A Western Digital Caviar Black is pretty nice for a hard drive, but it's also relatively expensive for a given capacity. If performance matters, then go ahead and get one.
If you just want cheap bulk storage and performance doesn't matter, then you're better off getting a big, slow hard drive like this:
For basic storage, the Caviar Greens are really pretty nice drives, because they really do give you tons of space for the price. I'm paring one (800GB version) with my new SSD right now.
AmazingAveryAge of Conan AdvocateMemberUncommonPosts: 7,188
Originally posted by Quizzical
A Western Digital Caviar Black is pretty nice for a hard drive, but it's also relatively expensive for a given capacity. If performance matters, then go ahead and get one.
If you just want cheap bulk storage and performance doesn't matter, then you're better off getting a big, slow hard drive like this:
Great link with price ranges, speeds and thoughts about SSD's and HDD's.
It's hard to take that link seriously. Elm Crest as best for the money at one price point? Really?
Lots of SSDs with the wrong capacity for the controller are on that list, too. Those may hit a given capacity and price point, but having the capacity not be a multiple of the number of memory channels in the SSD controller means it comes as the expense of performance--which is why they're never sent to review sites.
The hard drive section has lots of random price points, and then suddenly jumps to four hard drives in RAID 0, without ever having an intermediate number of drives in RAID 0. And a HItachi DeathStar as best anything? Really?
-----
I'm of the view that if you're going to get a hard drive, then either performance matters or else it doesn't. If it does matter, then try a WD Caviar Black. Sequential transfer speeds don't particularly matter, as IOPS is the bottleneck, and that's what the Caviar Black is built to do well at.
And if performance doesn't matter, then just get a big, cheap hard drive. 5400 RPM tends to be cheaper. That costs you some performance, of course, but if you're filling it with videos or pictures or whatever, that doesn't matter.
The OP is the same one that posted in the other thread having a good bit of hard drive space free and wanting to swap drives around. From the size of the drives, it's plausible that it's a SSD C: /older hard drive for space type setup, and the D-drive hardly had any use at all (like 10G of a 365G drive or something).
If this is the same computer, do you really need more hard drive space, your D-drive isn't even being used... do you really need more space?
Originally posted by Catamount For basic storage, the Caviar Greens are really pretty nice drives, because they really do give you tons of space for the price. I'm paring one (800GB version) with my new SSD right now.
I've been using Caviar Greens myself for just bulk storage, mainly due to their decent power management and low running temps. And they are spookily quiet. They are very aggressive on power management though, and take a good while to spin up from sleep/startup, so if you need fast access to anything, these are not the drives you are looking for.
Caviar Blues are the budget line, and can likely be found even cheaper than a Green line, but you get marginal performance and marginal power management. Meh.
I have used Spinpoints and Seagates, they are decent drives but I have nothing remarkable to say about them. Most drives are going to be "decent" in the fact that you can expect them to run 4-5 years without trouble. A drive typically will either be DOA/die within the first week or two, or run for years.
A few years ago, when IBM introduced the Deskstar, it was benchmarked as the fastest drive since sliced bread. I was younger, and had some money to burn, so I bought four of them and threw them in a RAID 10 with these slick waterjacket coolers, and the setup looked boss. Then the fact that the drives were only rated to run like 80 hours a month came to light, and the rediculously high failure rate.. and sure enough, my first drive failed after like 3 weeks. So I tore out all the waterjackets and RMA'ed it. Before the RMA came back, a second drive failed.
So I just cut my losses on the IBM Deskstar all together. A year or so later, Hitachi bought IBM's consumer hard drive business, and they make the drives now. I hear they are better, but I still don't have confidence in them. And just earlier this month, Western Digital was going to buy the hard drive business from Hitachi, but they backed out shortly after the announcement. I went back to buying Maxtor drives after that (who has since been bought out by Seagate).
I did something similar on the 72G Raptors a few years later. Similar results too... sometimes I wonder if I actually learn anything.
And after all of that, I learned the value of a solid backup strategy and good storage solutions, as I had plenty of practice in recovering from failed RAID 0's.
I still have several of those Maxtors that are in an old NAS unit that are getting close to 10 years old that still work, but they don't stay powered on long - maybe a few hours every couple of months.
It's hard to take that link seriously. Elm Crest as best for the money at one price point? Really?
