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Recommend a hard drive for internal storage?

C

Cyclone

Limp Gawd
Joined
May 2, 2001
Messages
503
Hi All-

First, I'm sorry to ask such a generic question. I am building a new gaming computer soon, my first in years, so I have been completely out of touch with new products and technologies. I will be using a SSD for OS/Programs, but I need a separate hard drive for data storage. The most demanding use of this drive will probably be writing uncompressed 3520x1200 video from FRAPS. Looking for 2-3 TB capacity. Motherboard will have SATA 3. Doing the build to be as cool and quiet as possible.

I tried looking through reviews on Newegg and Amazon, but it seems like every single drive in the world has a ton of negative reviews for failure. Hard to make any sense of it, or I'd have to assume there are no good drives out there! Any suggestions or advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!
 
Every one of the HD manufacturers have had drive failures. And people that received a bad drive talk about it more than those who received good drives.

I can tell you that I have had good luck with western digital. Then some one will come in after me and say to avoid them like the plague. It is luck of the draw.

If you are really worried about it, get two drives and mirror the data. Not raid, just have the same data on both drives. This reduces the risk of data loss as you are less likely to have two drives fail on you. But it can still happen.

If you want cool and quiet look to the 5400-5900 rpm drives. Simple as that. I just grabbed a hitachi 5900rpm 2tb for use as an external backup. So far so good.
 
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Every one of the HD manufacturers have had drive failures.
Click to expand...

Fully agreed.

And people that received a bad drive talk about it more than those who received good drives.

I can tell you that I have had good luck with western digital. Then some one will come in after me and say to avoid them like the plague. It is luck of the draw.
Click to expand...

This is a very key point. There is a > 1% chance you will receive a drive that is DOA. Then for the next 5 years their is a > 1% chance annually that the drive will totally fail.

As for peoples recommendations very few of them have enough drives (10s to 100s of thousands) to statistically say anything about a particular drive or manufacturer. Myself included I only have 200 to 300 drives.
 
One suggestion is that whatever drive you choose to get, run the manufacturers drive fitness test or some other drive-torture test once or twice in full mode to do a thorough test of the drive, and avoid any early-death issues.
 
I recommend to windows users a full format followed by looking at the SMART data with a program like CrystalDiskInfo.

For non windows users, I recommend at minimum a 4 pass badblocks read/write destructive test. Followed by looking at the SMART data using smartmontools.

BTW, manufacturer tools are almost always just a simple program with a GUI that issues a SATA long (or short) test on the drive. There is generally nothing special with them. You can do the same with smartmontools on windows, linux or any of its supported operating systems.
 
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