Which hard disk drive are you intending to purchase

In my opinion,the two outstanding buys at the moment are the SATA3 640GB Samsung model HD640JJ and the Western Digital 640gb SATA 3 model WD 6400AAKS,as regards performance and cost per GB.

There seems to be a price war going on by Samsung, to firmly establish its range.

Consequently both of these are really cheap and offer outstanding performance.especially the Western Digital-all to do with areal platter density, each platter has a capacity of 320gb.

Locally,the Samsung is available for about us$85-the WD for us$95.

My choice is WDs for a RAID 0 array

Interested what others are buying.

 

Thinking of buying the one below.Would the 32 meg cache be of benefit?

Seagate 500GB 3.5" SATA II Hard Drive
3.5" CUDA7200.11, 500GB, 7200RPM, 32MB, SATA II 3Gb/ s, NCQ, , 5 YR Price:$139.00 au

 

Doubtful if 32 over 16mb would be noticed-its been said its more of a marketing ploy in some cases.
WD claims they tested 32 instead of 16mb in the case of the WD6400AAKS and didnt think the larger cache was worthwhile.

If you do decide to buy the Seagate,have a look

HERE -costs $A110.

Not trying to be a salesman for these ,but the Samsung 640gb costs $A90
HERE.

The Western Digital 640gb costs $A110 HERE

The two larger drives are faster than the Seagate as regards read /write performance.

All these shops are OK-Ive purchased off them,but only useful if you are living in Australia.

 

Hairy Coo is right. I will add the WD6400AAKS is faster quieter and uses less power. The WD has higher data density is near equal to a Samsung F1 which is considered a very fast drive but is not as reliable and is a higher price as it 1TB. The Seagate does have a 5 year guarantee compared to WD 3 year one. The WD6400AAKS (640G) is considered the best desktop drive on the market and is really the one to go for. The price is fair.

There is a good review of it here. http://techreport.com/articles.x/14380/1

 

Thanks for the advice Hairy Coo and markymoo.

Will definately be getting a couple of the WD's 640 gig shortly.

Hairy Coo's link for $110 au is about the cheapest I can find atm with some prices going over the $200 mark.

 

Hello,
I've been using WD for the last 6-7 years at least. Never let me down, touch me wooden leg. So ... I'd go with a proven (personal) formula. BTW, I'd got as big as possible, so I'd choose 750GB or 1TB.
Mrk

 

It's not really size I want as I haven't even half filled an old 120 gig ide drive.

I do have a 320 gig sata along with heaps of much older and smaller drives with Vista/XP installs that I use for testing purposes such as when trying out malware.

The amount of platters and density a drive has is more important atm and I want two main drives where I will install XP and Vista and while I'm cashed up I may as well grab em.

The WD 640 gig has only two platters with the larger drives having three or more I think?

 

I'm waiting for the prices of the seagates 750gb to come down, I've seen them on sale as low as 109.00. I'll be replacng the 4 x 500gb seagates on my PVR computer with those. You can never have too much gbs.

The seagates have proven rock solid, haven't lost any on the PVR computer that runs 24/7 months on end. The only time I turn it off is when I have to sweep around the area.

The only brands I buy are seagate,maxtor and WD. I would stay away from hitachi/IBM brands. I'm not too familiar with samsung.

 

If you want faster speed get the WD640AAKS instead as they faster than 750GB. In fact buy 2 and use one as a backup drive or use together in RAID 0.

The Samsung Spinpoints are recommended for PVR as they quiet. I wouldn't touch Maxtor and quite noisy and don't put them in the build class quality as WD SG.

 

I have far too many Hard Drives. will now wait for the price of solid state to fall a little and for size to increase. may have to wait 6 months to a year but for me no more hot and noisy drives.

 

A bit. I have bought 2 of those and I am quite satisfied, Vista's score is 5,9. Here are my tests: HD Tune & HD Tach and also some techreport review.
Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 500GB 32MB SATA2 | ATI AHCI Compatibile RAID Controller 2.5.1540.43 | 32-bit Mode, Enabled Advanced Performance, NCQ

 

Decided to add a Xeon 9450 quad, Asus P5K-E Mobo, 9600 gt card to go with the two 640 gig WDs, XP on one and Vista on the other.

Don't really understand the HD Tune graph but it seems pretty much the same as yours?

 

There are not really big speed differences between HDD for desktop users. The most important is how loud and reliable they are, that depends mostly on temerature, but it can be fixed by placing the HDD to box. So it does not really matter, which HDD as long as it is for desktop usage. Server or RAID config can benefit from advanced features like 32MB cache and so on. I myself would like to buy 10000 RPM WD Raptor, but it is not worth for that money, not for gaming.

