Best performance hard disk

Performance? SSD

Storage? HDD

For mass-storage, try 5400rpm 1TB+ drives. For performance, try Intel SSDs.

Performance is something you need on your system drive. Your mass-storage only needs sequential performance; something 5400rpm HDDs are very good at.

For the best combination of storage and performance, the 2TB WD Caviar Black and the Seagate Barracuda XT 2TB are probably the best. You'd be better off with a small fast SSD and a large slower storage drive though.

You need to understand what kind of performance you're looking for.

If you want a general improvement in tasks like booting or starting up applications, then look for something with fast access times. Access times are measured in milliseconds (ms), the smaller the number the better. For hard drives, generally the faster the RPM the faster the access time. SSDs have by far the best access times, about 100X faster than a standard hard drive.

If you need to be able to copy large files quickly, or if you run programs that need to read or write large files quickly (editing video or RAW camera files are examples of this), then look for a drive with a fast transfer rate. Transfer rates are measured in MByte/sec, the bigger the number the better. SSDs don't have a huge advantage in transfer rates, and are often actually slower at writing large files.

Note that movie playback does not require a fast drive. Although video files can be quite large, playing them back at normal speed requires only a very low data rate.

What the big yelllow nosed guy said above me....

Best performance at what ?

The answer to who is the best performer at the Winter Olympics will depend on whether w etalking skiiing, ice dancing, hockey, luge, whatever....same deal.

Look at this comparison for example...
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/HDD-6Gbit,2528-7.ht...

Wow...the F3 rules !!!!

But wait a minute, let's look at application performance.....
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/HDD-6Gbit,2528-8.ht...

ooops....f3 way down in the charts on most but for movies it kicks arse...

Hard Drives - Check out the performance charts and pick whatever 500 GB per platter drive performs best under your usage patterns. The WD Black 2 TB is a good choice but at smaller capacities, you are limited to the Seagate 7200.12 or the Spinpoint F3. The 7200.12 excels in gaming, multimedia and pictures whereas the F3 wins at music and movie maker. See the comparisons here (copy past link in manually, link won't work in forum):

(http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/2009-3.5-desktop-har...[2371]=on∏[2770]=on)

sminlal is right, generally you should distuingish sequential I/O from non-sequential or random I/O.

For mass-storage, you only need sequential I/O performance. You won't be booting or launching applications; that's something for the system drive which focuses on random I/O instead - and would ideally be an SSD.

Let me explain the difference between random I/O and sequential I/O with some graphs. Compare the Velociraptor (generally the fastest consumer HDD) to the SSDs:



Hey the Velociraptor does pretty good here, and its even faster than the X25-M G2 Intel SSD. Sequential I/O is something HDDs do very well, so its ideal for mass-storage of huge data that is not 'executable'.

But, when we look at random I/O, we can clearly see the weakness of HDDs. This is most important for the system drive, things like launching applications and booting:



The Velociraptor looks like a floppy drive compared to the SSD's here. That's why HDDs can slow down an entire system if it has to seek alot. The throughput drops below 1MB/s. Nice you can do 100MB/s+ when copying files, but that doesn't work when launching applications, etc.

So SSD's are extremely good in random I/O making them suitable as a system drive for booting and launching application/games. HDDs are still useful for mass storage, and are pretty fast in that as well - competing with the SSDs.

Right now, your specifications are on opposite ends of the spectrum. It's either a hard drive is fast (SSD), or it has massive storage (HDD). SSDs are a long way from matching the capacity that normal HDDs provide. For the same amount of money, you can get an 80 GB SSD or a 2TB hard drive. It is true that as HDD space increases, linear read/write rate also increases, because of the higher data density. However, HDDs still suck at random I/O. That is where SSDs shine.

So it's this: If you want blazing fast performance, SSD. If you want a lot of storage space, HDD. If you want both, you can probably settle for something slower but with more space. A 500GB-1TB 7200 RPM hard drive should be enough for anyone.

+1 if you can afford SSD