new 1TB HDD...?

[Cormac]

Was looking at the following options:
WD Caviar Black (1001FALS)
Seagate 7200.11 (333AS) / 7200.12 (528AS)
Samsung Spinpoint F1 (HD103UJ)

My external WD My Book recently died on me and I lost quite a bit of data. Now I figured that I should really invest in a second drive, so I can use the replacement ext drive *only* as a backup (which I should've done from the start...)

Kinda narrowed down the choice to the ones mentioned above (anyones I missed?) With the WD dying on me, and the Seagate firmware debacle, I'm a bit weary of those two brands, but I guess they should still be trustworthy enough...

The drive is meant as a secondary data drive in my TV room PC. Shouldn't be too noisy, but my PC isn't exactly quiet as it is, so it probably won't make much of a difference...

Any advice about which one to go for?
Thanks!

[Diddums]

I don't like the behavior of WD drives in non-WD external enclosures (at least in my case, it seemed to spin-up/spin-down more often than necessary). Both WD and Seagate recently took steps to address some potential issues with their TB drives (http://www.silentpcreview.com/Terabyte_Drive_Fix), so maybe everything's hunky-dory now.

Still, I'd go with the Samsung Spinpoint F1. It's quiet, fast, and hasn't had any users screaming about bugs in the firmware. I have 2 of the 500GB models and couldn't be happier with them. The price/storage ratio of the Seagate 1.5TB drive is really appealing, but if all you need is a 1TB drive for backup purposes, the Samsung would be my choice.

[Joe M.]

It's worth noting the WD issue is with their Green Power drives, and not the Black Caviar. These designations refer to their relative performance, iirc. The black caviar being a higher performance drive? I'm too lazy to google but you might want to before laying down the $$.

[Gedd]

I don't have a lot of experience with them, but I put two of the Samsung Spinpoint F1's in the system I built a month ago and have no complaints.

[Cormac]

Yup, the black caviar is the high performance range and the issue mentioned in the article seems to apply to the green range only..

I think I might have been a bit unclear in my OP, the new drive is not going in an enclosure, but will be used internally as a data storage drive & not as a system drive.

The Samsung drive got some good reviews when it came out & is pretty quiet apparently. With the price sitting at about 112$ / 87€, its looking pretty attractive.

[flyinj]

So if I'm looking at internal WD drives, it's definitely worth springing for the extra $10 to get the 1tb black caviar drive, not the green one? Does the green consume less power, but performs worse?

This is going to be a system drive as well...

[unbongwah]

I've got a pair of Hitachi 1TB drives (this model (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822145167)) in a DNS-323 NAS: they're a little noisier than I would like, but seem quite zippy; they were supposed to be among the fastest 1TB drives at the time I bought them.

[ARogan]

I have four of the seagate 1.5TB .11 and so far they have been fine. Only one is under heavy use but all came with the latest firmware so no need to flash. At $130 at newegg you can't beat the $/GB.

I also have three of the 1TB drives (one I had to flash) all under heavy use and they have been fine too.

[Joe M.]

This might help you out, flyinj:

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/247935-32-western-digital-caviar-black-blue-green

In short:


the black drive are performance/gamer drive blue are the general purpose drives and green are the low power tree hugger drives.

Incidentally I just bought a 1TB Black Caviar drive. I'm wondering if I'll take a performance hit installing an operating system on such a big drive? If I do install Win 7 / XP on it, it'd be partitioned. Win 7 would be the first 150gb, XP the next 50gb, and then probably games / work split evenly over the rest.

My alternative is backing up everything (games, work stuff) to the 1TB drive and wiping my 2 300GB drives clean, using one for operating systems and the other for whatever (maybe OS backup or something). Any thoughts? I'd heard there were some efficiency concerns with running the OS off a large HD, but nothing concrete.

[wisefool]

Yeah, those Hitachi 7K1000's were pretty zippy. They have 5 platters thought which is why they are so noisy and hot (compared with 3 on the samsung F1's)

The 103UJ is very quiet and zippy. You're gonna be running this as a secondary? I guess the drive will power down and work properly. I have like six of these drives, and two failed already, but I don't have very good luck with any of my drives. I think the UPS guys just kick the boxes. As a caveat, if you are ever going to use it in a NAS be careful - my NAS hated these Samsung's saying they took too long to wake up from standby, which made the entire raid array corrupt or something. They liked the WD 1001 thought.

..

Joe, I would just run the new OS from the new, fast 1 Tb hd's. The platter densities are just much higher. This helps in large sequential tests. Keep the 300 Gb drives as repositories for your image file, if you have acronis or something.

[Joe M.]

Cool, thanks for the advice!

[Equisilus]

I've been using a the 1 TB Caviar Black since last August in my primary system and have no complaints (Vista x64 system; no partitioning). I debated going with the Green because it touches the environmentalist in me, but since I use my system for gaming, etc, I wanted to make sure I got the performance I needed. With it being the single drive, it's been working fine.

[Cormac]

Thanks for the input everyone! I've decided to go with the Samsung. Lets hope it was the right decision...