What hard drive should I buy for my OS

[jason1781]

Currently I have the second generation 74 GB Western Digital Raptor. For the past year it has been extremely loud and has slowed down a lot (even after a reformat and fresh install). Every time I move the mouse, scroll up and down a webpage, highlight text, switch between programs, and a lot more simple tasks the drive makes a loud high pitch squeal noise. It is very annoying but it still works so I haven?t gotten rid of it.

I want to get a new drive dedicated for the OS but I don?t know what to get. I want something fast and small. I hear that the VelociRaptor would be the fastest but I have had bad experiences with Western Digital drives failing and being very loud, plus I don?t need the 300 gigs that the VelociRaptor has.

Does anyone have a suggestion for a fast SATA drive under 100 GB?

 

[Dorkenstein]

Hmm, well, I have been watching similar threads myself and I see a few options, but not exactly fitted to your request.

At this stage, big storage is pretty cheap. Western Digital 640gb drive for what, 90 bucks on the Newegg site? That's awesome. Pretty fast, but not small, yet much better value for the money.

Or an OCZ solid state drive, small, EXTEMELY fast for certain uses, but not a good value yet, but getting better.

Personally I am going to get the WD 640 gb and just make a small partition for the OS and use the rest for certain programs. Then I will probably get another of the same model later and use it for pure storage. Not 100% in concrete yet but that's what I am thinking at the moment.

If you're dead set on staying under 100 gb then maybe a regular samsung or similar sata 80gb drive is for you? Not sure but I will look into it for you. Meantime, best of luck in your search.

 

[jason1781]

I'm not dead set on a drive under 100 Gigs, but it just seems pointless to have a drive with 250 gigs more than what I will ever use on it. I figure format times and defrag times will be a lot longer. Not that I will be doing that often, but still.

 

[DSF]

Originally posted by: jason1781
I'm not dead set on a drive under 100 Gigs, but it just seems pointless to have a drive with 250 gigs more than what I will ever use on it. I figure format times and defrag times will be a lot longer. Not that I will be doing that often, but still.

Large drives tend to have a speed edge over small drives at the same spindle speed. It's not a coincidence that most of the drives that are competing with the Raptor for speed are the 750-1TB category. That doesn't mean you need to buy one that large, but buying a small 80-120GB drive is probably going to underwhelm you. Price vs. capacity is also very poor in that size range. For only a few dollars more you get a 250GB drive, and for only about $20 more than that you can bump up to 500GB.

As Dorkenstein said, 64GB SSDs would be one option, but the lowest price on a 64GB SSD is around $700, so I think we can safely consider that a poor value.

Honestly, I'd just grab a 500GB drive in your position. If you're worried about defrag times, just let it do its thing while you're asleep.

 

[The-Noid]

Velociraptor or http://www.newegg.com/Product/...054&Tpk=samsung%2b64gb. Going with a lot of other drives coming from a raptor you will see a slowdown.

 

[Cheesetogo]

You could consider a solid state if you have a lot of money to throw around.

 

[shangshang]

Damn that Samsung SSD is almost $800 for 64GB? That's ridiculous for desktop use. I can see if people wanna get it for a laptop, but it's out of my range for desktop use.

But I do have a Velociraptor. I can say right now that the Vrap runs extremely fast, quite and cool. It's quiter and cooler than many of the "high performance" 7200 RPM drives out there. It's a huge improvement from the last generation of Raptor (150GB). Vista loads about 25% faster for me, so does game. Everything feels about 20-25% faster in Vista. I'm very happy. And yes, I do use all that 300GB of it.

In the above link, one Newegg reviewer said that the Samsung SSD was about 17% than his last 10,000RMP drive. And since the WD Raptor is the only 10,000 RPM desktop drive out there, I think we can kinda guess that the Samsung SSD will probably be faster than the current Velociraptor, but not by 17%. Based on this guessimate, I would say get the Vrap.

 

[z1ggy]

Yeah I agree, if you want something extremely fast you are going to pay a fair amount of cash anyways..Why not invest in SSDs? My digital design teacher in college says within 4-5 years hard drives will not even be talked about anymore by main stream computer users. Remember when 4-5 years ago a TB of HDD space was probably thought of as absurd? Now look at where we are...