Hard Drive Question

[Sidmouth]

I am finally looking to purchase my new system today after a few weeks of research to make sure I pick the best parts frist time around.

However the last problem is the Hard drive. I am thinking of purchasing a Caviar black after advice gained from the forums here. The problem I've found is that the 1TB and the 2TB seem to have a high failure rate according to customer reviews across 'Newegg' and other component sites.

I dont know if I'm looking into this too much and should just go ahead and purchase the system. But I'm in two minds now.

SSD's are out of the question they're price per gigbyte is hugely expensive at the moment and the 'Velociraptor' drives also by western digital are not really needed I imagine for the average user whether your gaming or not.

Any input wuld be great

Thanks

 

[brukin]

I actually find the Seagate Momentus XT hybrid drives quite decent. The onboard ram allows for caching of most used application data/windows boot files. This gives a boost that, while isn't SSD speed, does improve boot and loads speeds. The 7200rpm disk itself isn't too slow. Not sure how the price per MB compares to the WD drives though, and they might only have up to 750GB sizes...

http://www.anandtech.com/show/5160/seagate-2nd-generation-momentus-xt-750gb-hybrid-hdd-review

 

[Sidmouth]

Thanks Brukin thats actually a good recommendation.

I've actually just found a forum post elsewhere which states that the WD Black 1tb have a far lower failure rate than the 2tb equivalent. Would you know the reasoning behind this?

I'm still leaning towards 2tb because no doubt alot of users will need that sort of capacity even if they font think so yet. Similair to how evryone thought 8gb of RAM was a long way off and that came around quickly...

 

[BestUsername]

Thanks Brukin thats actually a good recommendation.

I've actually just found a forum post elsewhere which states that the WD Black 1tb have a far lower failure rate than the 2tb equivalent. Would you know the reasoning behind this?

I'm still leaning towards 2tb because no doubt alot of users will need that sort of capacity even if they font think so yet. Similair to how evryone thought 8gb of RAM was a long way off and that came around quickly...

What do you mean by high-failure rate? Most people who have no problem with something are much less inclined to post on it.

I've never had a HDD fail on me, even an external one. I don't know if it's enough to worry about.

 

[brukin]

I can only guess that the 1TB drives are single platter design while 2TB might be 2 platter, having the heads move between might be something that could cause more troubles. Not sure why. I've only just run out of the 1TB of disk space I've had for years on my desktop. I'm not a big torrent/downloader so it's mostly photographs(RAW and JPEG), documents and games. My laptop still has about 150GB free out of 640GB and it has dozens of large games installed. Depending on what purposes you use the machine for you might not need as much space as you think. Plus lots of stuff is migrating to "The Cloud" so again local storage can be reduced. Personally I have a WD NAS/media server solution with lots of photos and documents backed up onto it. I prefer that to having big fat hard disks in a laptop. Which brings me to the question... your proposed "system", is it a desktop or a laptop?

 

[Sidmouth]

I'm going for a Desktop.

Main uses: -

Development (Web and Software)
Creativity programs (Photoshop, Expression suite etc)
Gaming
Lastly the general browsing, office programs etc

Really the above points were what swayed me into thinking I may need 2TB. What do you think?

In response to 'bestusername' I only mention the failure rate because, I just did a quick search around to see what others thought of the product and nearly every other review mentions something negative along those lines.

Could just be bad luck

 

[BestUsername]

I'm going for a Desktop.

Main uses: -

Development (Web and Software)
Creativity programs (Photoshop, Expression suite etc)
Gaming
Lastly the general browsing, office programs etc

Really the above points were what swayed me into thinking I may need 2TB. What do you think?

In response to 'bestusername' I only mention the failure rate because, I just did a quick search around to see what others thought of the product and nearly every other review mentions something negative along those lines.

Could just be bad luck

For every 5 or so bad reviews you're going to find at least one bad one where something was dead on arrival or it failed.

 

[Sidmouth]

Yeah thats true.

Really I wasnt necessarily worrying about the WD black it is more a case of trying to make an informed technical decision on the drive. And whether there is a case that the 2tb is more prone than the 1tb version.