Looking to replace the drives in my current rig, need advice

[MunkyTOS]

Hey OC'ers!

I currently have an Samsung 840 evo 120gb ssd and a Seagate Barracuda 3tb HDD in my current ring (as found in signature). The ssd is nice, I'm glad I went with samsung but the size just does not cut it with the number of games I play and the size of the OS as is. Looking at the 240gb range as being ideal for my needs. My seagate is probably close to 4-5 years old now and it makes a noticeable grinding noise when reading game files. I am limited to buying at Newegg exclusively at the moment and the case I have (evga hadron air) is limited to 2 3.5" drive bays. Any advice on bands or links to specific good deals is much appreciated.


Just a quick update, had some free time to look around and came across these drives, was curious about you guys' thoughts.


Seagate 3tb hdd

Samsung 850 Evo 250gb SSD

 

[Mighty_Miro_WD]

Hi there.

First, what are you planning to use the secondary drive for - additional mass storage space or you want to run games and apps from there as well? If you're after the first option you may consider WD Blue which is most commonly used for regular computing, light gaming and workloads and combined with SSD. It is fully capable to run most games as well as many programs for editing or programming, but it comes in capacity up to 1TB. Another drive you can take a look at is WD Black since it's a performance oriented HDD with a built-in dual-core CPU that makes the drive great for multitasking and will give you faster loading times as well.

On the other hand if you just want some additional space for movies, music, pics, etc. you can take a look at WD Green since it is designed for backups and secondary storage. Its features allow it to be a great choice for quiet backup builds or for archiving, and works cool, quiet and saves a lot of power by spinning down after a certain amount of time (e.g. once every 15 minutes).

Here are some links if you want to check them out:

WD Blue - http://products.wdc.com/support/kb.ashx?id=1oLBMP
WD Black - http://products.wdc.com/support/kb.ashx?id=jA0RXS
WD Green - http://products.wdc.com/support/kb.ashx?id=1n3o6O

As for gaming from the SSD, the only real benefit you can gain is the reduced loading times which will be better for open world games and such that have to load often and load in objects, etc. Other than that you can run them from the HDD without any significant performance suffering since the GPU and CPU are the key components for your FPS.

Hope this helps and feel free to ask any questions you may have.

Cheers!

 

[MunkyTOS]

Thank you for your informative post mighty miro. I have looked at the western digital line and they seem like great drives for all their uses. I however ended up going with another seagate barracuda because of personal experience using them.