Two new HDD's

Kiro-San

Kiro-San

Kiro-San

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19 Jan 2005
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After a bit of a snafu with my boot HGST 7k250 250gB drive over the last few days I've decided to replace that and the 7k250 that holds all my games. Both are getting on now (the boot drive must be almost 5 years old now). So I'm looking for two new drives. Looking round at prices I'm happy to spend about £200 in total, which of course cancels out SSD's and Raptors (not liking their £/GB). Won't be running the drives in any sort of RAID either.

In addition I'd like to buy a decent external caddie/enclosure. Looking to spend under £50 on one of those.

So what HDD's should I be looking at (I have no brand loyalty) and who makes a decent caddy? Cheers.
 
Yeh I left the capacity out on purpose. The boot drive will actually be partitioned into a boot drive and a downloads partition. I was thinking of spending a bit more money on a quick and big (looking at the prices though two 1TB drives isn't out of the question really) gaming drive and a bit less on the boot drive.

That enclosure looks good. Is it simply a case of sliding out the tray, plugging the HDD in and then sliding it back in?
 
The Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 500GB SATA-II 16MB Cache - OEM (ST3500418AS) is a single platter 500GB drive and I am pretty sure its one of the fastest drives available atm. So this would be good for a boot drive, I would install my games on to it as well.

The external enclosure and dock is just like a normal USB/ESATA external hard drive caddie, which comes with an external power supply and has the additon of a docking bay.

However, when the dock is inside your PC, you need to connect it up to a molex connector and a sata connector (these come attached to the dock), this powers the dock and gives it the data connection.

This will allow you to slide the external hard drive caddie in to the dock when your PC is either on or off, and will be detected when you boot up or if you have AHCI enabled in your bios, it will be detected in windows if your PC is already on.
 
Looking around I've been considering the 300GB Raptor for my gaming drive. 300GB is easily enough for that purpose and the price is actually a lot better than I thought it would be and then that Barracuda for my OS/Downloads drive. Just over £200 which is fine. The dock is under £50 so that comes in at under £250 anyway.
 
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I just installed 2X 1TB WD blacks in a matrix RAID. I know you said you weren't interested in RAID, but a 450GB RAID 0 for boot and progs/games and 706GB RAID 1 for data, it's a pretty good deal. By splitting the drives and short stroking the RAID 0 array, access times are down to 8.6 ms :) as soon as i finishing getting all my progs/games back on I'll stick up the benchies.

Anyway, the WD blacks get my vote!
 
Ended up getting one of the 1TB Caviars and the 300GB Velociraptor. Spent a bit more than I wanted but the Caviar looks like an awesome drive. Went for the Icy Dock MB-559US as the external enclosure. Got some very good reviews.
 
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