MegaSack DRAW - This year's winner is user - rgwb
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Are they all much of a muchness? Or do you get significantly better quality from one make versus another?
I ask cos I'm very soon in need of a new one, and have seen the following deal...
[url] http://www.ebuyer.com/product/173804 [/url]
Which seems about the best deal anywhere for a 1TB drive, and it's a 7200rpm with a 32MB cache too rather than a slower 5400rpm with a smaller cache.
I use 4 Western Digital SATA drives in my Mac Pro; never had a problem with any of them. Stuck WD drives in other machines, always been ok.
Yes those samsungs are great drives. even the 5400 rpm eco models are great performers.
I've been running a smaller one of those Samsungs for a while, it's ace, barely any slower than my older Raptor and huuuuuge. Big capacity can often mean high density, which means (hopefully) faster reading. I'd happily buy that one at that price. Though tbh you may want to edit down the porn collection a bit, quality not quantity.
I'd keep my PC hard drive capacity at an optimum for my needs, rather than have too much capacity. I would also recommend using a NAS for backup and storage and this is where I would aim to have my high capacity storage (not without some level of RAID Protection).
Higher capacity storage = higher density = higher tolerances. Higher tolerances = higer risk of failure. I would therefore expect a 1Tb drive to have a shorter life than 0.5Tb as any surface defect would be more likely to span more tracks/greater relative surface area on the disc formatted at the higher density. The bigger drive is more likely to suffer an unrecoverable I/O error as a result.
These higher capacity units on average will probably last long enough for most people in normal domestic conditions(3 years or so), but I think the risk of premature failure is higher.
As user of laptops as a tool of my trade (large systems engineer), they were bounced around whilst travelling on the road, exposed to frequent swings in temperatures and generally hammered. I can tell you that the incidence of HDD failure was well below 3 years. This was with much smaller disc capacities tha 500Mb.
So whilst it sounds great having a terrabyte in one enclosure, the risk is that you could loose a lot more data. The best solution is lots of smaller discs in an array. Having a solid state disc in your laptop is the ideal, but these are expensive right now.
Higher capacity storage = higher density = higher tolerances. Higher tolerances = higer risk of failure. I would therefore expect a 1Tb drive to have a shorter life than 0.5Tb as any surface defect would be more likely to span more tracks/greater relative surface area on the disc formatted at the higher density. The bigger drive is more likely to suffer an unrecoverable I/O error as a result.
No, the 1tb simply has two 500 GB platters, whereas the 0.5 TB model has only one.
Also, 2TB drives are widely available at good prices.
Try aria.co.uk too. They have daily specials
WD are supposed to be good, however I use Samfung F series drives and are very happy with them.