Need advice on which 1-2TB desktop drives to buy this week

Hi everyone! I am in the market for two additional 1-2TB drives. I read so many horrible reviews about the 1TB Seagate Barracuda ST31000528AS that I wanted to ask you about it specifically that one. Do any of you own it?

What should I do? Am I really in a unique situation, because I am simply not used to ANY problems with hard drives. I kid you not. During the past eleven (11) years, I have used almost exclusively the 2.5" form factor of Hitachi's Travelstar 2.5" notebook drives. They all saw a LOT of usage, including even some rough handling at times. Not one of them has ever caused me any problems. I'll be disappointed the very first time that one of these drives show only the slightest bit of oddness, because I am simply used to everything always working just as advertised.

Given that history, should I maybe get Hitachi 3.5" desktop "DeskStar" drives? Then there is Western Digital (WD). Again, during my last 11 years with notebooks, the (very) few WD drives that I had also gave me zero problems. The reviews indicate mostly extremely satisfied customers for these. I'm only considering 1TB, 1.5TB, and 2TB drives w/ at least 32MB of cache, running at 7,200rpm, which probably applies to all drives except for the 2TB ones. I will need two, both of which will likely be external drives.

Thanks very much!
T

 

You can go for WD. Have been ok so far.

But keep in mind that any hard disk can fail [& will fail eventually]. So a solid backup is the most important thing besides brand name of the hard disk.

 

Thanks, Pete and rsinfo!

Yea, it looks like Samsung is making some killer drives as of late. I think I'll give them a whirl, as I've read through tons of reviews about how solid the Spinpoint's are supposed to be. Hitachi seems to make equally as excellent a drives on the desktop side as they do for laptops, which I can certainly attest to myself. The WD Caviar Black series is getting mostly good reviews, so Seagate is really the only company that does not fare as well. In customers' reviews anyway.

Hey Pete, how long have you had those Spinpoint's? I assume they're RAID'd? How big a performance boost do you see with the RAID set?
(By the way, I see you're using an ASUS motherboard on your system. I'm torn between ASUS and GIGABYTE for a mobo... )

Which drive do you think is best for storage purposes? I'm talking pure filing away thousands of GB's worth of data. Also, how do you guys view the importance regarding the new SATA 6GBps interface and getting a drive w/ 64MB vs. 32MB of cache?

Thanks again!

 

Maybe this could be of help http://www.techarp.com/showarticle.aspx?artno=511&pgno=0