Please help me chose

mejinks · 31 May 2009 at 00:32

Im in the market for a 1tb drive, maybe 2. I've been looking through loads of different reviews and it all seems a bit confusing as they tend to contradict each other.

My shortlist is as follows:

Seagate ST31000340AS - Worried because of the recent problems with them
Samsung HD103UJ (spinpoint F1)
Western Digital WS1001FALS

Its not going to be used in a server, but I do play games a bit and short loading times is good, as is shorter windows loading times.

What do you recommend?

CaseyChaos · 1 Jun 2009 at 02:12

I personally would stay away from Seagate. The Western Digital would be my choice but the F1's seems to be getting good reviews so if you want to spend less and get an F1 then I don't think there's much between them at all speed-wise, it's all up to which brand you prefer.

tempac · 1 Jun 2009 at 03:50

Over the years I can say that I've had most trouble with Maxtor drives, so much trouble infact that even now years later, I simply refuse to even purchase one. They messed me around so much over those same years that even though they're now owned by Segate I would still have problems installing and trusting a device with that name on it. True, that may seem a little stupid, but I've not more than a week ago purchased a 1TB Segate drive and it's a POS went to bed after 4 hours installing everything, woke up booted my pc and 'clink clink clink clink'. So pretty much as expected there then. I knew I should have looked for a better drive, but then segate used to have a good reputation.

Western Digital is my prefferred drive manufacturer, I've been through several 500gb's in my systems, upgrading all to 1TB's these days and selling on the 500gb drives. All have been listed as 'server' drives and the replacements of which I have 3 already are the 'green' 1TB variety, they're used for data storage with a faster drive as a primary, after my experience with maxtor\segate I'm considering ssd, might as well have reliability etc, but this is if I can't find a suitable fast enough WD drive.

HTH

leexgx · 1 Jun 2009 at 05:39

maxtor use segate drives now, and new Segate drives from this year are all useing new firmware so the silent death should not happen any more it was 2008 stock that had the problem before November as far as i know

really depends on how much you want to spend, have you considered SSD drives
corsair S128 is far faster on access times then an HDD all my games an programs and OS load very fast (once desktop loads i can click on any thing and it opens right away games as well), that drive is £171
next one up from that is Samsung 128gb SSD (£269) its £100 more and you get 200MB/s reads and 180MB/s writes (in game load time maybe 2-3 seconds and OS may boot up 3-4 seconds faster compared to the corsair S128),

if you wish to spend £70 more then the samsung you can get an OCZ vertex SSD but its the same as the samsung SSD for more price

other option is WD Black HDD with an formatted limit of 250gb for c: boot, games and programs on an 1TB drive to keep it in the fast part of the HDD and use the d: 750gb for file storage drivers backup