Help me find a new hard drive!

[Aragehaor]

Apologies in advance if this is the incorrect section (I've seen similar threads here before though, so i believe it is correct.)

I've been looking for a new internal hard drive and I'd like to hear what the playground's recommendations are for i suppose the 'best' internal hard drive for a desktop computer running windows. Ideally i don't want to spend more then $120.

Let me know if you need any more information! My thanks in advance.

[Fan]

Apologies in advance if this is the incorrect section (I've seen similar threads here before though, so i believe it is correct.)

I've been looking for a new internal hard drive and I'd like to hear what the playground's recommendations are for i suppose the 'best' internal hard drive for a desktop computer running windows. Ideally i don't want to spend more then $120.

Let me know if you need any more information! My thanks in advance.

If you already have a storage drive and are looking for performance for a few games you play hardcore I'd recommend a solid state.

[Aragehaor]

If you already have a storage drive and are looking for performance for a few games you play hardcore I'd recommend a solid state.

Hm, interesting - do you recommend any in particular then?

[Fan]

Hm, interesting - do you recommend any in particular then?

This works out pretty well.

[Aragehaor]

This works out pretty well.

That seems quite excellent - You have my thanks.

I am however still interested in getting a new internal hard drive to simply have more space - but I'll most certainly have to pick this up as well (either first or later, depending on what i decide i could use more right now.)

Still, thanks again.

[thubby]

the basic trade off is space vs speed.
people who work with programing, video editing, etc. want tons of storage.
gamers tend to prefer speed.
solid state drives are the fastest, but you pay out the nose for a small benefit.

for perspective, you could get a 2TERABITE drive for the cost of that solid state.

[Aragehaor]

the basic trade off is space vs speed.
people who work with programing, video editing, etc. want tons of storage.
gamers tend to prefer speed.
solid state drives are the fastest, but you pay out the nose for a small benefit.

for perspective, you could get a 2TERABITE drive for the cost of that solid state.

Which is why, i believe it would be most wise (since money isn't the biggest issue for me - though anything over $120 will have to wait about two weeks.) to get the "best" (in terms of speed, performance AND space) normal hard drive and a solid state drive to play certain other games. (and of course i need space for various other matters as well, though pure space is not the biggest draw as i have another computer at work that is more then adequate for those needs*)

Your help is appreciated though.


*Which of course excludes any personal purposes.

[factotum]

Hard drives are much of a muchness these days. They're almost all 7200rpm, and spin speed is one of the main performance indicators on a spinning rust hard drive, particularly because of seek time. As you're probably aware, this is the time it takes to move from data on one point on the disc to one somewhere else, and consists of both the time taken to move the read heads to the correct track and the time taken for the part of the disc containing the data to spin under them. The time taken to read the data off is then also partially determined by the spin speed, so faster = better.

You can get some drives that spin faster (Western Digital Velociraptor is 10k rpm, for example) but you'll be paying a lot extra for those--not quite SSD levels extra, but significant--and they'll be noisier than the standard, too.

Overall, I'd say just pick any decent capacity 7200rpm drive and you should be good to go.

[Aragehaor]

Hard drives are much of a muchness these days. They're almost all 7200rpm, and spin speed is one of the main performance indicators on a spinning rust hard drive, particularly because of seek time. As you're probably aware, this is the time it takes to move from data on one point on the disc to one somewhere else, and consists of both the time taken to move the read heads to the correct track and the time taken for the part of the disc containing the data to spin under them. The time taken to read the data off is then also partially determined by the spin speed, so faster = better.

You can get some drives that spin faster (Western Digital Velociraptor is 10k rpm, for example) but you'll be paying a lot extra for those--not quite SSD levels extra, but significant--and they'll be noisier than the standard, too.

Overall, I'd say just pick any decent capacity 7200rpm drive and you should be good to go.

Hm, alright - thank you all for your time and assistance then.

[Don Julio Anejo]

I second getting a solid state drive. Even if it's a small drive to only run Windows on it, it's already a significant boost. A 64GB drive will run you around $60-80, a 128GB drive is around $100 or so (ex: this is the one I got), and will also have space to install all your programs and a few games.

Windows becomes almost instantly responsive, and in general runs completely awesome. For some games, it makes little difference (i.e. Skyrim), and really only affects how fast the game itself loads. For others like Napoleon: Total War it makes it run/load a lot faster, especially the battle screens. I also do heavy photo editing (Lightroom/Photoshop), and it makes a huge difference in load times and program response, while letting me keep all the actual files on slower hard drives (and only, for example, keeping the specific set of pictures I'm editing at the moment on SSD).

So in short, unless you want a single large drive for lots of storage, buy an SSD and if you really need space, pick up a cheapo (i.e. WD Caviar Green) 7200 RPM hard drive later... I've seen 1TB versions for $80 and 2TB for $110. On the lower end, SSD's are about 9 times faster than a normal hard drive with virtually instant (like in the 30-50 ms range) seek times (can be a few seconds on hard drives), while higher end (i.e. Velociraptor) hard drives are barely 2-2.5x the speed of slowest ones (i.e. any old 5400 RPM drive).

PS: stay away from OCZ. Sorry Fan, but I've had 2/2 fail on me virtually immediately and talking to any random dude at NCIX (local computer parts chain) or reading reviews online will tell you that way too many of them don't work properly. Good brands/models are Crucial M4 (I've got two of these, the 128GB in my desktop and the 64GB mSATA in my laptop as a system drive, both in addition to regular hard drives), Samsung 830 or pretty much any Intel drive (320, 330, 520). Intel is a little more expensive but pretty much guaranteed to be extremely reliable.

PPS: ignore performance numbers. Unless you routinely move around 100+ GB of data while timing yourself with a stopwatch, SSD performance isn't going to matter (it's only important that it's an SSD to begin with).

[Winter_Wolf]

I got a WD Caviar Blue 7200 1TB internal drive with SATA connector for less than $100 USD last year. As far as I know, it still runs. Haven't turned on that computer in over 10 months since I've been away from it, but it was 100% reliable while I was using it, and I managed to have three more partitions to store my music and videos, miscellanea, and games and .iso backups of my software with loads yet to spare.

My only regret with it was using it as an internal disk instead of getting a case and making it portable storage, but I figure I can get another if it comes to that.

[Triscuitable]

I'm in the process of building a desktop PC with a 1TB 7200RPM HDD, and an 80GB SSD. While it's an entertainment PC for the family, games and heavy-load programs are to be installed onto the solid state drive, and music and other programs are set for the hard drive.

The dual-drive setup, while confusing, is also very effective at saving a lot of time. It's more expensive, but the trade off is worth it.

[noparlpf]

Apologies in advance if this is the incorrect section (I've seen similar threads here before though, so i believe it is correct.)

I've been looking for a new internal hard drive and I'd like to hear what the playground's recommendations are for i suppose the 'best' internal hard drive for a desktop computer running windows. Ideally i don't want to spend more then $120.

Let me know if you need any more information! My thanks in advance.

I have a Western Digital "My Book" 2TB. It's around $120-something now on Amazon. The main downside is the organisation software it comes with, but if you ignore that (when you plug it in you get two pop-ups, one to open the thing as a folder like any normal hard drive, one to run this software which I find annoying) it's fine.