Dead Drive - Recommendations?

SMOGZINN

Lifer
Jun 17, 2005
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So the primary drive in my HTPC died. It was a Seagate Barracuda 3TB drive with Windows 8.1 installed. Luckily I have a backup. So, I'm looking at new 3TB or larger drives and trying to determine what would work well with a always on HTPC as the boot drive. This is the second Seagate drive to fail on me in the last two years, so I don't think I'll go Seagate again.

So, my questions are:
What drive works well as the boot drive of a HTPC?
Is the extra $100 for a WD Black drive worth it, or is a WD Green good enough?
What about the Purple drive, it is on sale at Newegg for $115, is that better than the comparably priced Green drive?
Should I consider a cheap SSD+Large slow drive?
Any other brands I should be looking at?

My HTPC:
CPU: Intel G620
MB: TH61 ITX
RAM: 2x4gig DDR3 10666
Case: Fractal Design Array R2 Mini ITX