New Hard Drives!! Which one to get?!

[Lovely Rose]

So I'm not very big on the whole "computer parts" im more of a soft ware person.

 

And i need a new hard drive. but i dont know which to get.

 

I was leaning towards a 1 TB - 2 TB.

 

Any suggestions?

[AKM]

Well, I got a 2TB that worked just fine for somewhere between 6 months to a year, and then suddenly decided it wasn't happy and started wanting to run checks on a weekly basis.  I got used to them, and then it totally crapped and erased everything on one of those checks. 1.5 TB gone in a flash.

 

My 240GB main drive has been working flawlessly for... well, since I got the thing, so I'm guessing at 10 years plus?  It and the case are pretty much the only components I salvaged from my old rig when I built this one a year ago.  Makes me think smaller is better for longevity.

 

Both are the old tech (hard disk), rather than solid state.

 

I do have a solid state, but haven't been running it long enough to recommend anything.

 

Friends have said: disk for storage, solid state to run things (faster).  Your OS and other essential always running stuff would ideally go on a solid state, even if it's a small one, just for that purpose.

[Guest endgameaddiction]

Hitachi sucks.

 

Seagate is a really reliable brand. And as far as how much memory. That depends what you plan to drop in it. If it's for your main. OS and all that. I would just go with 1TB.

[Leito86]

I don't think it really matters on the brand.  I've tried Western Digital and Seagate and haven't had any issues with them on my personal computer.  You can get a 2TB hard drive for around $100.

 

There is the whole green, blue, black categories of hard disk drives.  Green being the slowest and black the fastest.  No idea how they compare to each other though.

[Zor2k13]

For big drives don't buy anything over 1TB in size right now. Many companies have higher failure rates with 2TB than with 1TB.

 

Get a WD blue or black series stay away from their green series unless you like watching all your data die!

 

Seagate sucks they last less than a year, hitachi is owned by WD now but still doing their own thing sort of. I have a toshiba 1TB laptop drive that lasted for about 2 years. I just got one of the new toshiba external laptop sized drives USB 3.0 1TB so far so good for almost 6 months now.

 

 

EDIT

 

Seagate loves to leave that firmware chip full error in their products, basically there is a log file storage area on the drive and it never clears to make room for new logs. So when the space runs out your drive stops working. It won't show in bios even just "poof" gone!

 

There is a market A MARKET!!!! for a special home made cable to read the older seagate drives with a program in windows to clear the log file space and get the drive working again. The new seagate drives are not compatible with this cable so off to the $2000 data recovery company when it fills up.

[Oversette]

Hitachi sucks.

 

Seagate is a really reliable brand.

 

This is the only thing I can say on the topic. My 2TB Seagate has been working flawlessly for quite some time.

[Cynical Misanthrope]

I have used this one for years. Or something similar anyway. I'm not hardware tech guy either, so I can't know for sure exactly which model I have. Way past the Warranty period which is 2 years. But a wild chance would be 4-5 years. It has worked flawlessly. I have no idea how great the disc is as a gaming disk. I use mine for storage.

[Lovely Rose]

i was looking to spend as little money as i could. XD

[Zor2k13]

Prices have gone up since last year and kinda stayed that way I noticed. There is no flood in thailand to blame this time so I don't know where the companies are getting these prices from.

[Lovely Rose]

So which lucky person wants to buy this little lady a hard drive?! XD

[Zor2k13]

There is this drive for lowest price: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822236339

 

or the black series for a little more: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822236625

 

Seems like retail drives are top price right now and bare OEM drives are cheaper. It would be better to buy it from a local store though. Expecting something like a hard drive to arrive in one piece after oops played football with it will be like winning the lotterey lol. When something is shipped to a local store it comes on a large pallet and does not take the same level or damage as individual items going through any of the infamous delivery services. I have seen oops employees play basketball with packages even big giant crt old skool tv sets before. Imagine what they do with a hard drive?

[Lovely Rose]

There is this drive for lowest price: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822236339

 

or the black series for a little more: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822236625

 

Seems like retail drives are top price right now and bare OEM drives are cheaper. It would be better to buy it from a local store though. Expecting something like a hard drive to arrive in one piece after oops played football with it will be like winning the lotterey lol. When something is shipped to a local store it comes on a large pallet and does not take the same level or damage as individual items going through any of the infamous delivery services. I have seen oops employees play basketball with packages even big giant crt old skool tv sets before. Imagine what they do with a hard drive?

