Which 2TB HDD?

[M0nkeyb0Y]

budget is £100 max,

General use - speed and silence obviously preferred.

I note that ebuyer have the seagate barracuda LP for £78

[Funkstar]

If it was me, I'd be buying a WD or Hitachi. I've had issues with both Samsung and Seagate in recent years so they are out of favour with me

[Steve]

Failure rates on 2TB drives are markedly higher than lower capacity drives.

Contrary to Funkstar's experience, I've had issues with WD drives, and always use Seagate myself, but I guess when you intersect our experiences, you're left with Hitachi (I recently used their 2TB Ultrastar disks, but I don't think you'll want to be paying for them )

Luckily they do cheaper desktop disks.

But still, unless you really need 2TB drives right now, I'd say for a single-disk purchase, go 1TB or 1.5TB.

[watercooled]

No drive MFR produces 100% perfect drives, but I've given my speech enough times on other threads.
I'm using mainly Samsungs but the one WD I have (in a MyBook but I've used it outside the caddy) runs very hot, so hot it's uncomfortable to pick up.
You might find these reviews useful:
http://hothardware.com/Reviews/Defin...oundup/?page=1
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/sto...roundup-2.html

[jim]

I'd just go for the cheapest.

To counter Funkstar and Steve, I own three Samsung F3 2TB drives, and have had about six Samsung F1 1TB drives and never had a failure.

[Sputnik]

I've bought 5 Samsung drives and not had any problems as yet.

Out of all the drives I've had over the years - WD, Maxtor, Seagate, Fujitsu,Toshiba (and some others I have forgotten about) the only drive failure I had was a Maxtor.

I had problems using Maxtors with an Nvidia Nforce3 chipset and that is how the Maxtor got the problem. I cured the issue by changing to WD drives for that machine.

Yes the Samsung drives seem to be having problems with some chipsets, Yes it is a problem with the drives firmware but, they have resolved it with a firmware update.

[malice19]

Western Digital WD20EARS 2TB Caviar Green 3.5" SATA II Hard Drive £79.89 , not bad price : )

http://www.aria.co.uk/SuperSpecials/...ource=googleps

[Steve]

BE CAREFUL.

The EARS are 4k sector drives, but the firmware reports 512 physical sectors, so a system that "trusts" the drive to report its physical & logical sector sizes properly will potentially have terrible performance (trust me, I've experienced it first hand).

If it's in a Windows 7 rig you should be fine, although I think you may have to take care with partition boundaries.

[M0nkeyb0Y]

Got the "Thanks" cannon out - all very helpful responses. Went for a seagate barracuda 1.5tb - on price and as per Steve's 2tb warning

[Reefer86]

i personally would go with the samsung drives they are one of the best 2tb to get and within your budget

[Behemoth]

I know we all have our prefered brand of drives but I'm now quite weary of any Seagate product, having got two seagate drives in my machine I'm always nervy when I hear either one make a new noise that I've not heard before.

Western Digital/Samsung/Hitachi have always been good to me over the years.

[EyedeA]

budget is £100 max,

General use - speed and silence obviously preferred.

I note that ebuyer have the seagate barracuda LP for £78

I bought this - Seagate have a long warranty on their drives now and this performs better than the WD green drives in reviews - it has a higher speed (at 5900rpm) than most 2tb drives.

I prefer to have different manufacturer drives in my machine as the probability of failure is less with different batches, models and ultimately manufacturers... A company I used to work with had two separate WD drives fail within weeks of each other and later found them to be the same batch.

Anyway, hope the big drive works out for ya!

[jim]

A few months back I had about four Samsung drives in my server with sequential serial numbers