Fast new HDD recommendations?

ojgbrown

ojgbrown

ojgbrown

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I have gradually been upgrading my rig and ripping out the crappy parts mesh put in it 18 months ago (never again now that I have learnt how to build!). Next to go are the PSU and HDD. I am getting an antec trupower 650w PSU but I am a little confused as to which HDD to get.

I currently have a slow HDD. I tis 500gb but it get 5.9 on windows experience which drags down everything else which are in the high 7's. I know it doesnt really mean anything but it is indicative of the speed of the HDD. It runs slowly as well.

Ideally I would like a really fast and efficient 1TB HDD which is also stable.

I am looking at the western digital ones, but am unsure as to whether I should get a caviar green or pay more for a caviar black. I know the green is more energy efficient and the black is faster but to what extent as is it worth the money? I am looking at these:

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=HD-336-WD&groupid=701&catid=14&subcat=1953

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=HD-244-SE&groupid=701&catid=14&subcat=1953 (would get 1TB version for £35 odd)

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=HD-366-WD&groupid=701&catid=14&subcat=1953


Which should I go for? Thanks.
 
Thanks for the info.

The samsung spinpoint there is Sata II with a 32mb cache. I want to get the fastest that I can. Are you saying that I will notice no discernable difference between that and a SATA III 6GB/s model with a 64mb cache?
 
You'll notice no difference between SATA 2 and SATA 3 HDD's.

You should read the conclusion of the test I linked to:

We're left with Samsung's Spinpoint F3, which is our clear favorite of the four. Not only does the F3 offer the best performance in all manner of sequential transfers, it's easily the quietest of the drives overall. I'm not thrilled by the fact that the F3's transaction rates drop off after 32 concurrent I/O requests, but that's not a condition many desktop users are likely to face. Besides, the Spinpoint certainly held its own in our disk-intensive multitasking tests, which are far more indicative of the sort of workloads produced by enthusiast desktops. Samsung doesn't give up much ground to the Caviar when it comes to random access times, either.
Click to expand...

If you want the quietest drives then you're going to have to get one of the lower speed "green" drives. The trade off is lower spin speed usually results in lower performance.

If you want as quiet as you can get, but still pretty fast, then consider the Samsung SpinPoint F4 EcoGreen 2TB.

This is a bench of one of my 2TB Samsung F4's:
 
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