best hard drive choice for ~$70?

wolfestone

Member
Apr 6, 2011
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I've been looking at several from samsung and western digital specifically. I'm open to any suggestions. I haven't been able to find direct comparisons on the drives I'm looking at.

My mainboard has sata 3gb/s, sata 6gb/s, and a Marvell sata 6gb/s controller. I know mechanical disks don't really benefit from the 6gb/s interface, however I've seen that when hooked up to the Marvell controller, drives with 64mb cache can see some benefit as the extra bandwidth allows faster writes to the cache.

My budget is around $70, right now the main disk in this computer is a 160gb SATA drive which I've measured at around 40mb/s avg (30-56 range) speed. It's the lowest score in my windows experience index and from what I'm reading a new drive should get at least double the performance.

Anything around 500gb is fine, I'd rate performance and reliability over noise and power consumption.

The toughest stuff I'm using the system for is photoshop and a bit of gaming.

Any suggestions would be much appreciated.
 

stahlhart

Super Moderator Graphics Cards
Dec 21, 2010
4,273
77
91
Samsung HD103SJ (Spinpoint F3) has been absolutely flawless here so far. Not sure how much longer they will be available, though. Picked up at Micro Center for about $60 (mainly to avoid the risks involved in shipping).