upgrading system - upgrade harddrive or not?

latercomer2 · 18 Feb 2009 at 13:38

I'm ordering some bits for an upgrade and currrently have a Seagate ST3250820AS 250GB Sata drive. I keep hearing about Samsung drives being the bee's knees but is it worth upgrading? i.e. will the performance difference be noticable? I'd be grateful for some advice from those in the know

I've got some old IDE drives which I'm going to use to back up everything off the existing drive before the upgrade.

ChrisLX200 · 18 Feb 2009 at 14:24

Samsungs are not the bee's knees, they're cheap, reasonably fast (not markedly different from others, and slower in some respects). Neither are they immune from dying - plenty of reports on here. There really isn't anything special about them.

If your comparing performance against an old drive (is that a 7200.10 you have?) you will notice an F1 is a bit faster, files transfer maybe 20% more quickly, booting is a bit quicker - but there isn't an order of magnitude difference like there would be with SSD. Any new drive will give you this though.

latercomer2 · 18 Feb 2009 at 14:29

thanks for the reply

Its a Barracuda 7200.10 according to the seagate site. So what would you recommend if I was going for a new Sata drive? Doesn't have to be that big as I never filled my previous 80Gb drive and the Seagate is mostly empty too

ChrisLX200 · 18 Feb 2009 at 14:43

HDs are better value (£ per MB) the bigger they are, mainly because a low capacity drive still has to have the same box and electronics, the only difference is maybe an extra platter. So I'd go for a 1TB drive.

My personal favourites at the moment are the 1TB Hitachi and WD drives. I've got WD Black, WD RE3, and a Hitachi 1TB drives. It is a personal choice usually, people have a drive fail and they say 'Never again!' which is a bit unfair based on a sample of 1. Seagate have dropped a clanger recently with their self-bricking drives (that's not as bad a problem as the Seagate customer service who for too long did nothing about it). Samsung I've heard of too many failures to feel comfortable with them, one might argue it's because they sell a lot of them, but until someone comes up with actual numbers of drives sold I'm going to avoid them. WD is my first choice right now.

latercomer2 · 18 Feb 2009 at 14:57

Ok thanks for that. I'll have a think and see whether the budget can stretch to another drive.