500GB Harddrive Suggestions

[compactdisc]

Hi, I'm building a new rig and was looking to go the SATAII Hdd route. The largest size that I can afford is a 500GB and should be plenty for me. I wanted to ask which drive will suite my needs the best. I'm looking for a high performance and cool drive. I was about to buy the 500GB 7200.11 based on the popularity of the 7200.10, but the reviews show otherwise, the synthetics are good but actual real world performance is poor.

Anyway, I have narrowed it down to these 3 choices:

1.) Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 (ST3500320AS)
2.) Western Digital SE16 500GB (WD5000AAKS)
3.) Hitachi Deskstar P7K500 (0A35415)

Each of the drives can be had for ~$125

Thanks in advance for the input/suggestions.

 

[Blain]

2.) Western Digital SE16 500GB (WD5000AAKS :laugh:

 

[myocardia]

I've never seen a review of the 7200.11's doing poorly. Got a link? All I could turn up was that they are slower than their competition when copying data from one location on the drive to a different location on that same drive, which all hard drives are slow at (including the 7200.10's), and is something that hardly ever happens, in real-world use, at least for the majority of computer users.

 

[MarcVenice]

Heh, neither of those 3. Samsung 500gb t166 spinpoint. Runs REALLY quiet, cool, and is plenty fast in real world applications. Anandtech did a roundup including that HD, look for it.

 

[ikjadoon]

Hey, man, what's up? I'm in the EXACT same boat as you. I've been looking at 500GB hard drives for at least a full week now. My preliminary conclusions:

1) You're dead-on with the 7200.11. Forget 90Mbps sustained rate, it gets raped in real-world test benches by the AAKS.
2) The AAKS is probably your best bet now; only sad part is that it only includes 16MB versus the Seagate's 32MB.
3) The Hitachi Ultrastar 500GB is a bit more pricey, but might have some of the wicked speed of its 1TB brother. Have found NO benchmarks on it.

TechReport.com has the latest benches. One thing you want to watch out for: same generation, different size = different performance. That statement is very important because many of my conclusions are drawn from the 750GB and 1TB versions. Unfortunately, many sites do not care to look at 500GB drives anymore because of the larger capacities available.

Good luck!

~Ibrahim~

 

[compactdisc]

Here's a review of the 7200.11 from AT, its not poor but there's better alternatives: http://www.anandtech.com/stora...howdoc.aspx?i=3161&p=7
HotHardware review of the 7200.11, it does well in synthetics but doesn't carry across to real-world use: http://www.hothardware.com/art...uda_720011_1TB/?page=6

ikjadoon: thanks for the tip on the different size = different performance cause i always thought that since only the number of platters differ, the performance should be the same. I almost bought the 7200.11, but then I found out it was cheaper than 500GB 7200.10, and it was released recently, so i had more doubts than before. Let me know which drive you go with to help my decision

 

[compactdisc]

SpinPoint T166 is atleast $125 whereas the WD5000AAKS can be had for $90. Is the price difference worth it?

 

[JustaGeek]

1.) Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 (ST3500320AS)

#1.

5 years warranty.

Your own copy of Acronis True Image 10, included as the DiscWizard.

If not, it is available for download here.

Not even a question...



BTW, leave the statistics and reviews alone. You won't even notice the real life difference...

 

[gpse]

I just bought a 500GB 7200.11 to replace my 250GB 7200.10, no issue's so far, I've always owned Seagate and never had any issue's. Performance is better than my old 7200.10 also.

 

[John]

http://forums.anandtech.com/me...124228&highlight_key=y
http://forums.anandtech.com/me...125386&highlight_key=y

 

[compactdisc]

thanks john, just bought the wd5000aaks since it was at least $30 cheaper than anything else, might have to test it out for problems

 

[Civic2oo1x]

Seagates. All of my systems now use some form of the Barracuda including my main with a 500 Main and 750 archive drive. I have 5 Barracuda drives. Only one went belly up and was replaced by Seagate no questions asked, even gave me a larger drive then the one I replaced (200 by a 250 I believe). I've had 3 WD's die on me, 2 due to overheating the other due to clusters.

