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Well ill probably be getting a new hard drive soon and was wondering whats the best option for me. Got about £50 to spend and storage is the main priority along with noise, got a 640gb aaks as boot and 2 250aaks as storage/games. Was thinking of getting the 1 tb hitachi as its cheap and said to be good but are there any alternatives to consider?.
This is a question askred lots of times (there have been at least two threads in the last couple of weeks, a search throws up more) and the answers often support various makes with an almost religious fervour!
Hitachi seem to offer good value for money at the moment, but drives are keenly priced and anything from Hitachi, Samsung or Western digital will meet your needs.
Personally I use Samsungs, or WD, but there will be others who will have had a bad experience with one of those, but in a commodity market like HDD, there will inevitably be a failure rate, and someone will inevitably get one! Quite often the damage may be caused during shipping.
In general, higher spindle speeds will mean faster data transfer rates, but possibly more noise and slightly greater power consumption, although modern drives tend to be quiet anyway - Samsungs have a good reputation for that. In a domestic situatio, the difference in power consumption is unlikely to be significant.
For WD, the velociraptors are the fastest, noisiest and most expensive, Scorpio blacks are at the higher end of the 'normal' market, with the blue the slightly less expensive range.
You could do a lot worse than look at the mfrs web sites to look at the specs in depth, and the difference between the various model numbers - some WD drives have shock protection for example, and then choose a retailer that has that model in stock - not all carry all models.
Consider the reputation of the retailer. Scan use a HUGE amount of bubble wrap on their disk drives when they ship them - I've never had a drive fail. (And you would qualify for free shipping. You also have the option of Scansure installation shipping (make sure you deselect it if you don't want that - it is an opt out service)
If you are near one of the major retailers (Scan, Novatech etc), you might be better buying it in person to avoid the risk of mis-handling in transit.
Heh - I know I've linked to Ars before <quiet in the back row !> but they echo peterb.
Personally, I just bought the Hitachi.
"Western Digital's 10,000rpm VelociRaptor 150GB and 300GB are even faster if more speed is required, but SSDs (solid state disks) are probably the way to go if you need even more performance. The Intel X25-M is probably the ideal drive to get for your money, with the cheaper OCZ Vertex being second. The problem is that SSDs or even VRs are still a substantial chunk of the budget, and while they're nice, the extra money is probably better spent on a faster video card.
Lots of other hard disks are out there if you don't like or can't get the WD Caviar Black. The Samung F1 1TB (HD103UJ), Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000.B (HDT721010SLA360), and Seagate 7200.11 1TB (ST31000333AS), as well as the somewhat less-performance-oriented 5400rpm Western Digital Green 1TB. "
http://arstechnica.com/hardware/guid...-edition.ars/2
I got 2x Samsung spinpoints 1tb. They are quiet and fast. I would recommend them.