Best 1tb drive?

I need a new hard drive to run my games from. I have a Vertex 3 120gb for my OS/apps but I need a fairly large hard drive for 200gb+ of installed games.

I've been following SSDs closely in the recent past but I realized I know little of what the best hard drives are these days. I'm not looking to spend a ton after just recently purchasing the Vertex 3 so the Velociraptor is out. What would be my best pick out of the current crop of 1tb drives for performance, reliability, and reasonable noise level?

I would recommend any of the WD or Hitachi lineup if you are not using RAID.

I'd go with the Western Digital Cavair Black. It's their high performance HD. I have it and it is great. It's not loud, at least I can't hear it. But it is really fast. Games and applications load extremely fast off of it. Definitely recommend it!

Edit: Stryfe, I'd go with the WD Cavair Black 1.5TB. It's cheaper than the 1TB right now($75 for 1.5, $84 for 1TB)

http://www.amazon.com/Western-Digit...TF8&s=electronics&qid=1309906383&sr=1-1-spell

Unfortunately I'm in Canada and Amazon.ca doesn't sell computer parts. The Canadian chain I usually buy from has the 1tb for $80 but doesn't carry the 1.5tb currently. The 2tb is $145.

Considering the only thing going on this drive would be my game installs which currently sit a little less than 200gb I think the 1tb should suit me just fine. If I end up filling it I would hope I would be able to find some stuff to uninstall at that point!

http://www.newegg.ca/

http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Produc...SpeTabStoreType=&AdvancedSearch=1&srchInDesc=

Samsung F3 1TB should be great for you.

I keep forgetting Newegg has a Canadian site now.

I'm having trouble finding benchmarks comparing a Samsung F3 1tb vs a Caviar Black 1tb or 1.5tb.

I realize either one would probably be a great drive, I'm just curious if there's anything that gives one a small edge over the other.

In my file server I have two Samsung F1s (750gb and 1tb) and two WD Caviar Greens (1.5tb and 2tb). I've been quite happy with both brands in the time I've had them.

Samsung F4 2TB drives are wonderful! While it is a slower 5400RPM drive it still has great read/writes across it. Access time is slower of course.

I would look at a F4 for my file server. I think for a drive I'm installing all my games to I would rather stick with something that's as fast as possible in both sequential and random reads/writes.

Stryfe said:

I keep forgetting Newegg has a Canadian site now.

I'm having trouble finding benchmarks comparing a Samsung F3 1tb vs a Caviar Black 1tb or 1.5tb.

I realize either one would probably be a great drive, I'm just curious if there's anything that gives one a small edge over the other.

In my file server I have two Samsung F1s (750gb and 1tb) and two WD Caviar Greens (1.5tb and 2tb). I've been quite happy with both brands in the time I've hard them.

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The F3s trade blows with the Blacks but with the Blacks you pay a price premium + another premium to get 'RAID edition' which I think is BS.

I was reading some of the reviews on the product pages on Newegg for the F3 and Caviar Black. Both have quite a few people mentioning them being loud. Some noise isn't a big deal to me, my systems aren't quiet already. But some people mentioned the F3's having a particularly annoying type of noise.

Does anyone who has one of these drives have anything to say about the noise they make?

Janus67 said:

The F3s trade blows with the Blacks but with the Blacks you pay a price premium + another premium to get 'RAID edition' which I think is BS.

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WD Blacks work perfectly fine in raid though. Nearly all drives work fine in raid unless they are green drives thats when issues arise from the sleep mode on the drive.

thideras said:

I would recommend any of the WD or Hitachi lineup if you are not using RAID.

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+1

Western Digital Black N RAID 0

I have worked on my two WD Black 500 (WD500IAALS-00L3B2) trying to set up a RAID 0. One drive is faster than the other. I was told by Western 2nd tier Support to go ahead and try it, noting to lose, so I did, and it didn't work out.

I have called Western Digital about these two drives to many times to count.
Second tier support said that the WD Black is a Consumer Grade drive and it is not designed to set it at any thing other than RAID 0 or a RAID 1. I would say the enterprise drives would be their best RAID drives. However that does not mean the WD Black will not run in a RAID 0, WD guaranties that it will run in RAID 0 or 1.

After I set my two drive in a RAID 0 it read at about >140 MB per-second for my set up. With HD Tech it reported that it was reading at 220.

As I bench marked this RAID I saw how unstable it was so I stopped the test and deleted the RAID.

One drive reads at 92 MB/s the other is at 78 MB/s or with a stop watch one drive can copy a 4.6 G file in 57 seconds and the other takes 64 second.

Both drives are considered to be in perfect heath but that is not the case when RAID is involved. Yea I might send them back and try again or not. I don't need more storage of a 1TB drive.

I have used SSD in my laptop, it made that laptop wicked fast but I got rid of it because it had an i7 in it causing it to run very hot and it cut my battery life in half. I have forgotten why I started writing all this stuff down what was the question?