Thinking of a new storage drive. Suggestions?

[TemjinGold]

So after using my 300 gb velo as a storage drive for a while, it's finally starting to feel small. I was considering getting maybe a 1TB drive. When I checked newegg today, I found that the WD Black with 64mb cache is $80 while the Spinpoint with 32mb cache is only $60. Now $20 is no big deal if the WDC is the "better" drive but I'm not one to like spending more if I'm getting nothing in return. The one thing that concerned me from the newegg reviews (not the most reliable things in the world, I know) is that several people complained about the WDC being LOUD. In any case, I don't have any direct experience with either of these drives (but have heard good things about both) and I care about performance and noise on my storage drive (hence was using a velo for that!) so I'm hoping you guys can advise between these two OR recommend something I haven't looked it.

 

[Blain]

Takes peoples "loud" comments (on any component), with a grain of salt.
Everyone guages noise differently, everyone's setup is different.

Samsung's have a reputation for building quiet drives.
But I have one of the 1TB (64MB), drives and don't consider it anywhere near "loud".
The warranty differences are something to think about when making a purchase.

 

[FishAk]

If you ever intend on putting the disk in an array, don't buy the WD drive.

That said, I have 4 of the 1Tb blacks in RAID 10. When they all start pushing hard, I can hear them above the noise from my fans. But they're not terribly noisy. I do wish I had bought the F3' though, since the WDs get kicked off the array occasionally. I also have one of the same disks all by it's self in backup duty, and I never notice it making noise.

 

[TemjinGold]

Nope, no arrays ever. I'm barely gonna use 400 gbs if that of storage (I don't download hordes of movies/games/pr0n/etc. like a lot of people seem to do.) I've been trying to hunt down a review for the WD1002FAEX and so far keep coming up empty though. I know the Spinpoint is kind of old by now but wondering if that $20 premium on the WDC buys me anything more than two checklist items (SATA3 and 64 meg cache.) If it's noticeably faster, I don't mind spending the extra $20 but if I couldn't tell the difference between the two, I don't like to waste money for no reason.

 

[Voo]

If it's only for storage I'd consider some 5.4krpm drives as well - obviously quieter, cheaper and depending on what exactly how you use your drive you won't notice the difference at all.

If it's got to be a 7.2k rpm drive: Without benchmarks you won't notice the performance differences between any same-gen, same-rpm drives, though there are some noticeable differences at the noise level. See here for example: http://techreport.com/articles.x/19330/9
I'd actually go with the spinpoint even if they were equally expensive - the black has a great reputation but that were the 640gb variants, the 1tb ones aren't that special (and the extra cache doesn't add much to the table)

 

[TemjinGold]

Excellent, that's just the kind of review I was looking for!