HDD Dead, what to replace it with?

[Mythbinder]

Have a WD2500ks chirps 3 times on boot and fails, BIOS only sees it as a WDC-rom--hawk 16mb lol, guess it just sees the cache. Uhg gotta rip all my Discs again..

6yr old drive, but its first HDD I've had die on me in wow over a decade.

Looking at these 2 dirves to replace it with

HITACHI Deskstar 7K1000.D $85
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822145531

Western Digital AV-GP WD5000AUDX $89
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822236080

Both are 32mb cache/500gb/6gb SATA/3yr Warr But I cannot find any solid reviews on either drive. I don't really need anything larger then this or an SSD.

MOBO is a Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3P, only supports 3gb SATA but I do not think that should be an issue.

My concerns are:
I have never used Hitachi drives before, are they reliable?
The WD is Designed for AV devices and streaming would there be an issue using it as a system drive?
Is 32mb Cache worth it? I mostly only do light gaming, Civ V, Oblivion, and Witcher recently, and some dvd ripping + some streaming to the PS3
.

 

[BFG10K]

Get the Hitachi, it’ll be a lot faster because it’s 7200rpm (vs 5400rpm) and has a higher areal density too. I have the 1 TB version and it’s very fast for file copying.

I was doing some file copying the other day and it was on average about 20MB/sec faster than my Caviar Black - write speed 90-100 MB/sec compared to 70-80 MB/sec for the Black, with the same files.

It’s okay for an OS drive too, though it feels a tad sluggish with its high access time. It should still be much better than the green drive overall for an OS, though.

SATA2 won't be an issue for a single mechanical HDD.

 

[Charlie98]

I have 2 of the lesser Hitachi 500GB drives (16MB cache) and they have been excellent so far. In fact, I bought one for my original build and wound up getting another because I liked it so much. I would assume the .D model would do just as well.

Were I you, I'd get TWO... one for backup...

 

[KirklandBrand]

If it's simply for storage purposes than just get the WD drive... but if your going to be installing an OS on it as well than go with Hitachi.

 

[General Kenobi]

Definitely get the Hitachi drive, the .D series is pretty good.