 

I ordered my whole computer from new egg and nothing was damaged XD

 

Even had a monitor in there. lol

[Zor2k13]

Oh I know about that sort of thing I have done the same myself but I have seen enough bad hard drives delivered in the past here and there to warrant staying away from the ace ventura delivery company as one reviewer put it over there lol.

 

Sometimes a local store will have a similar or even better price than newegg like microcenter for example and rarely fry's electronics.

[( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)]

I will say this right now, Solid State Drives (SSD) are fucking awesome, and while their prices are still higher than standard platter drives, have really become a lot more affordable since their introduction. I would recommend an SSD as the drive for your OS, and maybe a few programs, and at least a 1 TB secondary drive (this can be whatever, just not a green series) purely for data storage.

 

I know money's tight for most of us, but when it comes to computer equipment? Think of it like a car: invest in it now so you don't have to spend money later.

[RitualClarity]

Buy whatever is cheap that is a brand name. Hitachi, WD, Seagate whatever. I believe Seagates are on sale more often than not.

 

Then get a really cheap external drive at least the same size and image/backup your important stuff regularly.. Then you don't really give a flying f*** what happens to the drive as you could restore it back in a short time. (Two separate copies of your important data to be sure).

 

You an even image the drive using Acronis or something to restore the OS and programs very fast in case of failure.

 

Doing the above I can usually restore to a functional level my data and work in about an hour.

 

(plan on creating a proper backup of a clean system with all the modding tools so that I can restore quickly all those as well for the future. )

 

 

 

[Zor2k13]

SSD drives are getting cheaper but the size limit for them is still there. I don't think anyone would touch a 1TB SSD maybe if it was some hugely expensive enterprise gear but the price would deter that purchase. Would be nice to get a 1TB SSD drive for $160? any higher than that and I start thinking about a regular drive instead.

 

One of these days the nano tech stuff is really gonna take off and data storage will be a problem of the past.

[Cynical Misanthrope]

So which lucky person wants to buy this little lady a hard drive?! XD

 

Short on dosh right now, but I could send some pictures of my penis? It's not much ( ), but it's the thought that counts right?

 

Seriously thou, I agree with what said. Yeah, they are still pricey, but I am pretty sure if you would buy one today, you will never need a new one. I can't honestly remember when I installed W7 on my SSD, but it was more than 3-4 years ago, and it still just takes a few seconds to start/stop/reboot the system. 15 seconds max.

[Lovely Rose]

 

So which lucky person wants to buy this little lady a hard drive?! XD

 

Short on dosh right now, but I could send some pictures of my penis? It's not much ( ), but it's the thought that counts right?

 

 Haha, well see

[nIn nIn nIn]

Another ditto to frankmarlowe's suggestion. Smallish SSD for OS and 1TB for games and storage.

 

On a personal note I swear by Samsung hard drives. Their EVO series of SSD's are great (I have 2 in my rig) and their Spinpoint platter drives are super reliable. I have never had one fail on me in nearly 10 years of using them. A few of them have been in service for that long - currently in one of my kids PC's. I have a 1TB & a 2TB in my rig, both have extended service in there too. 5 years on the 1TB and 3 years on the 2TB.

 

Just be careful with the latest tech, I retired a Crucial M550 M.2 SSD just this morning (replaced with a  Samsung 850EVO) due to it "disappearing" from the bios routinely - has to be removed and replaced on the MB each time. A colossal pain in the neck. I suspect it is actually a MB issue, even after all the routine bios and firmware updates.

[RitualClarity]

 

 

So which lucky person wants to buy this little lady a hard drive?! XD

 

Short on dosh right now, but I could send some pictures of my penis? It's not much ( ), but it's the thought that counts right?

 

 Haha, well see

 

  You'd actually want to "see"..

[Guest endgameaddiction]

 

Hitachi sucks.

 

Seagate is a really reliable brand.

 

This is the only thing I can say on the topic. My 2TB Seagate has been working flawlessly for quite some time.

 

 

My Seagate's been putting out for 6+ years now. Original drive on this rig when I bought it. Mines still flawless as well. First time I had seagate actually. And I've done some reading and while it varies for some people I've heard more good than bad, I can confirm it's good. And I leave my rig on for a long time. Used to sit there idle back in MMO days for months with my character just standing at a city. So this baby has been through a lot.

