Looking for 2TB Internal Hard Drive For Videos

[endoftheline2]

I'm looking for a Looking for a 2TB Internal Hard Drive to use primary for storing and playing back 1080P videos. I'm looking for pretty good performance since I'll be copying a lot of videos to it and playing back many 1080P videos.

I've been looking on newegg and amazon and most of the 2TB internal HD's that I'm finding seem to be some sort of power saving green drive, also newegg doesn't seem to specify if they are 5400rpm or 7200rpm, I' hoping that they are 7200rpm?

I'm looking to get a Western Digital or other brand and avoid a Seagate due to some problems with their drives over 1TB.

In the reasonable price range (like under $200) I've found these two Western Digital Drives, which look good, EXCEPT newegg does not say if they are 7200rpm, and many of the reviews say that they are a bit slow, and not to use them for programs. I would really only be using for Videos, still I do not want a slow drive.

Western Digital AV-GP WD20EVDS
[Used in a lot of Tivos it seems]
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductReview.aspx?Item=N82E16822136494

Western Digital Caviar Green WD20EARS
[Looks good but people say it may be slow]
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductReview.aspx?Item=N82E16822136514

I do not want to buy a Green power saving drive in particular, as I just care about the performance, however I am looking in this price range, and it seems the best 2TB caviar black Western Digital Drives are $279.

Does anyone have any ideas on these two drives or another 2TB Internal Hard Drive that would be good for Mostly Video Usage?

 

[sminlal]

Performance is irrelevant for watching movies - the data rate for video playback is so low that any old drive will do. Of course it will make a difference when you copy the movies to the drive, but you only do that once and it can be done while you're doing something else.

The WD20EVDS is a green drive that operates at a slower spindle speed, as indicated by the "Intellipower" notation under the rotation speed on the product summary page:
http://www.wdc.com/wdproducts/library/AAG/ENG/2879-701250.pdf

Here's the WD product page so you can see which drives are which. Clicking on the model number takes you to the web page for the drive, from which you can click the "Specifications" tab and then click the link to get a copy of the PDF file which lists the detailed specs:
http://www.westerndigital.com/en/products/productcatalog.asp?language=en

A word of warning: The WD green drives that I've checked have a higher reliability rating then the 7200RPM drives. The greens are rated at no more than 1 unrecoverable read error per 10^15 bits read, whereas the blacks that I've checked are per 10^14 bits read (a factor of 10X difference). It doesn't sound like a lot, but on a 2TB drive the blacks have up to a 20% chance of an unrecoverable read error when reading the whole disk, while for the greens it's only around 2%.

 

[endoftheline2]

hum that is a good point, does the "Intellipower" notation mean that the speed likely maxes at like 5400rpm, and i guess maybe the RPM varies lower than that as well or something?

 

[sminlal]

I've heard conflicting stories on "Intellipower". Some say it's a fixed 5400RPM, some say its a fixed speed that's intermediate between 5400 and 7200, and some say it varies.

To the extent that the drive spins down when it hasn't seen any activity for a while the speed could be construed as "variable", but i don't think that really counts in terms of operating speed.

 

[cadder]

Drive "speed" is a function of rpm AND data density. All of the big drives have good data density because they are packing as much data as they can onto the platters. A 7200rpm drive might or might not give significantly higher data transfer in practice. The 7200 rpm will test faster but sometimes the large 5400 rpm drive will test faster than smaller capacity 7200 rpm drives. You can look up reviews that Toms has done for actual performance tests.

http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/2009-3.5-desktop-hard-drive-charts/benchmarks,50.html

A 5400 rpm drive will suffer a tiny bit in seek performance because it takes a bit longer for the platter to come around to the point where you might be ready to read from it, but this is more a factor in random i/o than it is if you are just reading or writing a long file to it.