External vs Internal , pricing and performance

kyle382

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Jun 15, 2010
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I am in the market for a huge media drive. Currently running all games off of an SSD and my 500gb internal has been exploding with data for years now.

I need a drive solely for music, videos, pics, ISO's. I am conflicted on whether or not to go internal or external. Currently the HD will live next to my computer 24/7, but I like the possibility of externals for sharing files with friends and such. How noticeable is 7200rpm vs 5400rpm and what about the read and write speeds? Definitely willing to sacrifice mobility for a noticeable performance difference, but I doubt that's the case. Bonus question, why are the WD black's supposedly so awesome? are they really worth the $30-$50 price markup vs green/red or just marketing BS?

Looking at :

Internal:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA6AH20Y2869

External:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822178435&cm_re=seagate_plus_slim-_-22-178-435-_-Product
 
Black is high performance.
Red was intended for video monitoring.
Green is slow to conserve power.

They all work for storing data. 5400 RPM is noticeably slower than 7200 RPM.

I think we wait too much on hard drives as it is. So my system has all programs, data and windows on a single 1TB SSD. SSD is 7 to 10 times faster than a hard drive. Costs more for an SSD, but there are no moving parts, so no fear of dropping the SSD and having the data platters get destroyed. Most SSD's say they can take a 15G drop, and survive intact. Try that with a hard drive...

I did recently add a 2TB hard drive to my system to store backups on. But that is all I use it for. I highly prefer the speed of the SSD over any hard drive.
 
Hey there, Kyle.

If you'd like mobility and you're going to use your drive just for storage (mainly media files), then you should be OK with an external drive. On the other hand if you want better performance and a more reliable drive, you can go with an internal drive. I mentioned reliability, because usually internal drives tend to last longer than external ones as they are not at risk of being dropped, disconnected accidentally, or someone spilling something one them etc. As for your question about the WD Black, it's WD's high performance drive. It's designed to give you stable and high performance when it comes to gaming and other demanding programs and it also comes with a 5-year limited warranty, so that should explain the pricing.
As you are looking for a budget friendly internal drive, you could take a look at the WD Green drive, instead of the WD Black one. The WD Black would be a bit overkill just for storage purposes. The WD Green drive is designed to be used as a secondary storage HDD and it runs very cool and quiet. Depending on the model it has read/write speeds of up to 150-170MB/s which would be more than enough to handle the job. You can take a closer look at it here: WD Green.
I just want to make a couple of clarifications on @MarkW's post. The WD Red drive are designed for RAID/NAS configurations. The WD Purple drive is the one for video surveillance and security systems. I do agree that the SSD's own the HDD in terms of performance, but technically speaking they are not 10 times faster than the HDD. If we say that the average HDD speed read/write speeds are ~160MB/s and the average SSD read/write speeds are ~460MB/s. The access time though is a whole different story. :)

Hope that helps. Please let me know ig you have any questions whatsoever.
Boogieman_WD