Small, fast, reliable HDD?

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21 Dec 2004
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TLDR: want a cheap but good fast and reliable HDD and I'm trying at the worst time.

My hard drive broke about a month ago (I rather stupidly only had one drive that had Windows plus everything else on it).

I still haven't managed to justify buying a new one with the current prices. Plus I cannot afford it. It seems like the best deals are on 2-3TB "green" drives, which is fine for some extra storage but I wouldn't get one of those for my Windows installation. I would expect the larger the drive the less reliable, and I also want a 7200rpm drive for Windows.

So I'm looking for a smaller hard drive, one that'll be within my budget, but also a good one. It seems like nobody sells such a hard drive any more. All the best tech with 7200rpm like WD Caviar Black goes into larger hard drives, minimum 500gb, but those are mostly sold out and overpriced wherever I look.

Really 120gb would be enough for my Windows and the few programs I use. I can buy cheap storage drives for backups or movies, or other drives for games later.

I did look at SSD drives since they seem to fit what I'm after. Normally I wouldn't even look at them since the price per GB is so bad, but I would rather pay extra for speed and reliability than for space right now.

I did order a Crucial M4 64GB for £79 when it was on offer here because everyone on OcUK seemed to recommend it. Then I read this thread:

http://forum.crucial.com/t5/Solid-State-Drives-SSD/0x00000f4-error-on-M4-64GB/td-p/76392

Seems like a lot of people have had problems with it becoming unresponsive after 1 hour of use. People have had this problem with all different firmwares so if it is a firmware bug then it's in all of them; otherwise it is the hardware or something else. Either way I could never forgive myself if the hard drive I get to replace my failed one fails within 6 months so I cancelled my order.

It seems like whatever SSD you drive you might get difficulties and have to update the firmware. I don't want to mess around. What I'd like is a cheap 7200rpm 320gb drive like I would have bought 5-7 years ago and which will do the job and age well, but it seems nobody makes those any more, the platters are all larger.

I'm struggling to buy food atm lol, but I need my computer so my budget for a hard drive is realistically <£100, though I maybe could stretch it a bit if I knew it was worth it. Six months ago I could have bought 3 pretty good hard drives for that lol. Any advice?
 
For 1TB size drives the recommendation would always have been the Samsung F3 as it performs as well as the Caviar Black but was half the price.

At OcUK the F3 is currently £100 and the Caviar Black £120 so the Caviar Black becomes a much more reasonable choice due to the 5 year warranty.

Here's a comparison of 1TB HDD's if you're interested:

7,200-RPM terabytes from Hitachi, Samsung, Seagate, and WD face off

You'll save just over 2% if you order from OcUK before midnight tomorrow and use the code VAT175. You'll also get free shipping but you qualify for that anyway.

Remember that the 2TB Samsung F4 is no slouch and at £110 it's twice the storage for the same money.
 
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Thanks Surveyor.

It was a Samsung F3 I had before that failed on me. I thought maybe the Caviar Black would be better quality but who knows.

Like you say, it has a 5 year warranty instead of 1 year.
 
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