Am I kidding myself

I want to upgrade my current drives to sata. I current have two IDE drives with 2mb caches. I think that the Raptors are too expensive atm. I am going away to college in 3 weeks, so I need to have all this here and installed by the end of next week, early week after. So do any sata drives come semi close to the raptors?

The newest Hitachi drives seem to do quite well. Check this out:

http://www.storagereview.com/articles/200407/20040729revisit_1.html

do those results hold true for all size of hard drives or just the Hitachi mentioned there. I was looking at this one http://www.newegg.com/app/viewProductDesc.asp?description=22-145-049&depa=1. Mainly because it is cheaper than the seagate and the same seak time

In all seriousness, I've probably used about two dozen of these 80gb Hitachi SATA both for myself, and clients whom I build computers for.

I've never had a failure, and the speed for an 80gb drive is second to none. Most of all, you simply cannot beat the price.

They will not be as fast as a 250gb drive (having 6 read write heads [in the 250gb model] as opposed to two, is going to make seek times a tad faster, as well as data throughput), but the difference is hardly noticable.

Having two in Raid0, I am constantly benching over 100mbps in Atto.



In terms of transfer speed, this is definately Raptor territory. Compared to the Raptor, the hitachi suffers in seek times (perhaps more important) but is definately head and shoulders above the rest.

Not to knock Hitachi's, but with HDD's you really do get what you pay for.

Honestly I think any 8mb current-gen drive you get you'll be happy with. Its just that you don't know for how long... I will admit that even Seagate too has shipped a few DOA drives...but thats to be expected when you pay for little for such advanced tech now.

from newegg

Hitachi 80GB 7200RPM SATA Hard Drive, Model HDS722580VLSA80, OEM

Model# HDS722580VLSA80
Item # N82E16822145049

Specifications:
Capacity: 80GB
Average Seek Time: 8.5 ms
Buffer: 8MB
Rotational Speed: 7200 RPM
Interface: Serial ATA
Features: Fluid Dynamic Bearing (FDB) motor technology
Manufacturer Warranty: 3 years
Packaging: OEM DRIVE ONLY

Click to expand...

If it's DOA then I'll send it back to newegg, never had an issue with them before.

HiProfile said:

Not to knock Hitachi's, but with HDD's you really do get what you pay for.

Click to expand...

Not really, in fact quite the opposite is true.

After doing a quick search on Newegg, Hitachi is both the fastest, and cheapest 7200rpm, 8mb cache, SATA drive available. Now in this scenario, you are actually getting a bit more than you pay for, when you consider that the next cheapest brand is several dollars more expensive, and slower!