 

[Skott]

I put a samsung T166 500Gb hd in my latest system recently. Saw some good reviews of it so decided to try it instead of my usual Seagate and WD choices. Had trouble with it from the start. It finally crashed after a few days of use. Got a Seagate 7200.11 500Gb to replace it. No problems with it so far. Probably a fluke but I seriously doubt I'll by another Samsung drive. I'll stick to WD and Seagates from now on.

 

[Davegod]

I'm in the same boat as the OP. True the real world performance difference may be barely if at all noticeable but I'm loath to go for second-best for (more or less) the same money.

Looked around for reviews but they're quite poor IMHO. To pick on the anandtech review, why mix two 500gb's with three 1tb drives? I can understand the raptor as a benchmark crown, but the pricing and volume differences between the others means people are unlikely to be choosing between them. Why have half a 500gb roundup with half a 1tb roundup, instead of a full roundup?

Western Digital WD5000AAKS 500GB 16MB Cache - OEM £62
Seagate ST3500320AS [7200.11] 500GB 32MB Cache - OEM £69
DESKSTAR P7K500 500GB 16MB £84
ULTRASTAR A7K1000 500GB 32MB £106
Western Digital WD7500AAKS 750GB 16MB Cache - OEM £107

I guess the winner is either the WD5000AAKS or ST3500630AS? I'm a bit annoyed with regard the Hitachi, older reviews give promise but I cant find a direct comparison of these models and my preferred site seems to have screwed up it's pricing.


(I really dont care about the £7 difference between the top 3)

edit: removed what turned out to be a 7200.10

 

[Snydly]

I've got 2 Seagate 7200.11 drives that have been great. I use them for music and movie storage. It seems that they perform just as fast as my WD Raptor (10k rpm) that I use as my OS/programs drive. After reading this thread I moved about 5 GB of movies from the Seagate to the Raptor and back. The Seagate averaged 56 MB/sec and the Raptor averaged 58.5.

 

[MarcVenice]

Skott, I put a samsung t166 500gb in my rig and it has been running flawless. Yours was just a fluke, that's for sure. And I probably wouldn't trade my samsung for any other HD, because they'd have a hard time being as quiet and cool running as my samsung.

 

[Blain]

Originally posted by: MarcVenice
Skott, I put a samsung t166 500gb in my rig and it has been running flawless. Yours was just a fluke, that's for sure.

That's how trends start...
a fluke failure here... another one there... soon you've got a full blown IBM "Deathstar" type epidemic on your hands. :laugh:

The people that really get burned are the early adopters. They tend to jump into water head-first before knowing how deep the pool is.

 

[MarcVenice]

No Blain, your FUD spreading is how a trend starts. Do you have more reports of samsungs dieing on people prematurely, more so then WD's, Seagate's or Hitachi's ?

 

[Blain]

Yikes dude, chill...
I'm not announcing a widespread Samsung HD failure epidemic, simply stating the obvious. :roll:

Newegg Customer Reviews for SAMSUNG SpinPoint T Series HD501LJ 500GB...

John Ownership: 1 week to 1 month 1/13/2007
"My first one clicked a few times about 40% of the way through its format and XP's System Event Viewer showed bad blocks. Oh well, the 2nd drive has been running fine for 2-3 weeks."

redsyrup Ownership: 1 day to 1 week 2/16/2007
"One of the drives had a loose bit broken off of it, while the packagine appears completly undamaged, I will think that was a manufactuers defect? The second drive worked for 24 hours of that it had only been formated and large 250GB worth of data copied to it, after this there was a large pop, and the BIOS never heard from it again. Initaly the HD seemed ok, but be careful about pushing it toward 'normal HD' usage.

