyone. I'm thinking I'm gonna go with either a Samsung Spinpoint or a Western Digital Black. Not sure what size though. Probably either 750gb or 1tb. Either of those should be good, yeah?
 
The 640GB WDs are the fast ones. Larger than that and you're dealing with smaller platters. So 640GB WD Black or 1TB Samsung Spinpoint F1.
 
Alright, thanks for narrowing it down even more for me everyone. So now it's either a 640gb or 1tb that I'll go with. I was thinking Seagate was a good hdd brand all this time, but from what everyone is saying they aren't so much? Doesn't matter much, because I wasn't planning on getting a Seagate, but I'm just curious.
 
Samsung Spinpoint F1 1TB, got mine for $95 shipped from Newegg.com last week. The thing is fast and quiet, couldn't ask for more.
 
First I purchased a few Seagate ST31000333AS but after issues about the entire 7200.11 line surfaced I switched to WD Caviar Black (WD1001FALS). To be fair, I didn't have any issues with the Seagate drives but I decided to replace them just to be on the safe side. I still have the seagates sitting in a drawer waiting for a firmware update (which is out, btw: SD1B) So, what I would suggest is getting the 1 tb WD Caviar Black (WD1001FALS) which is about 10 dollars more than the seagate 1tb drive (ST31000333AS) on newegg but if you want to save a little money go for the other brands mentioned in this thread (samsung, hitachi, etc). I only mentioned what I had personal experience with. Hope that helps. I suppose you could also get the ST31000333AS now that the new firmware is out... from what I heard it's pretty difficult to actually brick the drive so if it happens to you, I guess you are pretty unlucky.
 
Awesome, thanks for the help. Also, where do most of you order your hard drives from? I usually get my hardware from newegg, but I remember reading threads around here about how bad newegg packs their hard drives. ZipZoomFly?
 
CLock3 said:
Alright, thanks for narrowing it down even more for me everyone. So now it's either a 640gb or 1tb that I'll go with. I was thinking Seagate was a good hdd brand all this time, but from what everyone is saying they aren't so much? Doesn't matter much, because I wasn't planning on getting a Seagate, but I'm just curious.
Click to expand...

They're fine as a brand, but their current series of drives (7200.11) are having some /serious/ firmware related issues. I would not buy one until it's fully ironed out, which at the current rate... may not happen until they release the 7200.12s. Pathetic, really.

Newegg is fine if you order /one/ drive. The problems is that with multiple drives they will just tape them together and bubble-wrap the bundle, and then they will knock together and probably die in shipping. Ordering more than one, ZipZoomFly is a good option.
 
Either new seagate 7200.12 500gb or WD 640gb black drives are good choices. Seagate 7200.12 is slightly faster than WD black. The transfer rates showed by HD tune are 106mb/s and 95mb/s respectively, about 10% different. Single 500gb platters are used on seagate 7200.12 drives. I own a 500gb seagate currently, love this drive, it runs very quiet and cool. 80% faster than my 7200.10 drive which has dual 160gb platters.
 
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