which hard drive?

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Hi guys,

ok, so i'm not bothering with getting an I7 rig setup until next month now, i don't think it's worth it yet which leaves one thing to upgrade and thats the Hard Disk Drive. I have £100 to play around with and have narrowed the choice down to 3 main desicions. Those are:

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=HD-245-WD&tool=3

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=HD-054-SA

or one of the fabled 64GB Samsung MLC SSD's now that i know where i can buy them from.

The only thing that puts me off buying the Samsung SSD is it's very small ammount of storage space (i will be using it as a main drive to install the OS and a few games onto) which means i will more than likely buy either the WD Caviar Black drive or the Samsung F1 (i already have a 320GB version of the F1) but i'm not sure which one, both have very good reviews.
 
Consider the SSD's somewhat overpriced.

Had a Samsung F1 750gb fail on me (6 months old)

So I'd go for the WD :D
 
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you know, if there is one thing i've never had, its a hdd fail on me, i don't know why? but i've heard of hundreds of people having drives fail on them and not had one myself, maybe it's because they're never in long enough to fail, the 2 raptors that i have now have been in for around a year and that's the longest that i have ever stuck with a single brand of hard drive.

at £100 though, those samsungs are awefully tempting, just a bit skimpy on storage space, means that reallistically i'd have to fill atleast one of my other sata connections with a large capacity drive or get a second 64GB samsung drive and use the 320 that i have as storage.

Conundrums conundrums...
 
Neither had I until the Samsung - Probably just bad luck :(

So far as SSd's are concerned am taking (probably incorrect) view that by the time I'm looking to move to i7 (1yr+) the prices will have dropped another large chunk and they will be at least double the size.

Between now and then a Standard , pretty large (640gb) sata hd drive would do which could become back up/storage drive for new build.

You say your thinking of moving to i7 next month - if I were I'd be tempted to get one myself ( but logically I'd know I shouldn't) :D
 
i have heard of a lot of comments that the WD are fast, reliable and silent but i just don't know, i've heard much positive hype about the F1 also, specifically the 1TB version. The idea of having a miniumum of 436GB more than the SSD is whats stopping me from buying the SSD and from what i've heard, SSD's are being, atleast in some cases, beaten in terms of performance by some traditional spindle hard disks, but then, SSD's are able to maintain the system performance and does'nt slow down like spindle drives do when their is a lot of data on them.

And i'm still not sure about the I7, i don't think that it's worth it over what i already have at the minute, atleast not until more apps and games that use quad core technology come out, i think its better to go for a faster clock speed than core archetecture at the moment.
 
I have a total of 6 Samsung Spint Point F1s (between my NAS and my PC).
If I known then what I know now, I would have personally purchased the WD RE3s.

Failing that, any of the WDs would be my preferred choice.
 
I try to only purchase Samsung drives and have never had one fail on me. I have 3 x 250 GB, 320 GB, 2 x 640 GB and recently a couple 1TB and all work fine and flawless. My Hitachi died on my a few weeks back....:rolleyes:

Also they seem to be coolest and quietist I have ever used, especially the F1's. I 1TB's in my NAS run at 23c.
 
its going to be one of those things isnt it lol. some will say go with the F1, some will say go for the Caviar Blacks. I must admit that i am torn between the two and can't see any good reason why i should go with one over the other however there are a couple of things that bother me with both manufacturers. Some review sites say stay away from the RE2 Caviar drives because they are prone to failures which means that i could be unlucky enough to get a bad drive (and with my luck lately i would'nt want to push it) and the second thing is that samsung have released the Raid version of their F1 range. But from what i can tell i would be no better off buying a standard version of the drive as i would the Raid version.
 
After Samsung failure I went with

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=HD-198-WD&groupid=701&catid=14&subcat=940

No regrets - yet !!

Might be a little smaller capacity and less cache than the 750 F1 but on reading reviws and user posts came to the conclusion that if not as fast as the F1 , it nearly was & it was known to be a reliable drive. ( Am not saying there are not failures but there appeared , to me, less than for the F1 )

Running at the moment @ 23c - a degree or so less than the Samsung but nothing to shout about .

Runs a little noisier than the Samsung - but not a lot in it. Basically I occasionally hear the WD whereas I cannot remember hearing the Samsung.
 
well, speed and overall system performance are the key issues for me. I think that i could cope with 64GB but i'm not sure, thinking of getting 2 samsung ssd's for a raid setup.

I think that I'll buy one this month for the initial test and 1 next month to finish the raid keeping my 320gb f1 as storage. I don't think that i will be able to match the sustainable rates of an SSD with a standard platter based drive.

they're a bit pricey at £100 a pop but i can live with blowing £100 on one drive just to see how much better the system performs and to gague if going for raid is a viable option. Besides, looking at this review is whats swung it for me really to be honest http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/flash-ssd-hard-drive,2000-19.html if they are the right samsung drives that i am looking at on google now.
 
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