Hi, posting a thread (there are so many on picking hard drives) to tailor it to my situation.
AMD 965 gamining system. I have an 80GB Intel G2 for the Windows 7 Ultimate and World of Warcraft.
The shopping is for a hard drive. I'm leaning towards a 1TB.
The only real use planned is gaming. There's a possible HTPC/DVR use as well at some point, but I suspect that isn't too much an issue for the pick.
Reliability: important, but not really an issue - any of the drives I'm considering seem to have that comparably.
Noise: this is somewhat important. It'll annoy me to hear the hard drive. So I'd rather get quieter.
Performance: matters if I'll notice, but I've started to wonder how much I will. In a game like WoW where there's a lot of disk loading - zoning into Dalaran and instances - that's why it's on the SSD. And it works great, Dalaran is like one second zoning. But I've shifted my 'get the fastest' to 'maybe that's not a big deal'.
So here's where I'm leaning. I just got the WD 1TB 64MB cache, after I saw that cache and good reviews. I haven't opened and can return it.
Now I'm seeing the Samsung look better overall - quieter, faster throughput like double and a bit slower I/O but maybe trivial issue.
The WD Green wasn't an option because of the performance, but now the noise versus performance has me wondering - noticable quiet for pretty much not noticable performance difference? Maybe it's worth looking at after all for my use.
So that's the basic question - I'm all but convinced it makes sense to return the WD with the sexy but not apparently very useful 64MB cache (forget the SATA 3.0 that it doesn't come close to benefitting from as it doesn't even hit SATA 1 speeds) and get another (but tell me if I'm wrong and would love the faster I/O or something), leaving the main alternative the Samsung F3 or the WD Green (for the quiet).
Thanks.
AMD 965 gamining system. I have an 80GB Intel G2 for the Windows 7 Ultimate and World of Warcraft.
The shopping is for a hard drive. I'm leaning towards a 1TB.
The only real use planned is gaming. There's a possible HTPC/DVR use as well at some point, but I suspect that isn't too much an issue for the pick.
Reliability: important, but not really an issue - any of the drives I'm considering seem to have that comparably.
Noise: this is somewhat important. It'll annoy me to hear the hard drive. So I'd rather get quieter.
Performance: matters if I'll notice, but I've started to wonder how much I will. In a game like WoW where there's a lot of disk loading - zoning into Dalaran and instances - that's why it's on the SSD. And it works great, Dalaran is like one second zoning. But I've shifted my 'get the fastest' to 'maybe that's not a big deal'.
So here's where I'm leaning. I just got the WD 1TB 64MB cache, after I saw that cache and good reviews. I haven't opened and can return it.
Now I'm seeing the Samsung look better overall - quieter, faster throughput like double and a bit slower I/O but maybe trivial issue.
The WD Green wasn't an option because of the performance, but now the noise versus performance has me wondering - noticable quiet for pretty much not noticable performance difference? Maybe it's worth looking at after all for my use.
So that's the basic question - I'm all but convinced it makes sense to return the WD with the sexy but not apparently very useful 64MB cache (forget the SATA 3.0 that it doesn't come close to benefitting from as it doesn't even hit SATA 1 speeds) and get another (but tell me if I'm wrong and would love the faster I/O or something), leaving the main alternative the Samsung F3 or the WD Green (for the quiet).
Thanks.
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