I didn't really agree with a lot of his recommendations either.
However, he's just an enthusiast, like us, and his page is just a formal place to list all his opinions. He has a few facts here and there, but by and large, it's an opinion page, which as far as opinions go, I can't really say are any more valid than my own even if I don't agree with them.
I give him credit for actually making a blog page for it, and so that people can refer to it. It's something that should be done, I just wish someone that was a bit better... informed or maybe just closer to my own opinion, were doing it instead. His power supply writeup is actually pretty good (right up until he gets to the "Best Power Supply for $XX" part), although I think the vast majority of his readers have stopped reading by the second paragraph...
OP, any drive CAN run an MMO. Even my WD Cavair Green, used as a temporary system drive (had to wait a bit to get an SSD) was able to run Aion alright for the most part, and it's slow as molasses. Any drive for under $100 also has decent storage, at least outside of SSDs, where that would only land you 32-40GB.
So what's more important, speed or size? Exactly what do you consider "decent"? enough to load all your games and files with loads of room to spare (500GB), or enough to download every film ever made from the internet? "Decent" is a pretty subjective term.
That's why we've given you options. If you just want a drive that's as big as possible, and will physically run your programs, get a 2TB WD Caviar Green for $99.99. Do you think you'll use 2TB? That's a TON of storage. That's enough room to load my copy of Aion 110 times over, and still have enough for Windows, and about 100GB of videos, photos and documents. If you don't think you need that much, then get a 1TB WD Caviar Black. It's only half the size, but 1TB is still enormous for most people, so it should be "decent" for size as long as you aren't shoveling around absurd amounts of data. It's also the fastest platter-based drive there is, afaik, at least in the 7200RPM range (anything faster is basically obsolete due to SSDs, so I don't count 10-15k drives anymore ).
There is no "right" drive, there's only options. So there they are. What suits you better?
Samsung Spinpoint F3 1 TB - $55 @ Newegg right now. Cheaper and faster than the WD Black drives. Can't be beat. Your budget is $100? Buy two.
Cheaper, but it's also slower. It's a question of priorities. IOPS numbers are harder to find, but they're the important metric, and reviews have typically found that the WD Caviar Black wins there--which is precisely why it's recommended as being faster than most hard drives.
Samsung Spinpoint F3 1 TB - $55 @ Newegg right now. Cheaper and faster than the WD Black drives. Can't be beat. Your budget is $100? Buy two.
Cheaper, but it's also slower. It's a question of priorities. IOPS numbers are harder to find, but they're the important metric, and reviews have typically found that the WD Caviar Black wins there--which is precisely why it's recommended as being faster than most hard drives.
Its pretty difficult to go wrong picking a new hard drive. SSDs sure, but the HDD market is so cut-throat that you are assured to get a high quality, high capacity HDD for a low price. The only thing you have to do is not pick a Hitachi, get a large cache, and make sure you get one that supports SATA 2 or 3 inputs.
AmazingAveryAge of Conan AdvocateMemberUncommonPosts: 7,188
Originally posted by Cleffy
Its pretty difficult to go wrong picking a new hard drive. SSDs sure, but the HDD market is so cut-throat that you are assured to get a high quality, high capacity HDD for a low price. The only thing you have to do is not pick a Hitachi, get a large cache, and make sure you get one that supports SATA 2 or 3 inputs.
Western Digital now own Hitachi. I've never had any issues with 2 Hitachi's used in the past years batch.
Samsung Spinpoint F3 1 TB - $55 @ Newegg right now. Cheaper and faster than the WD Black drives. Can't be beat. Your budget is $100? Buy two.
Cheaper, but it's also slower. It's a question of priorities. IOPS numbers are harder to find, but they're the important metric, and reviews have typically found that the WD Caviar Black wins there--which is precisely why it's recommended as being faster than most hard drives.
It's not quite true that IOPS numbers are the only thing that matters when comparing SATA hard drive performance. But it's pretty close. Fortunately, that review has some, albeit labeled differently, and it demonstrates what I'm talking about.
Again, slowest of the 7200 RPM hard drives in the review.
I'd like to see Crystal Disk Mark numbers, as that lets you split it into queue depth 1 and queue depth 32, but that's probably pretty consistent with what is shown there.