 

Do these "super" drives get very hot ? using HD tune 3 my hottest drive runs at about 34 c with others running as low as 29C. How hot do Raptors run ?

 

Had a look around for more info on Raptors and came across Storage Review which seems to cover a lot with good testings of different hard drives.

A neighbour gave me 8 x 9.1 gig and 4 x 4.2 gig old 10,000 rpm server drives.Bought a SCSI card and fired a couple of them up on my old P4.

They seemed OK but are quite loud and have that awful clunky sound which I think is associated with the seeks?

Oh well, will still be ok for experimenting with raid setups which I haven't attempted as yet.

 

Tried HD Tune on my XP install WD 640 gig and had slightly different results to the one in my other post which has Vista.

 

They have bigger temperatures, but since box is ussally used to lower the noise, it is OK, but Raptor is an old news, there is VelociRaptor already - review.

 

i just got one of the Samsung Spinpoints 1TB and man the drive is really fast and quiet, i was transfer all my record show to the new drive and it was like 80mb/s was really fast, problably i will get one more

 

Great purchase the 7200.11 is a great performance drive overall. I am planning to get 2 WD640's. They are certainly faster for desktop use over others. The transfer rate is nearly 2x faster than the 7200.11 http://techreport.com/articles.x/14380/6 and they beat Western Digi's 150GB 10,000RPM Raptor.

that some extreme power. that is a great board. did you get onboard SCSI 320 with it? if i running that spec i would definately run the drives in RAID 0 to match the Xeon.

congratulations a wise choice!

the graph shows the the drive being read from its outer edge to the inner. the outer edge is the fastest as the read/write arm has to move less. you see the performance drop as it reads further towards the inner. when you first write data to the drive it starts using it from the outer edge first. the maximum transfer will be at that outer edge. the minimum is only reading 10MB and should be around 40-50MB. either you using the pc while its running or AV software, using older hardware or no write cache enabled. the yellow dots is the access time.

 

Just configured my two WD640s into a RAID 0 array and was impressed with the results.



Average read 202 MB/s.-random access 7.3.

Seem to be the drives to choose for a combination of great speed and value.

 

Don't know about the onboard scsi as I didn't ask about it at purchase so probably not.

I do have a scsi card and several old 10,000 rpm server hdd's that I have fired up as single units on another machine. I would have to do a bit of reading if I was to try a raid setup.

Thanks for explaining the HD Tune graph.

 

@Hairy Coo

Great performance with those 2 drives just like we predicted. What has impressed me is not just the transfer rate over 200MB which beats my 3 Raptors but the access time has dropped significantly to 7.3ms from 12.5ms. Mine is 5.4ms and thats 10,000 RPM so you not far off. Want to swap? You also notice the CPU resources has shot up from 1.5% to 12% this is obviously due to the huge increase of data reading and writing. Just great overall . You also got over 1TB free space. I guess you removed the jumpers on the drives. Who needs solid state drives? not you.

@Franklin

My interest was if you had built in Ultra 320 SCSI card then the Seagate Cheetah 15K drive is mighty appealing even though it costly as it beats everything on the transfer and has a lower seek time than anything. I didn't know the full spec on that board as Asus bring out too many and alot are similar. I wouldnt use anything less than Ultra 320 SCSI as you benefit more from the SATA. As you got the SATA drives already then worth doing the RAID to benefit the multii tasking of the Xeon.

 

Thanks Marky-also for providing some vital info!

The array actually has exceeded my expectations and the general increase in performance is quite noticeable,for example the backup speed using ShadowProtect has increased fron about 55- 60MB/Sec to 80 ,before overclock
So the whole exercise is really worthwhile.
Think what three of these monsters would do!

Another pic of HD Tune-showing how stable the performance is,despite another app running in the background,which accounts for the CPU usage.




Are you still considering these?

PS The drives didnt have jumpers-seems silly to fit them!
I do have some free space-thinking of hiring it out!
Note how cool these drives run!!

 

Hairy Coo, if I'm reading that graph right it seems you are getting higher speeds than those new SSD drives?

 

Franklin,

Sure am!!

For much less than the cost of one SSD 64gb drive ,you get better speed and an extra 1200gb of space thrown in

About time you bought another WD640 and also made a RAID 0 array -actually the prices have even come down a bit.

Be happy to assist with any specific info.