Please help with HDD choice and Q's

Hey all, thank you in advance for your replies..


I am looking to replace my 2x 160g hard drives, and when i mean replace, i will keep these are they work fine, but plan to add more room.

I have been hearing good things about the Samsung Spin Point, and of course the Seagate 7200.12 has been a good contender for a while, and then the old faithfull, WD640 Black.

My question is really... which one is the fastest or would be the best performer in games?

I don't really care if my OS loads 3 seconds faster or if one runs 5 degrees hotter than the other, im just concerned with which will give the best, reliable performance.

I have been leaning toward the WD Black for a while, simply because i don't know much about the others. I have also considered the VelociRaptor, but am not really sure if the performance is worth the price difference?

I have also been toying around with the idea of a SSD drive (probably kingston or OCZ) but, am a bit confused on the bootable or not. From what i've been told is even if you have a bootable SSD drive, it's better to leave the OS on a standard HDD and just install your aps on the SSD.

Also, are there any benefits to having say.. OS and Games on 1 drive, and having a smaller other drive setup as virtual memory?

Again, thank you for any and all input!

Here you contradict yourself. You don't care about boot times or application load times but you do want the "best reliable performance". Reliability and performance are two separate things. Either you don't care about performance and want something reliable (that keeps working) or you want something fast and DO care about the one being faster than the other. Please clearly describe what you want this is a contradiction.

SSDs are ideal system drives; and ofcourse they are bootable. SSDs should be used as system disk, containing your OS + installed applications/games, but not user data like music, videos, ISO, RAR, etc; any binary large file. Those should be stored on big HDDs instead.

Swap file is virtually not used anymore as PCs have enough RAM. Swapping is also something else than virtual memory design, though they are related. With 4GB+ RAM simply disable the swap if you like it shouldnt make any significant difference.

Thank you all for the posts!

Jack, thank you for the link to the charts, i don't know why i didn't think about seeing if Toms hard charts on HDD's considering they do on most other stuff.

sub mesa, I really appreciate your input, and the info on the Swap file and virtual memory. Though, on my "reliable and performance" i don't really see that as a contradiction. For example, the Caviar Black is performance, and has a 5 year warranty, that to me implies it's got performance and is reliable. (i meant "reliable" because for brands like Hitachi, who score fairly well in performance, i have no idea how reliable they are).

Looks like i'm still leanin' for the WD640 Black

=D