What's the "best" 7,200RPM drive?

Tute

Tute

Tute

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Hey all.

Looking to add a 500GB drive to my Raptor, for storage.

What's considered the "best" drive?

By best I mean has the best balance of speed, silence, and reliability. I've heard good things about both the WD AAKS drives, and the 7200.10 series.

Which would you recommend of those? Or anything else maybe?
 
The 7200.10 and AAKS series are pretty much the best at the moment speed wise etc

Bought a 500GB 7200.10 not long ago purely for the 5-year warranty.

But bought a pair of 500GB AAKS for my brothers PC which are also very nice.
 
Any differences you could notice between the two? Noise or speed? :)

I'm really struggling to decide here, it almost seems like the two drives are identical but with a different name! :p :D
 
I've got a 250gb 7200.10 and it is great in every way but it seems some are noiser than others so I might sway towards the Western Digital AAKS series if I was buying now, they also seem to be the merest shade faster. I don't think you can really lose with either one so maybe just pick the one that is the best deal. :)
 
Like Richdog says Hitachi do make good drives but as with any top capacity drive you pay a fairly hefty premium over buying two smaller models that either equal or normally exceed it in capacity. e.g. 2x WD AAKS 500gb is less than 1x Hitachi 750gb. If you have limited SATA connectors, a PSU that is on the limit or money to burn then the premium for a high capacity drive such as the Hitachi makes more sense but for most it doesn't really and it does also make for the whole "eggs in one basket scenario". :)
 
Yeah the new Hitachi K1000 drives aren't very cost-effective in comparison to buying 2x 500GB AAKS... I get the feeling they will be producing 500GB variations of them soon though. But it's not as though they're really any better than WD or anything so not really worth waiting for. Go with WD. :)
 
T166 500 gb or the 500 gb AAKS?
I ordered the AAKS but can still send it back, its mainly for storage of media.
 
mattbill said:
the Samsung Spinpoint T 500GB is very very good... custompc mag gave a very good review, quicker and quieter than others.
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Unfortunately not.

Samsungs are known for for being one of the slowest performers as they focus on noise more than performance, often switching on the acoustic management to bring this into effect.

Further, those models use parallel recording, which is about 20% slower than perpendicular tech drives like the Hitachi 7K1000, WD AAKS and Seagate 7200.10.

I personally have 4 Seagate 7200.10's which I'm going to be hardware RAID5'ing. All are very quiet and very fast. I'm led to believe the AAKS is faster by the very slimmest of margins and generally WD's are quiet. However, all my Seagates are quiet and the 5 year warranty decides it for me as I care not about drive failure, because they are in a RAID array (and yes, I will still backup externally).

I think I'd have to recommend the WD for you though.
 
Good thing i didnt go for the Sammy then, my Sammy SATA drive is quiet but painfully slow at times as well. Good for a HTPC, but in a desktop with 120mm fans whirring the AAKS cannot be much louder?
 
WD's are pretty quiet themselves, so yeah, you are right. In fairness, all drives are quiet - it's only the seeks which make noise. These are usually pretty good on WD's and I agree, with fans whirring etc, you aren't going to notice a small noise like the drive.
 
Gormond said:
I disagree, the Samsung T166 http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=hd-036-sa scores very highly on any benchmark i have seen. look at tomshardware for example, in the file writing test it scores 90.2 mb/s when the wd raptor only manages 86.3 mb/s
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the Tom's Hardware comparison shows that the Samsung peaks above all but the minimum is below all drives of comparable size so therefore the average isn't as good as that of some others and I'd usually rate the average as being more important. The drive does have more impressive performance figures than I was expecting though if the article is correct, particularly when considering the slow access time and interface bandwidth. Unfortunately they also don't include the AAKS series of drives as that would make for a more interesting comparison. :)
 
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