Req: HDD ratings charts

[djtrex]

Can someone post a link to a chart or two with HDD ratings and reviews? I have checked Cnet and ZDnet and i found nothing to help. There are some descent reviews at Amazon but you can only see them when you select a specific product. What i want is a list of drives ranked best to worst.

I am looking to add 2 Hard Drives to my system. I currently have a 500GB external and a 1TB internal. I am looking to go to 3TB total with a 3TB backup for my music and image files. I'm a graphic designer and an amateur photographer.

Looking for:
2TB internal +
3TB external
or
3TB internal +
3TB external

Thanks everyone,
Wayne

 

[truegenius]

www.harddrivebenchmark.net/high_end_drives.html

 

[WyomingKnott]

Tom's has extensive comparison charts here: http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/hard-drives-and-ssds,3.html , although it looks like they didn't update it for HDDs recently - you'll have to check.

The problem is: Better or Worse depends on what your criteria are. This is easier to see with SSDs, where some do serial reads and writes blazingly, while others are optimized for tens of thousands of random IOs per second. The latter is useful for running databases, the former for nothing that I can think of besides benchmarking. Back to HDDs, some people will focus on access times, some on sustained read and write rates, some on power saving, and some on price. So best-to-worst isn't really well defined.

My two cents: All of the well-known brands are reliable and will probably show similar failure rates once you get the sample size up to thousands. Buy whatever is available. And no matter how good the drive, do backups, as you have indicated you will. Backups should be external, so that a whole-system disaster will not wipe out your internal backup.

 

[djtrex]

I guess my main criteria would be reliability and accuracy. I want the drive to last and copy ALL files completely. Since i plan to set it up to do backups automatically i don't think it matters what speed it goes at although we all want the fastest transfers as we can get.

Thanks for the links guys

Wayne