Which Hard Drive should I buy from this shop?

[Lithocardia]

I live near this place and it seems to have the best prices.

My HDDs are crap, slow, unreliable and generally... did I say crap?

I was looking at the WD10EARS (bottom of page 1 I think, it looks black but it's the 'green power' version. Read a lot of problems (resolvable though) for people on XP. I'm on win 7 32 but will install x64 to the new drive. Anything over 500gb is getting partitioned.

Which is the best value for money, reliable and above all fast?

The reason for the purchase is that windows rating for my rig is only 5.9 because of the HDDs. Everything else I have is rated around 7.1 - 7.5

Oh and I don't want to spend over $100, less would be preferable.

https://www.pcdiy.com.au/index.php?cPath=160_233&osCsid=6d9935aae7350031fcd6af74b5bd49ff

 

[tecmo34]

1) I would go with the Samsun Spinpoint F3 500GB. It is one of the fastet hard drives you can buy. The one you select (Green) is more designed for a storage drive & not boot drive.

2) You will see a nice improvement with this drive but it will not bring you over the 5.9 rating. No standard hard drive can score over a 5.9 (the new SATA III Velicoraptors might???) in WEI. You'll need to jump to a SSD to get over 5.9 and there is a cost factor to it.

3) I won't put any major stock into your WEI ratings. It is not a true system benchmark worth wording about (which is why you never see benchmarks include WEI).

 

[Lithocardia]

What about the fact it only has 16mg cache on the Samsung? Is that an issue?

Thx for the advice btw

 

[Lithocardia]

Or maybe my HDDs aren't as crap as I thought... maybe it's something else. Pls give opinion!

I've got (according to sys tools, too much crap in the case to see these days and I forget)

2x Samsung HD250HJ ATA device

ST3500418AS ATA device

I use the later partitioned. I think the boot drive is the 300gb partition, leaving the rest for storage. I found this thread on it:

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/256428-32-seagate-st3500418as-performance-problems-videos

This is the problem I have, didn't try the solution in the thread yet.

When I watch video material in Win7 media player, occasionally the vid will freeze for a few seconds. When it resumes it runs super fast until it reaches the point where should have reached had it played naturally. Like I said, it only happens occasionally and the problem only last for 2 seconds or so. It's not a problem but I hear a whirring noise when it does it and freak out that what's truly happening is that my HDD is on the way out.

What do you think?

edit: (I don't believe my Asus P5Q Pro can run Sata III without some additional card. My 2x ATI 4870s take up too much room to really think about any more PCIe devices- if that is where the thing would go)

How can I tell how much cache my HDD has? It doesn't seem to say in Sys tools. It would help to know because this model had a really really bad version (32 cache) and a newer release (16 cache). Be nice to know.


Oops thought I hit edit not reply, sorry for double post

 

[tecmo34]

What about the fact it only has 16mg cache on the Samsung? Is that an issue?

Thx for the advice btw

The Samsung gets it's speed from having a single 500GB platter, so the 16mb of cache doesn't effect it's performance. Older drives were based on two 250GB platters.

ST3500418AS ATA Device is a Seagate 7200.12 hard drive, which is equal in performance to the Samsung Spinpoint F3, so there is no need to get a different drive.

I'll have to do some more research on your issue... It could be drive related as Seagate has been known to have firmware issues but most were related to the 7200.11 1.5TB drives though.

 

[Lithocardia]

I switched primary HDD. I've now got my Seagate as data storage and one of the Samsung HD250HJ's a C:\

I found on Google that other people had the same issue with that model Seagate causing the freezing/speedup/whirring during media play.

I can't say the change of HDD has caused a speed increase because I did other things at the same time like OC my CPU and upgrade to 64 bit win (increasing max RAM). What I CAN say is the whirring/freezing stopped

I found that my model Seagate apparently had a firmware update but I couldn't find anywhere to download it. Maybe it already has the newer because the 'problem' drives usually showed up as 410AS but mine shows up as the 418s.