How To Decide On How Big A Hard Drive To Buy!

[HarryWild]

Hi all!

Just purchased a new computer a Lenovo ThinkCentre M58p SFF! My current computer is a IBM ThinkCentre model 8183 - it a small form factor like my new one. I had purchased it with a hard drive. I been using the Western Digital high end server type drive and been very happy with it. I like the speed and it has been very nice in that it seems to no fragment much and no corruption of data.

Prices have gone down a lot on hard drives. I need to decide go with a 70, 150 or 300gb drive. Currently, I have a Raptor 70gb with only 23gb left free. My plan is to clone my existing drive into my new drive, place it into the M58p and used the Windows Upgrade Install procedure to make the clone drive work with the M58p. I was going to go with the 300gb but at my rate it take 6 years before it reaches 2/3rd of the hard drive size. I'm planning on getting a SDD(Solid State Drive) in two years to migrate to Windows 7 when the SSD prices come down. I keeping the original M58p hard drive to use as my upgrade option since it has Vista on it. The 150gb is around $160 while the 300gb is around $200. So for $40 you basically get double the size.

The question is should I go with the 150gb or 300gb. I fear the maintenance of the larger drive size since the utilities will take longer to run because of the size - disk frag, optimize, etc... while the corruption might be easier to obtain on a larger drive size.

I plan on using a portable or external drive for storing so call "crap". Movies, photos, stories, etc...

Any thoughts on the Blu-Ray to be consider in an optical drive. Burners are $200, Combo package read Blu-Ray, but burner DVD/CD are around $135 and multi-burners are $50. Is Blu-Ray needed and which type would you buy? Kind of scare off by the Blu-Ray disk price of $5 a disk but like the 25gb. 50gb is very nice too but disk are very pricey. Even the Blu_Ray drive is costly even at $200 when compare to multi-burners.

Please tell me your thoughts on what I should buy and what you would do!

Thanks.

Harry

 

[HarryWild]

Ben,

Look at this link form your comparison link:

http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/2009-3.5-desktop-hard-drive-charts/compare,1019.html?prod

[2367]=on&prod[2365]=on

It compares the Velociraptor with the WD Black 1 TB! To me the Velociraptor is much faster then the 1TB. It is the 2TB with 64mb cache that is close to the Velociraptor!

 

[kjv1611]

The WD Black 2TB, as well as the RE4, in that scnerio actuall is faster than the Velociraptor. The WD Black 1TB wasn't as fast, but it wasn't that terribly far behind. In real world usage, you won't see the difference, more than likely.

--

"If to err is human, then I must be some kind of human!" -Me

 

[kjv1611]

The main thing, though, is that whether you bought the Velociraptor, WD Black, or RE4, you'd not be dissapointed in performance. If you don't need 1 TB of space, then the velociraptor should be fine. In all honesty, if it were me, regardless of reading some of the charts, I'd probably choose the Velociraptor as my system drive if I were buying for a new system. Then I'd get a WD Green drive for the data drive, b/c for your data files, you don't really need a fast drive. And the WD Green drives have EXTREMELY fast continuous read and write rates. They just fall behind when you have multiple input/output operations, like with gaming, databases, OS system procedures, etc.

--

"If to err is human, then I must be some kind of human!" -Me

 

[BadBigBen]

There you can see what the difference CACHE and optimization can do... I've go a notion that pretty soon the raptors will catch up...

amd I agree with KJV1611. that I would also go with a raptor for the OS drive and a slower (green or Blue) drive for the Data...

and if I really want speed, the there is nothing better then SSD or SAS (in the Enterprise area, too expensive for SOHO in my opinion)...


Ben
"If it works don't fix it! If it doesn't use a sledgehammer..."
How to ask a question, when posting them to a professional forum.
Only ask questions with yes/no answers if you want "yes" or "no"

 

[HarryWild]

Hi to all - BadBigBen and kjv1611,

Happy New Year to you!

I have not have the motivation yet to assembly the parts into my computer yet! I will wait for some reason a week or two just to relax before I do the dirty work! I just hope all the parts work!

Well get back to you as start the "process".

Harry