The two failed SSD were a Samsung 840 250 GB and an OCZ Vertex 4 120 GB. Then I bought no more SSD, two failed out of two is enough.
Tullio
The only hard disk failures in my life were on the 20 MB "Winchester" disks on Onyx computers in the 1981-1985 period. We made incremental backups on 10 MB tapes in Unix Version 7 with the Berkeley commands "dump" and "restore".

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And everyone continues to go on about SSDs in this thread, while Dirk asked what the fastest HDD is that he can use, because that's what he wants to use. Why does everyone still then feel the need to tell him otherwise?

If you were to ask what the best bike is and all of the rest told you that bikes are so passé, you should go and get yourself a moped, or better yet a motorcycle... what would you then do?

It's very nice that all of you with SSDs think they're the best thing since sliced cheese, but it isn't really an answer to what Dirk was asking, is it? Especially not since he told us that he doesn't trust SSDs, so what is the use then of everyone -aside from tullio and me- since Dirk's post trying to cram SSDs down his throat? It would be very nice if people were to read what the original poster's wishes were and answer to that instead of what they themselves would do in this situation.

The whole off-topic conversation about disk compression isn't helping much either.

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From what I can see there are 2 HHDs out there that seem to get the best reviews

1. Seagate ST1000DM003 1TB 7200rpm:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148840

2. Western Digital Caviar Black WD1003FZEX 1TB 7200rpm:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822236625


Good luck..

From what I can see there are 2 HHDs out there that seem to get the best reviews

1. Seagate ST1000DM003 1TB 7200rpm:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148840

2. Western Digital Caviar Black WD1003FZEX 1TB 7200rpm:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822236625


Good luck..

Yep...Newegg and TigerDirect were suggested early on... The thread got off track after that...

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From what I get on Internet the Helium filled disks are the fastest. But they cost a lot more.
Tullio

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From what I get on Internet the Helium filled disks are the fastest. But they cost a lot more.
Tullio

8tbs for $1000! I couldn't find the transfer rates, but the power savings (23%?) alone make them worthwhile for server farms. Still only 7200rpm... Interesting though...

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The helium drives are meant for sequential reads/writes. They have pretty good performance for doing backups, but fall flat on their face when you do small, random seeks on them.

If you want a fast mechanical platter drive, you'll want 10k or 15k RPM, but the down-side is that the cost/gb is not that great.

I know the WD Black 4TB drives do about 175MB/sec read and about 150MB/sec write, thanks to the high data density. Those are pretty good speeds for 7200rpm.

I've been wanting to get something bigger/newer than the five 1TB Blacks I have in my external enclosure, but the reviews across all brands for anything over 2TB do not fill me with much confidence. Apparently, Quality Control is no longer a priority like it used to be. That being said.. I would recommend doing a complete system image once you get Windows installed and get all the updates and drivers you're interested in. Make the image, store it somewhere (another HDD, a flash drive that is big enough (probably 32gb), etc) so that IF the drive dies unexpectedly, when you RMA it and get the replacement, you can just reload that backup. And I would make frequent backups of the personal data that you don't want to lose.

That's the problem that I find with large-capacity drives is that when they die.. you lose so much data (unless you have backups). That's kind of why I like having 5 1TB drives, because if one dies, I only lose at most, 20% of my data, assuming none of it is backed-up (which most of it actually is).



I like the idea of SSDs, and they are getting cheaper and more capacity, but I honestly don't find a huge difference with them. Sure, system boot time is pretty quick, but once you're at the desktop.. I honestly don't notice much of a difference between SSD and the old 80gb WD Caviar that only did 35MB/sec. I guess it would be more significant if I booted-up and shut down frequently, but I generally go 15-40 days between restarts. So.. yeah, SSDs are nice, but cost/gb still isn't close to what mechanical drives have to offer. Not yet, at least. Give it another year or two and we'll start seeing 3 and 4TB SSDs for $300-400.

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Linux laptop:
record uptime: 1511d 20h 19m (ended due to the power brick giving-up)

And everyone continues to go on about SSDs in this thread, while Dirk asked what the fastest HDD is that he can use, because that's what he wants to use. Why does everyone still then feel the need to tell him otherwise?

Dirk said he wanted the fastest HDD, and not to bother with SSDs

I asked why.

He said why; in his response to my question he not only said that it was a lack of trust, but that he wanted his games to load as fast as possible- that would require a SSD, not a HDD.
So i responded pointing out why he should consider SSDs, and gave evidence to backup that statement. I also included in the comparison the fastest desktop HDD available- the answer he actually asked for, although it appears his suppliers don't carry it.