[Zor2k13]

I have been in retail positions here and there for many years now as well as selling stuff on ebay from used markets and I can tell you that I saw a lot of seagate hard drives go bad. The worst one was that skinny drive they used to make way back in 2002 it would sound bad even brand new and several stores I worked at had a lot of returns for that drive. Through the years I have seen many individual situations where a seagate drive was bad or going bad. I think the company took a turn for the worse after they bought maxtor corporation which had just bought quantum corporation before being bought themselves. One time seagate had a problem with a virus infecting a lot of their new stock going out to customers. They had to do a lot of damage control for that one. Seagate I think is the largest manufacturer of hard drives so their failure rate no matter how large or small will be seen by more people than the other companies.

 

https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=seagate+hard+drive+serial+cable

 

This firmware problem pissed off a lot of people over a number of years. I remember seeing it when it first started in early 2000's and the way some store employees would go on and on about "oh it was a bad batch" because they didn't want to lose money on products they would be stuck with if people stopped buying them. Same thing happened when SATA came out there were a bunch of store owners complaining it wasn't any faster than IDE and there was no difference because they knew people would stop buying IDE and the store owner would be stuck with a bunch of expensive paper weights nobody wanted.

 

Western digital I would see so few of them bad and the ol circuit board trick worked for a while until the firmware was put on the platters instead of a chip on the circuit board. Sometimes I think these companies leave dumb stuff in their products to produce business for other companies like for example data recovery companies... who would pay $2000 for data recovery among retail users? business sure but individual consumers? nope not gonna happen. But if the pressure is great enough some people will pay! Recovery companies know all about how to get your data back because some of their equipment is made by the hard drive manufacturers while some other stuff is proprietary like a certain pci card can't remember the name atm but it cost $3500 minimum and you have to order more than one just to get it.

 

I like the idea mentioned earlier sort of, buy an external drive and do regular backups. But what if you have a bunch of stuff that you rarely access? archival situation is different and at some point that data is gonna have to be archived some other way. The other medium for archival stuff is optical like blurayXL which has 128gb per disc capacity but just one disc cost $99 or more. Would take almost ten of those to do archival backup of a 1TB drive and that is pretty much $1000 which is totally unacceptable. I guess you could buy a backup drive once every two years and just keep doing that. Still expensive and time consuming, it makes me think the companies kinda like it that way. Of course there is difficulty in making high capacity hard drives and the higher the capacity the higher the failure rate..

[Rayblue]

I use both brands -- Seagate and WDs -- for years without any problems and it all falls down to proper periodical maintenance such as defragging, error checking and backup. Same goes to SSDs, which although they're fast, if they get bricked it's near impossible to recover data.

 

Best to get WD Blacks -- usually a good choice for gaming and performance.

 

I usually shy away from pre-acquisition (meaning to say before they were acquired by WD) Hitachis because of their short lifespan and the notorious one where the platters got shredded to dust.

 

Do note that I avoid using system hibernation or sleep because asides from other horror stories about bricked drives, I've seen a couple of Acer PCs lose their OEM WDs (looked at the label, said they were made in 2011) because of it causing bad sectors, and had to replace them with Seagates, so it's wiser not to let the PC run 24/7 -- turn off hibernation or sleep.

[afa]

...This is honestly the only place where I actually see people putting Seagate over other brand in recent years.

I had a Seagate once it was ok until it wasn't  Lasted reliably for I think about from about 2006 to 2011 or so, I think it still works but not with confidence.

Had a Hitachi Deathstar Deskstar before that lasted for about the same time, I ran that one to the ground.

Currently using a WD since 2009/2010 no issue so far...although the first one was DOA and have to rma for this one.

Have a Seagate external harddrive, had to rma 2 to get one without clicking sound.

 

Get SSD if you can afford it. If you still want to use HDD as boot drive get at least 7200rpm. Do they even still make higher ones in this day and age?

[bjornk]

 

Need I say more?

 

 

FYI.

 

HGST, Inc. (formerly Hitachi Global Storage Technologies) is a wholly owned subsidiary of Western Digital that sells hard disk drives, solid-state drives, and external storage products and services.

- If you're looking for a single desktop system drive, the best option is WD Black.

- Like others have said, a better option would be a 120GB SSD (Intel or Samsung) as a system drive and a 1TB WD Blue for storage and backup.