Trying to figure out which HD to pick

[yourmom2161]

I'm a cheap college student with poor gaming habits, and I'm still using an HD that has been passed along from computer to computer from a 6 year old pre-built HP computer. Pretty sure it's 200GB and 5400RPM, but honestly I have no idea since I'm too lazy to look up the model number on it and HP doesn't like telling its consumers what they're buying.

Anyway, I was installing Crysis Warhead yesterday via a virtual drive onto my hard drive and it was taking FOREVER. The write time was a whopping 4.5mb/s: That's when I decided it was time to upgrade.

I have about 90 bucks at the most to spend, and I can't for the life of me figure out which of these drives to buy:

Western Digital Caviar Black WD7501AALS 750GB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Hard Drive -Bare Drive
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136283&cm_re=western_digital_caviar_black-_-22-136-283-_-Product

Western Digital Caviar Black WD1001FALS 1TB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive -Bare Drive
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136283&cm_re=western_digital_caviar_black-_-22-136-283-_-Product

SAMSUNG Spinpoint F3 HD502HJ 500GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive -Bare Drive
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822152181

Western Digital Caviar Black WD6401AALS 640GB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive -Bare Drive
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136319

The WD drives all seem to vary in price greatly, but it's the model numbers that confuse me. What's the difference between the WD1001FALS and the WD7501AALS? The Spinpoint is really cheap, but I'm seeing that it's one of the fastest non-SSD and non-10k HDs available?

 

[sminlal]

The WD page below lists all of their internal drives and is a pretty good way to see what the high-level differences are between the drives. For more info you can click on a drive link to go to the web page for that drive. On the drive web page, clicking the "Specifications" tab gives you more info and a link to the official PDF specifications document.

http://www.wdc.com/en/products/productcatalog.asp?language=en

 

[yourmom2161]

Thanks very much! Looking at your link, it seems as if though all the WD drives are the same except for the amount of space.

So now the question is, do I get the Samsung, which came out much more recently or the WD?

 

[rofl_my_waffle]

There is the WD caviar black FAEX 1TB which is 64mb cache and sata 6gb/s if you are interested.

I personally went for two spinpoint F3 1TB in raid 0 because they have faster sustained read and perform quieter.

 

[yourmom2161]

Okay, so I'm better off buying the Samsung? It has a 16mb cache versus the 32mb: What would that affect?

 

[yourmom2161]

Best answer selected by yourmom2161.