My next post was in response to Tullio, once again responding to a statement that was based on personal empirical experience that wasn't a indication of the actual facts of the matter.

The whole off-topic conversation about disk compression isn't helping much either.

True, but how many forums have you been on where there is no thread drift?

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Grant
Darwin NT

I honestly don't notice much of a difference between SSD and the old 80gb WD Caviar that only did 35MB/sec. I guess it would be more significant if I booted-up and shut down frequently, but I generally go 15-40 days between restarts.

It really depends on how often you're starting up & shutting down programmes (and how much system RAM you have), and whether or not have a lot of input/output (particularly random) as to how much benefit you would see from a SSD.

If you have plenty of system RAM (to allow caching) and mostly browse the web, do email etc then other when you first start up your programmes after booting, or when re-booting or doing system updates you won't see much benefit from a SSD. Doing audio or video or any sort of database work you will see a huge benefit.

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Grant
Darwin NT

The helium drives are meant for sequential reads/writes. They have pretty good performance for doing backups, but fall flat on their face when you do small, random seeks on them.

If you want a fast mechanical platter drive, you'll want 10k or 15k RPM, but the down-side is that the cost/gb is not that great.

I know the WD Black 4TB drives do about 175MB/sec read and about 150MB/sec write, thanks to the high data density. Those are pretty good speeds for 7200rpm.

I've been wanting to get something bigger/newer than the five 1TB Blacks I have in my external enclosure, but the reviews across all brands for anything over 2TB do not fill me with much confidence. Apparently, Quality Control is no longer a priority like it used to be. That being said.. I would recommend doing a complete system image once you get Windows installed and get all the updates and drivers you're interested in. Make the image, store it somewhere (another HDD, a flash drive that is big enough (probably 32gb), etc) so that IF the drive dies unexpectedly, when you RMA it and get the replacement, you can just reload that backup. And I would make frequent backups of the personal data that you don't want to lose.

That's the problem that I find with large-capacity drives is that when they die.. you lose so much data (unless you have backups). That's kind of why I like having 5 1TB drives, because if one dies, I only lose at most, 20% of my data, assuming none of it is backed-up (which most of it actually is).


I like the idea of SSDs, and they are getting cheaper and more capacity, but I honestly don't find a huge difference with them. Sure, system boot time is pretty quick, but once you're at the desktop.. I honestly don't notice much of a difference between SSD and the old 80gb WD Caviar that only did 35MB/sec. I guess it would be more significant if I booted-up and shut down frequently, but I generally go 15-40 days between restarts. So.. yeah, SSDs are nice, but cost/gb still isn't close to what mechanical drives have to offer. Not yet, at least. Give it another year or two and we'll start seeing 3 and 4TB SSDs for $300-400.

As far as I know WD is the only manufacture to ever make SATA drives over 7200 RPM. Which is my I mentioned SAS drives for 10K & 15K previously. Something like the a Seagate ST1200MM0158 (1.2TB 10000 RPM 128MB Cache SAS 12Gb/s) might suit their boot disk needs.

I would hazard a guess that this might be for their new gaming machine being built. For games that load a lot of data while playing you really want the fastest drive access you can get. Otherwise you may have to deal with frustratingly long load times from maps or waiting for menus to open.

Like you mentioned. Losing large amounts of data when a disk dies is one of the problems with a single large disk. So for any of my personal storage over 1 TB it goes into a RAID1 or RAID5. Then I backup my OS with a disk image to my RAID storage. For my needs, & budget, I'm OK with using the "fake RAID" from the chipset controller. My current gaming machine uses an inexpensive sandisk 480GB SSD & a RAID5 array using 3TB WD Red drives for my backup/archiving/media storage.

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SETI@home classic workunits: 93,865 CPU time: 863,447 hours
Join the [url=http://tinyurl.com/8y46zvu]BP6/VP6 User Group[

I have a 1 TB external disk connected to my Windows 10 PC via USB. It was formatted FAT32 and Windows used it to make backup of my personal files, but refused to do a full system backup on it since "other people might read it". I succeeded in partitioning it in two partition, one FAT32 of 32 GB, the rest NTFS. Now Windows makes a full system backup on it every Sunday at 7 PM. I have a 2 TB hard disk, don't know the make since the scant information available on the documentation which arrived with the HP Pavilion 500-152ea does not specify it, and it is installed in a vertical position which makes difficult to read its make. I suspect it is a Seagate hybrid at 7200 RPM. Anyway, it works fine.
Tullio

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Western Digital VelociRaptor 1 TB 2.5" Internal Hard Drive WD1000CHTZ

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This item would cost me more than the HP Laptop 635 which cost me 269 euro.
Tullio

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