So i have been running the same harddrive now for about 5 years and think it may be time to upgrade any idea's or suggestion's on what to get and please keep in mind im not rich the wife is the only one working Im playing a stay home dad and taking care of my kids
Western Digital Caviar Black seems to be the go to mechanical drive right now http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...cription=westren+digital+caviar+black&x=0&y=0 This one is the standard one. Good size good price and 64mb cache. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136533 If your looking for speed you need to look at an SSD somebody else can recommend those I think they are still too expensive so I didn't research them much.
If you don't need a lot of space and can afford a SSD they are quick and pretty nice. Still expensive though, imo. A mech. Drive as stated above should get you. Or a velicoraptor drive.
There's a lot of hype about SSD right now but the price difference and storage capacity is still a non-negotiable vs mechanical drives atm imo. An SATA 1 TB 6Gb/s 7200 RPM should suit all your needs and still be in a moderately low price range at the same time. I'd opt away from generic brands. For the most part, the larger brand names (Samsung/WD/Maxtor/etc) have the same relative occurence of fail drives (Hitachi might have more though...?) so you'll want to check out the specific HD you like, individually, to review the entire lot of it for aggregate quality.
Seagate still sucks. dont go with them. and WD and Samsung seem to have about the same failure rates to me, which is pretty high as well I personally buy Samsung F3 1TB drives, but I think the WD black drives are a tiny bit faster. They also run much hotter though and a bit louder. I think they are both the same price. SATA6 doesnt make a single bit of difference for performance so dont choose based on that. Having a bigger cache is nice, but 32-64MB isnt really enough to make huge differences. If you want a giant speed boost then you have to go with a SSD. But I dont think you can afford a SSD of necessary size as they are still expensive. My failure rates in the past 4 years: 2 out of 3 Seagates died 2 of 4 WD drives died, all Green series. Both Black drives work fine. 3 of 5 Samsung drives died. Mixed series, had an F1, F2, and F3 die on me. My other F1 and F3 are working fine.
I have 2 Western Digital Black 1TB hard drives that I have had for 3 years now and a 750GB Western Digital drive that I have had for even longer then that and they are all working fine to date. I have owned Seagate, Maxtor, Western Digital, and Hitachi hard drives but my favorite and most dependable have been the Western Digitals. Western Digital hard drives are more expensive then the competition but their well worth the extra price. My experiences with Seagate have not been very good and the other companies just dont manufacture hard drives as fast or reliable as Western Digital. I recommend: For Storage: Western Digital Caviar Black 2TB SATA 3 64mb cache For windows/bootup/games you want to load quick: Corsair Performance 3 CSSD-P3128GB2-BRKT 128GB SATA III MLC SSD (anything else is either too expensive or too little capacity and corsair has the fastest read/write speeds for this amount of space). Corsair is also known for making quality, reliable products so when you buy Corsair you know that your getting a quality product that you can rely on to keep your data safe.
Good call. If you want a SSD to run Windows and games off of, with another HD for storage, it'd make a great combo. This sale literally just popped up 10 minutes ago for $90 off for a similar item (Plextor PX-M2 Series PX-128M2S 2.5" 128GB SATA III): Here
Both of these two drives are cheaper with the same or better reliability: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820147125 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820148442 The Corsair P3 drive uses the same Marvell controller that the Crucial M4 drives use, but Crucial has used them for much longer and seems to get better firmware out for them. Also the M4 is proven to have an incredibly high lifetime and be a fairly reliable controller. The P3 will do fine too, but the original with the same controller is cheaper so you may as well get that. And ya I know its just $5 cheaper, but for someone tight on money that $5 is lunch money for a day. Except for the massive recall due to drive failures and data corruption as well as low speeds on some of their drives. Of course, this is with a Sandforce controller and everyone should know by now you NEVER buy a Sandforce based SSD if you want any sort of reliability. I have owned 2 Corsair SSDs with Samsung controllers and both still work like the day I got them. As do my other 6 SSDs that use Samsung controllers, with the exception of a single SSD randomly dying.
Didnt know about that since SSD's are a pretty new technology. Corsair products are usually very reliable but after hearing about this I wouldnt try one of their SSD's just in case. The Newegg.com reviews on that Corsair SSD dont seem very positive either, lots of people claiming defective drives. Good to know about the info on the Sandforce controllers as well, I havent purchased any SSD yet (havent upgraded my system recently) so I didnt know that they had issues with reliability. Thats a pretty big difference in read/write speeds between those two drives.
this is what i am using right now and its been really good to me but like i said it is 5 years now. Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 ST3250410AS 250GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive -Bare Drive I put this same HD in my wifes comp also and it has been working great and hers is 3 years old now
So is a new hard drive all your getting or planning on upgrading any other parts of your computer as well? Check out this awesome motherboard: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128472 It has onboard X-Fi audio, bigfoot killer lan, 4x USB 3.0, 2x SATA 6 gb/s. The catch is that you need an XL-ATX case for it because its too big for a regular ATX case. Its also pretty expensive but check out the Newegg.com video on it, its a beauty to look at.
LOL already upgraded motherboard and cpu http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131402 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819103808 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820104183
It is the .11 series that had huge problems and reliability isnt great in the .12's either. I too had two .10's and they worked great and a long time. Reinier, Who the heck would pay $380 for a motherboard full of gimmicks? You can get the same performance from a $200 motherboard. Please dont waste your money and I hope no one else does on such a thing. Besides, that socket and chipset will be completely phased out and EOL in less than 2 months. Yes it is, they use different controllers. The M4 uses a Marvell controller, same as the Corsair Performance3. It is "the fastest" controller on the market in terms of sustained speed. But sustained barely even matters except for marketing. All you need to care about is random 4k read and write, that is where performance comes from. This combined with fast access times are what make a SSD 20-40x faster than a mechanical drive. Now dont take it that the M4 isnt great because it has the highest sustained speed, it still has very good random read and write performance, especially random write. Reliability is in the top bracket as well. Reliability of controllers in order are: Samsung, Intel, Marvell, Indilinx, JMicron, Sandforce. With Marvell pretty darn close to Intel in reliability statistics. The difference in speed cant truly be seen, both drives perform the same to your eye. You only tell a difference in benchmarks. Additionally, Samsung makes incredibly reliable controllers and NAND. They market primarily to enterprise customers so they need to be the most reliable. Samsung has never been the fastest controller, but it has the least firmware problems and highest reliability stats out of ALL drives and all controllers since the very beginning. No other company comes close. People who buy Samsung drives know this and that is why they buy the drive. If you want the fastest you can, then buy an OCZ Sandforce drive. It is like 10x faster than the Samsung in benchmarks. Only problem is the very high failure rates, speed throttling, and false speed advertisements since it is only that fast on highly compressible data.