A new internal hard drive

[AngryMerchant]

I'm pretty tired of this computer being a clunky mess. I want to install Windows 7 on a new hard drive and start all over. All I need is 1TB, a good speed, heard to avoid Seagate. I think I've had a Western Digital for nearly 4 years and never had any problems. I went to look up hard drives on newegg, and was assaulted by a variety of external hard drives I have no use for. So I'd appreciate some recommendations while I sift through this stuff.

 

[Fourstaff]

WD Blacks, they are more or less the standard for speed recommendation. Samsung F4 is fast too, and there are others. More varieties if you are going to 10K rpm drives, but those are quite a lot more expensive.

 

[theonedub]

The F4 is a green drive, the F3 is the full speed Samsung HDD

 

[MilkyWay]

Western Digital are fast but have a noise trade off, at least in the most recent editions. Green drives are always quieter and consume less but wont be pushing the same speeds. Samsung F3 if you can get it, is still a good choice for noise to speed ratio.

 

[A Cheese Danish]

IMO, Western Digial green drives are great when they work. I own 3, had to RMA each one. Total, I've RMA'd my drives 8 times.
If you can get a good deal, get the WD Blacks, Samsung F3. I have a Seagate now, and it seems to be okay.

 

[techguy31]

The new Seagate Momentus XT seems to have rave reviews. IMO I always thought Seagates were bad drives, but I guess they cleaned up their act. I would agree with the other users to get a Samsung F3. It's a fast 1TB for the price too.

 

[TheOne]

Seagate actually owns Samsung's HDD division now.

A WD Black will have a slightly lower access time, but the F3 will be quieter.

Also a small SSD as your primary can make a world of difference, so you could do what many people do and buy a 60GB SSD and a large HDD and use the SSD for the OS and some applications and the HDD for everything else.

Or you could buy a HDD and a Caching SSD since you will be using Windows 7, several manufacturers use NVELO's Dataplex software to cache files to an SSD, such as Corsair's Accelerator series and you can get Corsair's Accelerator 30GB Caching SSD for $60 on Newegg, theres also OCZ's Synapse series, and Crucial's Adrenaline.

 

[nleksan]

I can say that WD RE3 and RE4 drives are incredibly reliable and only cost a bit more than the CavBlk while pushing same or better speed... The new 1TB Raptor looks mighty nice, especially if you are only going to get one drive. That would be my choice, hands down. Throw in a 90-120GB boot drive and smaller 30-64GB SSD for cache and you will be flying!

 

[Jetster]

Any Samsung, Seagate or WD will do fine

 

[bmaverick]

Had WD in the past. After going through 4 WD drives on two diffident machines in the past 2 years, I switched to Seagate. Only one Seagate was faulty over the years, but didn't totally die, so getting the data off wasn't too hard.

As of last year, I'm using the Samsung 1T drives. No delay on power up, they hum along without much noise. Data transfer speed for a SATA 3.0Gb isn't bad either.

Hitachi is another brand I've dealt with on a machine given to me. The drive was a little more noisy that I would have liked.

 

[Dbiggs9]

I always buy seagate's 4x250GB working. 4x320GB 3 are dead 4x1TB all working. only the 320GB went bad i think a lot of people had problems with 320gb's, I did RMA all 4 320 and got new 320's slim drive all have worked fine for over 2 years now