Hard Drives, the buying of new ones, and performance?

Elimination

I've been heavily upgrading my system, and i've got everything in so far and its going great, my last upgrade i want is a hard drive. I've been browsing around and i see all kinds of prices for all kinds of sizes, and all kinds of wacky speeds and stuff.

Can someone please help me out and explain a bit on what actual difference i will see performance wise, specifically in gaming, that i will see between say, the 32mb cache, 7200 RPM 2TB, 6/gbs Corsair Green, and the 1tb 7200 RPM, 64mb cache, 3gb/s Corsair, or whatever other examples you people can use (Those were just fired out there because i had been looking at them on sale.)

I'd love to have 1-2tb's at least. My current drive is from 2007 and is a Hitachi Deskstar 320gb, and i fill it up to nearly the brim on a regular basis, this annoys me. What does all the speed, cache and such, actually do that i will notice significantly? Or is it just e-peenery at its finest? Sort of like putting 2 GTX 580's in SLI, its cool, but not really necessary/overkill.

I am not looking at Solid States, as they are expensive and have very little space and i dont really care if windows loads 30 seconds faster or whatever.

kleinfehn

Are you interested in RAID? because with two hard drives you can have a system that runs faster but is more prone to failure or have it so when one hard drive fails the other one will still have all the data. With a 3rd hard drive, you can do both of these, spend around ~$180 and have double the room you currently have now.

Elimination

I dont really want to spend $180 for double the room. That would be $180 for less than a 1tb, that sounds like an awful deal to me. I am also not looking to spend that much money, as i just spent $500+ on upgrades already.

I'm more interested in what the actual performance difference will be, in gaming between so many different hard drives to choose from. I am pretty sure my current drive is RAID capable, as its a SATA drive with the right plugins' n all that, but i'd rather just have a 1 or 2 tb HDD, but the prices vary wildly and i dont really understand why. Why would a 1tb HDD cost more than a 2TB, when they are both 7200 RPM? Things like that.

kleinfehn

The speed of the hard drive and the manufacturer. Slower drivers are generally cheaper. My suggestion is looking for a 7200rpm hard drive and looking at the reviews, try and look for the lifetime of the hard drive in question, maybe google to see if there are any mass problems (I know Seagate had one a few years back). I would not recommend having multiple hard drives to add together for total memory because that increases your chance of failure.

Elimination

I want to replace the one i am using now, with a 2tb ish sized one if i can. They seem a lot more affordable now than they used to be when that size range first came out a little while back. Any particular brand suggestions?

Djeet

Going from 32 to 64 MB of cache will have absolutely no observable affect on your computer usage unless you happen to regularly work with a lot of 33-64MB sets of data. The 6gb vs 3gb max data bandwidth has no real application to non-SSD drives (perhaps if you were running a 4+ member RAID) and then only in sequential read. The only important spec is that you get a 7200 RPM drive, that will make a noticeable difference over a slower drive.


The Samsung Spinpoint F3 is highly regarded in the computer build thread, but I'm not seeing a 2TB option at Newegg. I'm not sure if the newer F4 is similarly regarded.

If you're really interested in performance, but not RAID, you might consider the Momentus XT. It's only 500GB though, and it's more expensive (it's a laptop drive), but it seems to perform very well and I've a friend with one who seems to think it makes a noticeable difference. It's a hybrid drive, which has 4 GB of flash memory (presumably for some kind of caching operations); so it's faster than most non-SSD drives, but slower than a true SSD.

Darkwyndre

I just picked up the Elmcrest 510 - 120GB SSD for my OS drive about two weeks ago. Fantastic speeds.

I also picked up a 2TB WD Black Drive, which is 7200 RPM, 64m cache. I would have gone with the much cheaper Green drive, but I am running most programs and games on the HDD WD so I went with 7200 RPM. It was $138 which was smoking good deal.

Elimination

What about something like this ?

Alecthar

Elimination, the WD Greens run at 5400 RPM, which I would say is too slow for a system drive. As a storage drive it's solid. If you want a single drive 2TB solution, go with this WD drive.

Djeet, I like the F4 2TB for storage, it's often cheaper than the 2TB WD Greens, but it's a 5400 RPM drive, so not suitable for system drive use.

Elimination

$169, eck. Oh well.

Elimination

Anyone have good experiences with Seagate Barracudas?

I'm currently using a Hitatchi Deskstar, and its been awesome so far, it just doesn't have the space i need.

Also some info on how to clone/transfer the data from my current HDD to my new one would be awesome too, i've never tried to do it before.

Alecthar

Seagate has had some reliability issues in the past, but recent revisions should be fine.

What are you filling up your drive with? I'm running a 1TB drive on one PC that, with a bunch of games (seriously, a lot) and most of my iTunes library only takes up about 600GB.

I think the best value for you is to pick up a relatively inexpensive 1TB 7200 RPM drive to use as your boot/game drive, and a separate 2TB 5400 RPM drive to store documents and movies. Not necessarily at the same time.

Skoal Cat

Elimination wrote: »

Anyone have good experiences with Seagate Barracudas?

I'm currently using a Hitatchi Deskstar, and its been awesome so far, it just doesn't have the space i need.

Also some info on how to clone/transfer the data from my current HDD to my new one would be awesome too, i've never tried to do it before.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=600003269&IsNodeId=1&Description=hitachi%20deskstar&name=1TB%20and%20higher&Order=BESTMATCH
???

I have a 1T and I enjoy it very much.

Elimination

Yeah im filling my drive up mostly with games, but keep in my my current drive is very small, its actually 250gb 7200RPM Hitachi Deskstar. IT salways at the brim and and have to uninstall things to make room for other things all the time, things i dont really -want- to uninstall.

I like the idea of having a second drive for general documents and movies and digital media ect, that does sound like a good idea, i have nearly 300gb of that stuff on my laptop alone. Anyways, for now i think i will go with another Hitachi Deskstar, 1tb. I've had such good reliability from this one i dont see why i cant again.

Now, is there a way to clone my current data over to my new drive when it arrives from Newegg? I've never tried to do it before, if there isnt than whatever, i'll figure something out.

Synthesis

Another one to point out that Seagate Barracudas had some past reliability issues--I've only had two hard drives fail me (click click click bad sectors fail, specifically), and one was a Seagate (the other was a Samsung, I believe, though it's been a while).

I currently rely on a pair of WD Caviar Blacks, 1 TB each (they were purchased back when that was considered the largest size drive you'd probably want to buy). Haven't failed me thusfar.