Zero Ownership: 1 week to 1 month 7/27/2007
"I ordered three of these drives, all identical. Two are performing flawlessly, one developed the "click of death" (though not allegedly a widespread issue with this drive model) within one day of operation. Samsung refuses to admit on their web site that they make this model of drive and refused to RMA it. Had to RMA through Newegg, at my shipping expense, week and a half wait, &c. If it were for a personal system I wouldn't care that much, but a 33% defective rate in a series of supposedly critically acclaimed drive purchased for a customer's system is simply unacceptable.

Brian Keys Ownership: 1 month to 1 year 6/28/2007
"Two out of three of these drives have failed within the first 30 days of using them. One was DOA and the second started failing two weeks later."

~tas Ownership: 1 month to 1 year 8/4/2007
"Nearly 4 months to date of purchase this HD failed - massive bad sectors. Tried to replace this with Samsung, but since the serial number wasn't accepted on their website there was nothing they would do. They only authorize returns thru the website. They had no answer why sn# wasn't being accepted."

nspanahi Ownership: 1 month to 1 year 7/13/2007
"They have a larger than usual percent that die or begin to die. Of the 24 I have ordered, 1 died all of a sudden (would not power up) and 3 begin giving errors (through my SMART status logs in my RAID controller) and died not long after. Age does not seem to matter, since one died after a few months and others died in a matter of days after getting them."

Tacoman Ownership: 1 week to 1 month 6/19/2007
"HDD started making clicking noises and froze my PC. I was able to get most of my data off before sending back. I ordered another second drive and that started to make the same clicking noises and could not be recognized by the BIOS."

coucha Ownership: 1 day to 1 week 3/2/2007
"Died the first day. System became very unstable after installing this drive."

no thanks
Ownership: 1 month to 1 year 11/13/2007
"I got sucked in on price and a favorable review from a hardware site.
Had the drive 6 months, and I'm experiencing constant write errors and windows is running chkdsk on this one every time I boot up."

IL Ownership: 1 month to 1 year 11/13/2007
"Disk 1 lasted less than 4 months. Replacement from Samsung DOA RMA WEB site not beeing working for the last few days They do not respond to emails"

Plenty of other owners have reporded no problems with their drives at this time.

 

[MarcVenice]

I could start picking negative reviews from a WD 500gb as well:

Cons: One lasted two months while the other died within hours. I guess I shouldn't complain as I have 1 left, but am really nervous about throwing data on it.
Cons: goes clickity click while reading/writing data
Cons: The drive was dead on arrival. After hooking it up and trying to transfer about 200gigs to it it got very hot and started having IO errors. Shortly after it started making physical noises and sounded like a bad motor trying to spin up.
Cons: It was part of a totally new build and it wouldn't allow WinXP Pro to finish installing the initial software past a specific point. Tried to long format the C:\ partition and it never would start. It only would do a quick format. Then after a few repartitioning and format attempts, the drive refused to be recognized by the MB in the bios. Installed into another system and it was also not initializing there, just a clicking noise from the heads trying to move. 2nd WD drive that I have owned to die suddenly. Went to a local BB store to get a 500Gb Seagate drive and that worked the first time out. Just had to pay more for the convenience.
Cons: Got halfway through XP install and started getting copy errors. Re-booted and only got 1/4 as far. On third try, system wouldn't even recognize there was a HD anymore.
Cons: According to /var/log/messages this drive lasted exactly 8 hours 34 minutes and 50 seconds before getting unreadable sectors, 6 more hours to come offline and another 15 days before failing its SMART self-check.
Cons: i bought 2 of these drives. first two, one worked, one was doa. rma, ordered another while waiting. that one arrived doa. going with samsung now, never again wd. been a customer for years, but, youve lost the touch, sorry. if it wasnt for neweggs customer service, my studio would have no clients right now. im going on 2 weeks with no way of making money for my business becuase of the lack of quality control on these drives. horrible experience.
Cons: it's my first DOA hard drive. now i have lost confidence in these. i don't have raid for safety so I need to rely on my hard drives. at least it didn't die after i load it up with data.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/...x?Item=N82E16822136073

I suppose we can agree that's either not how trends start, or all HD brands are seeing widespread epidemics of failing HD's ?