Best large capacity/speed/value HDD for better-half's computer

[dug777]

Completely and utterly out of the loop on HDDs these days

Are WD Green and Black HDDs pretty reasonable in this day and age, and would she notice the performance improvement of a Black over a Green? It will be her OS drive and storage drive (Vista 64-bit).

Looking at the 1 TB ones.

I suppose it is worth asking as well whether the Vista 'HDD error' message tool is any reliable guide to HDD issues?

That has appeared once so far, we have backed everything important onto an external HDD just in case...

 

[Rifter]

Samsung F3's are generally regarded as the best/fastest 7200rpm SATA drives right now.

I own a few 7200.12 series seagates and am happy with there performance as well.

Any of the 500GB platter drives are going to offer the most performance.

 

[RaistlinZ]

If it'll be her OS drive too then you'll want 7200rpm. Gotta go with the Samsung Spinpoint F3 1TB. They're rediculously low priced now at only $69.99 shipped at Newegg.

 

[guskline]

I just bought 2 Samsung F3 Spinpoint 500 gig HDDs and installed them in Raid 0 configuration. BLAZING FAST!

 

[Elixer]

Whatever the choice of brand, get 2 units, you need backups.

 

[jjmIII]

Are WD Green and Black HDDs pretty reasonable in this day and age, and would she notice the performance improvement of a Black over a Green?

Yes! The Black is 7200rpm and has twin processors, the Green is 5400rpm and more of a storage drive.

Get a WD Black or Samsung F3 as suggested above.

 

[ShawnD1]

At the very least, never install Windows on a Green drive. My file server had Vista installed on a 1TB WD Caviar Green and I swear it took about 4 minutes to boot. Slowest piece of shit ever. The computer would hang for seconds at a time because the hard drive was so intolerably slow.

One of my most recent computers runs from a 500GB Caviar Black and it works great. Boots in a reasonable amount of time, it doesn't hang, etc.

The biggest speed increase you can possibly have is to run separate tasks on separate drives. That means something like Windows and installed programs go on a small Caviar Black drive; downloading porn, swap file, and other crazy tasks are handled on a second hard drive.