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WD 500GB 3.5" SATA 16MB Cache OEM - $59

WD 640GB for $69.99 here is a much better deal. Both per GB, and in terms of read/write speed as it's a 2-platter design. Their 640GB is also one of the coolest-running and quietest drives in the category. No tax in NY.
 
Caviar black is nice. Got me the 640gb version recently. I paid more than these prices, though, but I don't care. It was worth it.
 
Originally posted by: cyberkost
Larger cache (+$10), black theme (+$5), all other differences are rather superficial.
Click to expand...

It's also supposedly a bit louder. And since most real-world applications won't use the cache, I'd recommend the 16meg version.

 
What is is with such a high failure rate with WD lately? Just checking reviews for various drives (Caviar and Black) and some people had these fail withing an hour to a week! On the surface it looks like they have good ratings but when you start reading reviews there's a lot of failed WD drives out there.

I'm in the middle of building a new PC at the moment so I'll have to make an HD choice pretty soon but these 640GB drives look good despite failures. I'm thinking mirrored raid (raid 0?) on these is the best way to go. That way when one fails you can easily replace it without your system going down.
 
cheap, I don't think there's a massive WD HDD failure going on, you might be oversensitive to what you're reading b/c deep inside you want a WD drive 😉 Just get into a habit of backing your stuff up -- the new drives (if failed) will be replaced under warranty (I think it's 3yrs for WD and 5yrs for Seagate)
 
Originally posted by: Eric62
What makes the Caviar Black Edition $25 (for the 604GB) better than the non black edition?
Click to expand...

Much faster, double the cache. It's faster than the 76g and 36g raptors. And compared to those, it's practically silent.

For storage, don't go with a black drive. But for a system drive, it's either a black drive or a veliciraptor if you want speed.
 
Originally posted by: cyberkost
cheap, I don't think there's a massive WD HDD failure going on, you might be oversensitive to what you're reading b/c deep inside you want a WD drive 😉 Just get into a habit of backing your stuff up -- the new drives (if failed) will be replaced under warranty (I think it's 3yrs for WD and 5yrs for Seagate)
Click to expand...

Black comes with 5 years warranty which is really good. But still you want your drives to fail as little as possible cus it's a big hassle reinstalling everything and RMAing stuff. That's why I think the best thing to do is to run them in raid config, especially with these cheap hd prices. You'll get performance increase and backup feature in one.

If you told me about 13 years ago that we will have such massive storage for so little I would never believe you. I remember paying $100s just for measly 500mb drive. Everything cost so much for so little. Today is a really good time for PCs in general. For $300-400 you can put together a low end PC which will still kick ass, it just won't be bleeding edge. Back then you could build a low end PC for about $800 and it was still pretty much garbage. The difference between low end and high end was huge.
 
Originally posted by: cheap
I'm thinking mirrored raid (raid 0?) on these is the best way to go. That way when one fails you can easily replace it without your system going down.
Click to expand...

You're thinking RAID 1. RAID 0 is striped disks, the data is spread across multiple disks to improve performance. If any single disk goes down you lose the entire array. Raid 0 increases your risk.

RAID 1 is mirroring and will give you disk failure tolerance.
 
Originally posted by: cheap
Black comes with 5 years warranty which is really good. But still you want your drives to fail as little as possible cus it's a big hassle reinstalling everything and RMAing stuff. That's why I think the best thing to do is to run them in raid config, especially with these cheap hd prices. You'll get performance increase and backup feature in one.
Click to expand...

I don't see how RAID saves one from having to RMA a failed drive. Also, RAID (even those that offer redundancy) is no substitute for a good backup, as it might not save your data when there is a fire in your office or when your computer falls on the floor from the tabletop, while having your data somewhere on the network or on external drive in a different physical location might.

 
Originally posted by: cheap
What is is with such a high failure rate with WD lately?
Click to expand...


Lately?

Most of my failures over the years have been WD drives. The newest drive in my system(WD) also has the worst SMART stats of the 3 drives which are 1-3 years older. Unless a deal's too good to pass up, I won't buy any more WD drives.
 
I'm just the reverse, my Seagate drives have the worst SMART stats, and my WD is running real cool and quiet. I've not had a WD fail on me personally.
 
Originally posted by: cyberkost
Originally posted by: cheap
Black comes with 5 years warranty which is really good. But still you want your drives to fail as little as possible cus it's a big hassle reinstalling everything and RMAing stuff. That's why I think the best thing to do is to run them in raid config, especially with these cheap hd prices. You'll get performance increase and backup feature in one.
Click to expand...

I don't see how RAID saves one from having to RMA a failed drive. Also, RAID (even those that offer redundancy) is no substitute for a good backup, as it might not save your data when there is a fire in your office or when your computer falls on the floor from the tabletop, while having your data somewhere on the network or on external drive in a different physical location might.
Click to expand...

Yeah, I meant raid for backup and performance, not RMA. For me personally it takes at least half a day to completely reinstall xp along with all the apps and games and patches and updates + all kinds of tweaks. I don't do anything critical on my home pc where I would need constant backups but I hate doing clean reinstalls of xp. I know there's a bunch of apps out there that can backup a whole boot partition and then restore it when yours goes bad but I've just been too lazy to research and mess with them.
 
Originally posted by: cyberkost
Larger cache (+$10), black theme (+$5), all other differences are rather superficial.
Click to expand...

The benchmarks show them to be as good as the raptors and they don't just excel in some areas while performing poorly in others like other 7200rpm drives, they are well balanced.

So you get a fast well balanced drive, large capacity and they are affordable.
 
Originally posted by: 13Gigatons
Originally posted by: cyberkost
Larger cache (+$10), black theme (+$5), all other differences are rather superficial.
Click to expand...

The benchmarks show them to be as good as the raptors and they don't excel in some areas and bad in others they are well balanced drives.

So you get a fast drive with huge storage as well.
Click to expand...

I'm not going to argue with that. Raptors probably still beat 640AAKSes on seek times, but in continuous reads/writes 640AAKS might be better than raptors b/c of substantially higher density (not sure about veloci-). My comment was about "black" and "regular" editions of the 640GB -- there's an obvious difference in cache size, color "theme" and potentially firmware optimizations, but the difference in performance for a casual user is not there to justify ~20% price differential.

 
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