The usual hierarchy for hard drive performance goes:
10k+ hard drives (VelociRaptor and various enterprise drives)
WD Caviar Black
Seagate Barracuda 7200.12
Samsung Spinpoint F3
Hitachi DeskStar
Sub-7200 RPM hard drives.
The WD Caviar Blue is the other major modern hard drive, and probably goes either immediately above or below the Hitachi DeskStar drives.
Comments
This is a basic 1T hard drive and its a good brand.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136284
this is the sata 3 version, has twice as much cache then the sata 2 version only a few bux more (64meg cache)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136533
A Western Digital Caviar Black is pretty nice for a hard drive, but it's also relatively expensive for a given capacity. If performance matters, then go ahead and get one.
If you just want cheap bulk storage and performance doesn't matter, then you're better off getting a big, slow hard drive like this:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136514
Double the capacity of the ones linked above, and cheaper, too.
For basic storage, the Caviar Greens are really pretty nice drives, because they really do give you tons of space for the price. I'm paring one (800GB version) with my new SSD right now.
I can recommend that Drive too. Put one in my DVR
Aside from the WD Blacks, Samsungs Spinpoints are pretty top notch as well...some are even faster than the Blacks.
http://www.hardware-revolution.com/best-ssds-hdds-for-your-money-march-2011/
Great link with price ranges, speeds and thoughts about SSD's and HDD's.
It's hard to take that link seriously. Elm Crest as best for the money at one price point? Really?
Lots of SSDs with the wrong capacity for the controller are on that list, too. Those may hit a given capacity and price point, but having the capacity not be a multiple of the number of memory channels in the SSD controller means it comes as the expense of performance--which is why they're never sent to review sites.
The hard drive section has lots of random price points, and then suddenly jumps to four hard drives in RAID 0, without ever having an intermediate number of drives in RAID 0. And a HItachi DeathStar as best anything? Really?
-----
I'm of the view that if you're going to get a hard drive, then either performance matters or else it doesn't. If it does matter, then try a WD Caviar Black. Sequential transfer speeds don't particularly matter, as IOPS is the bottleneck, and that's what the Caviar Black is built to do well at.
And if performance doesn't matter, then just get a big, cheap hard drive. 5400 RPM tends to be cheaper. That costs you some performance, of course, but if you're filling it with videos or pictures or whatever, that doesn't matter.
The OP is the same one that posted in the other thread having a good bit of hard drive space free and wanting to swap drives around. From the size of the drives, it's plausible that it's a SSD C: /older hard drive for space
type setup, and the D-drive hardly had any use at all (like 10G of a 365G drive or something).
If this is the same computer, do you really need more hard drive space, your D-drive isn't even being used... do you really need more space?
I've been using Caviar Greens myself for just bulk storage, mainly due to their decent power management and low running temps. And they are spookily quiet. They are very aggressive on power management though, and take a good while to spin up from sleep/startup, so if you need fast access to anything, these are not the drives you are looking for.
Caviar Blues are the budget line, and can likely be found even cheaper than a Green line, but you get marginal performance and marginal power management. Meh.
I have used Spinpoints and Seagates, they are decent drives but I have nothing remarkable to say about them. Most drives are going to be "decent" in the fact that you can expect them to run 4-5 years without trouble. A drive typically will either be DOA/die within the first week or two, or run for years.
A few years ago, when IBM introduced the Deskstar, it was benchmarked as the fastest drive since sliced bread. I was younger, and had some money to burn, so I bought four of them and threw them in a RAID 10 with these slick waterjacket coolers, and the setup looked boss. Then the fact that the drives were only rated to run like 80 hours a month came to light, and the rediculously high failure rate.. and sure enough, my first drive failed after like 3 weeks. So I tore out all the waterjackets and RMA'ed it. Before the RMA came back, a second drive failed.
So I just cut my losses on the IBM Deskstar all together. A year or so later, Hitachi bought IBM's consumer hard drive business, and they make the drives now. I hear they are better, but I still don't have confidence in them. And just earlier this month, Western Digital was going to buy the hard drive business from Hitachi, but they backed out shortly after the announcement. I went back to buying Maxtor drives after that (who has since been bought out by Seagate).
I did something similar on the 72G Raptors a few years later. Similar results too... sometimes I wonder if I actually learn anything.
And after all of that, I learned the value of a solid backup strategy and good storage solutions, as I had plenty of practice in recovering from failed RAID 0's.
