Suggestions on Hard Drives

[trickynick]

I'm looking to upgrade my 500 gig HD and would like help in deciding on what I should get.

Thinking 1 or 2 gig, but don't know how to go about selecting one. Could anyone help me out?

I use Windows 7 Ultimate. Current Drive is a green drive, wouldn't mind something that is a little speedier as well.

 

[inzone]

I'm sure that you mean 1 or 2 tb not gig. Hard drive prices are inflated right now and are expected to stay that way for 2012. If you wamt one now you are going to have to decide on how much you want to spend. As far as being speedier that will also depend on what you want to spend. A regular hard drive runs at 7200 rpm and so that makes almost all of them around the same speed. To get something a little faster you have to go to 10,000 rpm like the WD Veloceraptor but those come at 600gb. If you have a sata2 hard drive then you can get a sata3 hard drive if your motherboard has sata3 ports. Then you have something like this;

OCZ RevoDrive RVDHY-FH-1T PCI-E 1TB Hybrid Solid State Drive PCI-Express 2.0 x4 MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD
$499.99 and a $30 rebate makes it $469.99
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227753

This is a hybrid hdd that plugs into a pci-e slot and has a small ssd on it for a cache and the rest of the hdd is a 1tb hdd. Read speeds of up to 910mb/s and write speeds up to 810mb/s. If you don't have the spare cash for something like that then you could get this if you have a sata3 port;

Western Digital Caviar Black WD1002FAEX 1TB 7200 RPM 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive -Bare Drive
$199.99
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136533

 

[trickynick]

Yes, I did mean a tb, not gig, my bad. Thanks for not being "smart" about my little mistake there.

I have just a 500gb hd, 5200 RPM, so a 7200 is quicker. My hard drive is about 75% full mostly cause I delete a lot of downloads after installing instead of keeping like I'd like.

I don't want to spend that kind of money for the hybrid, I'm looking to spend as little as possible. Why are prices so inflated anyways? I remember when they were cheaper.

 

[sapreaper]

these are decent for the price ~$120-130
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136284
Should give a bit of performance boost compared to what you have now.
With all the flooding and damage in Thailand prices went thru the roof with all the damage. They could no longer keep up with demand especially for the big boys, HP, Dell etc which were a priority for quantity. Prices have already started leveling out though. They should also start coming down a bit soon.

 

[inzone]

The last that I heard was that the prices were supposed to remain inflated for most of 2012 so I don't think we are going to see the really cheap hdd prices like we used to for some time. It is hard to believe that flooding could do so much damage and that with the demand for hdd's that there couldn't be something done , unless they just want the prices high.

 

[xtremcarl]

to me you pretty much break it down to 4 options

1. buy an external hard drive to help store the downloads you have been deleting, you can find decent 1tb ones for around 100

2. buy a smaller ssd for your os and most used game or two, you can find good 60gb ssd's for around 70-80bucks. This will help with the speed but won't really help with the space you are looking for

3. buy a 500gb hdd for around 90 bucks and use that and create a total of 1tb with your older 500gb hdd

4. do a combo of the above options, like buy a ssd for you os and a few select apps and another 500gb hdd for extra storage

It pretty much comes down to how much room you "need" (at least for the next year or so since they are predicting that the hdd prices will start to drop in about that time), how important speed is to you, how much money you have to spend or want to spend, and personal preference

 

[trickynick]

I'm going to end up waiting. No real need to upgrade, instead of external HD could just burn it to dvd, have a ton of them laying around.

Guess I'll wait until the prices drop or I get a new computer.

Thanks for all your replies and explaining why prices went up.

 

[inzone]

I think that $100 can buy a 1tb hdd with a little searching and since you said you wanted to wait then you can actually take your time and try to find a good bargan like a sale or rebate. Like this one;

http://us.ncix.com/products/?sku=63571&vpn=WD10EARX&manufacture=Western%20Digital%20WD&promoid=1029

 

[trickynick]

That gives me one of my two options I'm looking, more space, but being green, it'll be sleeping a lot of the time. Looking for performance. I'm in no hurry, I'll reconfigure my system as well. I have two identical HDD in my system, but the 2nd was a backup drive, I'll just put them into a raid array to act as 1 drive and do back ups to DVDs

 

[trickynick]

Best answer selected by TrickyNick.