SSD? Hybrid Drive? Superfast HDD?

[UFN]

So my new build is missing a key ingredient - the hard drive! Unfortunately, or fortunately depending on your pov, storage drives are going through something of a transition with SSD's being top choice for performance builds. The amount of choice is staggering!

Anyway

I've got an unfortunately small budget (~£120) but so far my choices have been neatly narrowed down to either a small SSD, mid sized hybrid drive or a larger Performance HDD! Specifically being

Ocz 120gb Solid 3 2.5" Sata-ii Ssd - £135

Seagate 500GB Momentus XT 2.5" Hybrid SSD/HDD SATAII 7200rpm 32MB Cache OEM - £89

WD VelociRaptor 300 GB Internal hard drive 300 MBps 10000 rpm - £110

So chaps! Thoughts? Extra suggestions? I can't decide myself >.<

 

[dugdiamond]

my advice would to get a few sataIII WD caviar blacks for the time being, and wait for the price of sataIII SSDs to fall a bit more.

then in the future use those drives in RAID as storage and use a good SSD for the OS

 

[S_I_N]

cant agree with Duggy more its what I would do with a limited bufget. I saved a lil bit here and there to get my SD's and when I saw a sweet sale on a sata 6GB/sec ssd I was able to jump on 2 of them ( I like raid0)

 

[yassarikhan786]

+1 on the Caviar Black. I have a 2TB WD Caviar Black 6Gb/s drive and they are very quick. I store most of my games on this drive and the loading times are super fast, you won't be disappointed

.

 

[Diablo]

Newer hard disks are probably going to represent better performance/price than the velociraptors. Get a big disk for the moment and then when you can afford it buy a nice SSD.

 

[UFN]

Well that's pretty definitive

I had a look at the Caviar blacks and I found two!

x2 WD Caviar Black 500 GB Internal hard drive 600 MBps 7200 rpm 32mb Cache

OR

x2 WD Caviar Black 750 GB Internal hard drive 600 MBps 7200 rpm 64mb Cache

They both cost roughly the same but, even though on paper the 750gb is clearly the winner with more storage space and double the cache, the Reviews on google shopping were HARSH for the 750gb (30 out of 92 rated it 3 stars or less, 18 of which were 1 star) compared to the 500gb which was much more what i'd expect (26 out of 207 rated it 3 stars or less, only 9 of which were 1 star).

I'm not desperate for the space, 500gb is simply plenty for me, but does the cache size make that much difference to justify the risk?

Thank you!

 

[S_I_N]

as an owner of 4 wd caviar blacks 64meg cache 7200rpm 640GB drives I can say without a doubt they are da dawg's danglies. Meaning they'll rock ur socks. meaning buy it you wont regret it.

 

[UFN]

as an owner of 4 wd caviar blacks 64meg cache 7200rpm 640GB drives I can say without a doubt they are da dawg's danglies. Meaning they'll rock ur socks. meaning buy it you wont regret it.

Where did you get them from? The sellers listed for th 640gb models all seem to say that it's a discontinued model, most likely replaced with the 750gb model.

Which brings me back to my hesitance considering the far greater than normal negative feedback. I've never built my own computer before and i'm a touch cautious!

 

[FragTek]

Were the bad reviews DOA's or poor performance or what?

 

[S_I_N]

newegg.com and that would prolly explain why they RMA'd me a 1TB instead of a 640 lol out of production is my guess then. not to bad on my side as I paid like 50each for them and just sold the replacement for 60$ as I no longer need them. Plus I think I killed it ...it didnt fail on me. I did a newbish thing just trying to wipe them before selling lol

 

[UFN]

Were the bad reviews DOA's or poor performance or what?

The general sentiments from the 3 stars and down crowd are : -

DOA's (some people getting multiple of the same drive and upwards of 50% of them failing)

Dead after a day or two

Dead after a month or two

Loud

poor performance (not much faster, if at all, than sata II)

Sector failure/Data corruption

These are the reviews i'm looking at

I know every piece of machinery has a failure rate and that reviews almost always have 1 star reviews but they usually dont take up quite as much of the overall review spectrum as they have for that product. If the cache+600mb/s SATA III model offers a worthwhile performance boost (or is supposed to) over SATA II then i'll probably throw the dice, but i have no idea if it really does!

 

[dugdiamond]

http://www.aria.co.uk/Products/Comp...AEX+3.5"+SATA+III+Hard+Drive+?productId=40242