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Started by wanderer | | 4 answers
How fast of a hard drive is worth it if it's used as a secondary storage drive?
I'm building a high end PC using a Samsung 840 Pro SSD as the primary OS drive. Now, I'm trying to decide on what hard drive to use for storage.

Will I notice a difference in performance between a WD Black vs something like a Seagate Barracuda (or WD Green), if I'm only using it for storage? Reason I ask is because I want a 2TB drive, but the WD Black one is almost $140, and you can get a Barracuda/WD Green for around $80 (in addition to Hitachi/Toshiba). I've also heard that Barracudas have a higher failure rate, so I'm looking for something reliable.

I want to have high performance, but if they'd perform about the same, then it would seem more wise to put that extra money toward something else. What HDD would you recommend?
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a b G Storage
August 28, 2014 3:28:52 PM

I'd go with nothing less than a WD Black or the 7200 Seagate. Anything else, 5400RPM or the green drives will be too slow. Signup for newegg's e-offers. They often have the WD black 2TB on sale for around $120. They are great drives and well worth the $$$.
August 28, 2014 2:08:43 PM

I have a Seagate Barracuda ST1000DM003 1TB 7200 RPM 64MB HDD as well as some WD WD BLACK SERIES WD1003FZEX 1TB 7200 RPM 64MB SATA 6.0Gb/s HDD's and any difference in speed/transfer rates/latency is negligible.
a c 81 Ô Samsung
a c 954 G Storage
August 28, 2014 2:03:41 PM

No, you won't see any difference in operation.
A WD Blue would work just fine. And in reality, here is no 'speed' difference between a WD Black and WD Blue.

I'm not a fan of the WD Greens, but that would probably work as well.
August 28, 2014 2:03:18 PM

i would go with a cheaper/slower hdd, like the wd green you mentioned. of course slightly higher performance would be nice when transferring files, doing backups, etc, but the price premium would be too high for my taste.

i don't know which manufacturers are more reliable than others right now, i have the feeling that you can get a bad drive from all of them occasionally. so you should have your important stuff backed up either way.

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