Which HD is better?

[bosa]

I am looking to get a new hard drive for storage space/performance. I currently have 500gb 16mb 7200rpm

These two hard drives look Identical but one says its on SATA III and other other one does not.
http://www.amazon.com/Western-Digital-Caviar-Internal-Desktop/dp/B0036Q7MV0/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1323921142&sr=8-1


Here is the other link.
http://www.bestbuy.com/site/Western+Digital+-+Caviar+Black+1TB+Internal+Serial+ATA+Hard+Drive+for+Desktops/9958909.p?id=1218201215581&skuId=9958909&st=WD%20Caviar%20Black%201.5%20TB%20SATA%20Hard%20Drives&cp=1&lp=1

I want to get at least a SATAII 7200rpm and 64MB SATA 6 Gb/s 1TB drive.

Is the second drive I linked pretty much the same at the first one!?! The only thing I noticed different is that the second link dose not say SATA III, that really matter!?

 

[jsrudd]

You linked the same drive twice.

An SATA III drive will work with SATA II. If you plan to keep the drive along time then get SATA III.

Also, think about getting a 1.5 or 2 TB drive. That's were the sweet spot for price is. If you notice a 1.5 TB drive is about 10 dollars more expensive while a 2TB drive is 30 dollars more expensive.

 

[Deleted member 217926]

SATA 2 and SATA 3 make no difference whatsoever on a mechanical hard drive. The 7200 RPM drives can not even saturate the full bandwidth of SATA 2 so the extra bandwidth provided by SATA 3 does not help. The only time SATA 3 helps in when using solid state drives.

Also while a bigger cache can help it is more a marketing gimmick than a measure of how fast a drive is. The speed of the drive is determined by platter density.

The WD 1TB Black you linked to is a fast drive and is comparable to the 1TB Samsung Spinpoint F3 and the 1TB Seagate 7200.12. All 3 of these drives are about equal in benchmarks. The Spinpoint used to be the recommended drive because it was the cheapest. Hard drive prices have gone up so much with the flooding in Thailand that I am not sure what is the best deal right now. Any of those 3 drives are about equal so find the cheapest one.

 

[bosa]

Best answer selected by Bosa.

 

[Mousemonkey]

This topic has been closed by Mousemonkey