I still have several of those Maxtors that are in an old NAS unit that are getting close to 10 years old that still work, but they don't stay powered on long - maybe a few hours every couple of months.
I didn't really agree with a lot of his recommendations either.
However, he's just an enthusiast, like us, and his page is just a formal place to list all his opinions. He has a few facts here and there, but by and large, it's an opinion page, which as far as opinions go, I can't really say are any more valid than my own even if I don't agree with them.
I give him credit for actually making a blog page for it, and so that people can refer to it. It's something that should be done, I just wish someone that was a bit better... informed or maybe just closer to my own opinion, were doing it instead. His power supply writeup is actually pretty good (right up until he gets to the "Best Power Supply for $XX" part), although I think the vast majority of his readers have stopped reading by the second paragraph...
Thanks for the links, but, I don't know which hard drive can be used too run MMORPG's but still hold a decent amount of space... Thanks -Justin
OP, any drive CAN run an MMO. Even my WD Cavair Green, used as a temporary system drive (had to wait a bit to get an SSD) was able to run Aion alright for the most part, and it's slow as molasses. Any drive for under $100 also has decent storage, at least outside of SSDs, where that would only land you 32-40GB.
So what's more important, speed or size? Exactly what do you consider "decent"? enough to load all your games and files with loads of room to spare (500GB), or enough to download every film ever made from the internet? "Decent" is a pretty subjective term.
That's why we've given you options. If you just want a drive that's as big as possible, and will physically run your programs, get a 2TB WD Caviar Green for $99.99. Do you think you'll use 2TB? That's a TON of storage. That's enough room to load my copy of Aion 110 times over, and still have enough for Windows, and about 100GB of videos, photos and documents. If you don't think you need that much, then get a 1TB WD Caviar Black. It's only half the size, but 1TB is still enormous for most people, so it should be "decent" for size as long as you aren't shoveling around absurd amounts of data. It's also the fastest platter-based drive there is, afaik, at least in the 7200RPM range (anything faster is basically obsolete due to SSDs, so I don't count 10-15k drives anymore
).
There is no "right" drive, there's only options. So there they are. What suits you better?
Samsung Spinpoint F3 1 TB - $55 @ Newegg right now. Cheaper and faster than the WD Black drives. Can't be beat. Your budget is $100? Buy two.
Cheaper, but it's also slower. It's a question of priorities. IOPS numbers are harder to find, but they're the important metric, and reviews have typically found that the WD Caviar Black wins there--which is precisely why it's recommended as being faster than most hard drives.
How important are IOPS numbers? Going off this review http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/storage/2009/10/06/samsung-spinpoint-f3-1tb-review/10 it seems the F3 is extremely fast in nearly all the benches both theoretical and real-world.
Its pretty difficult to go wrong picking a new hard drive. SSDs sure, but the HDD market is so cut-throat that you are assured to get a high quality, high capacity HDD for a low price. The only thing you have to do is not pick a Hitachi, get a large cache, and make sure you get one that supports SATA 2 or 3 inputs.
Western Digital now own Hitachi. I've never had any issues with 2 Hitachi's used in the past years batch.
It's not quite true that IOPS numbers are the only thing that matters when comparing SATA hard drive performance. But it's pretty close. Fortunately, that review has some, albeit labeled differently, and it demonstrates what I'm talking about.
Read speed:
http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/storage/2009/10/06/samsung-spinpoint-f3-1tb-review/6
Slowest of the 7200 RPM hard drives in the review.
Write speed:
http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/storage/2009/10/06/samsung-spinpoint-f3-1tb-review/7
Again, slowest of the 7200 RPM hard drives in the review.
I'd like to see Crystal Disk Mark numbers, as that lets you split it into queue depth 1 and queue depth 32, but that's probably pretty consistent with what is shown there.
The usual hierarchy for hard drive performance goes:
10k+ hard drives (VelociRaptor and various enterprise drives)
WD Caviar Black
Seagate Barracuda 7200.12
Samsung Spinpoint F3
Hitachi DeskStar
Sub-7200 RPM hard drives.
The WD Caviar Blue is the other major modern hard drive, and probably goes either immediately above or below the Hitachi DeskStar drives.
Yep WD velociraptor rock for sur ...but ssd is amazing and change pc totally