Any brands worth considering over others? 7.2krpm worth it?
Ask six different techs about HDD brands and you'll get six different answers.
I saw a marked performance improvement going from 5.4k to 7.2k, YMMV.
Obligatory comment about SSDs.
As above. Last one I bought was a western digital scorpio black. 7200rpm and quiet. I seem to remember it was a bit of a pain working out what all the colours of their models meant but in the end the black was the one to get
SSDs: less heat, no noise, better battery life, 100% quicker data access (?), but not as reliable as the tried and tested HDD.
Seagate Momentus was THE HDD of choice last time I checked (7,200rpm).
SSD not an option. Quietness nice, low battery consumption nice but not a huge deal.
Reasonable cost also an asset. I don't need SATA III do I?
According to Google, "Failure rates are known to be highly correlated with drive models, manufacturers and vintages [18]. Our results do not contradict this fact. For example, Figure 2 changes significantly when we normalize failure rates per each drive model. Most age-related results are impacted by drive vintages. However, in this paper, we do not show a breakdown of drives per manufacturer, model, or vintage due to the proprietary nature of these data."
Although sadly they don't say who is good and bad.....