What is the new generations of HHD's? 640gig ? 750gig ? 1TB ?

Hey Mfusick,

Check the link below for some information on the one platter versus two platter:

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/253571-32-what-single...

(its an old thread regarding your question so, there may be newer information now)

Also, the charts on here give some indication in terms of performance on several hard drives (2009 chart):

http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/2009-3.5-desktop-har...

Hope this helps a little with your question!

thank you !!!

Big help.. I will go read now

ok... I read that thread but it does not say specifically if the say 750gig is newer or older than the 500gig or 320gig platter platform

Hey Mfusick,

For example, the WD 3TB uses a 4 platter 750GB platter, so this would make it the newest generation, due to the time it had been released. It wouldn't really make all that much sense if there was less GB/platter because of performance reasons. The best thing would be to confirm with WD about the 750GB per platter just to be sure.

Hope this helps you with your question!

yes the newest tech is the 750gb per sq in platters . The WD 3TB drive is the first 3.5" drive to use this tech but its performance is a bit lacking. It acts more like a notebook drive but then it is a green drive....

1TB platters are up and coming which should get us into the 4tb drives pretty easily and you'll see 2tb laptop drives! <sweet>

so if I was looking for 2 drives to RAID 0 now.. I should focus on 750gig drives ?? Since they are newer than 500gig?

(I assume the 1TB drives are older 500gig platters times 2 ? )

and older than those are 320/640 gig drives.

Any reason not to get two 640gig drives? I can get a good deal on WD blacks. but if 750gig drives are much better I would spend the extra for those.. and RAID them

Currently we have:

500GB platters @ 5400rpm + 7200rpm
666GB platters @ 5400rpm
750GB platters @ 4200rpm (assumed)

If you see a 750GB drive, then it could only be a drive with a single 750GB platter, and these don't exist yet, or it could be a 3x 250GB platter drive which is very old by comparison.

So avoid 320/640/750GB drive and buy only modern 500GB/1000/2000GB drives. 500GB you should pay attention not to buy a 2x 250GB platter drive, but a single platter 500GB.

The other choice would be Samsung F4 320GB; this is a 666GB-platter drive which uses only one side of the platter; so half the capacity and they labeled it as 320GB. Should be one of the fastest drives out now and unlike the F4 2TB, spins at 7200rpm and uses normal 512-byte sectors. This may also be one of the most reliable 7200rpm desktop drives on the market, since it uses the fewest mechanical components possible with conventional means. By using only one side of the platter, there is just one head; so even less components than a standard single-platter drive, which uses both sides of the platter and thus has 2 heads. Note that all heads in an HDD share the same actuator; so there is no performance boost that you could expect.

Wow awesome this is what I needed to know!!!


so 500gig/1TB is the newer stuff... Now I just need to pick one out.


Below is a few I was looking at. What you think is the best ? Should I consider Hitachi or Seagate over Samsung or WD?


http://www.newegg.com/Product/Productcompare.aspx?Submi...|22-136-805^22-136-805-TS,22-152-185^22-152-185-TS,22-152-238^22-152-238-TS,22-136-284^22-136-284-TS

Samsung performs best in all test that I've seen.
I had another vet on here tell me something about how WD disables TLER on consumer retailed HDD's which I believe is mainly for a RAID setup anyways.

Sub Mesa knows alot more than I do though, but I bet he says the Samsung  

Well i hope so anyways because i just bought a OCZ V2 SSD and a samsung F3 lol

Samsung F3 or Samsung F4 320GB would have my preference. Note that the Samsung F4 might need a firmware fix to address a corruption issue under some circumstances (combination of SMART + NCQ + a regular write request), the Samsung F3 doesn't need this as far as i recall.

Note that having a strong preference for a specific brand may not be the most objective way to buy new hardware. All the HDD vendors are quite close to eachother. When brand X releases a new drive or cuts prices even further, that could change the balance on what would objectively be the best disk for your to buy at that point.

If your question is which HDD brand is more reliable, then my answer is: none are. Don't trust HDDs not to fail! If you do rely on this, you'll get bitten by dataloss one day or another. It's just a matter of time. Mechanical storage is inherently unreliable. Also early SSDs have a tendency to abruptly fail, without any obvious cause. So don't trust storage devices not to fail; expect them to fail and adjust your methods for data protection accordingly.

Use backups to protect your data, so that if either fails you still have the other copy and can back it up to another source quickly again. Backups are masters of data preservation, in their battle against time.

My rule of thumb is, that any of your storage devices in your possession, should be able to fail without you having a bad day. If you got your backups setup properly, that would be the case and you can sleep well knowing that even if your HDD fails; you got a backup.

Also note that RAID is not a form of backup, but rather a form of redundancy. Those are two separate things both providing protections that are overlapping but not at all equal.

F3 it is then. Two of them 1TB size... I will RAID 0 them into a 2TB array  

To go with my SSD 120gig vertex2  

I just wonder if I should get the 1TB WD black instead. it is only $7 more but gives me 5 years warranty instead of 3. I am sure I will break it within that time... lol