Hard Drives for Desktop Computers |
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Last Updated: December 12, 2008
Today's Best Hard Drives
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Owner's rated their satisfaction with these drives far above average on NewEgg. The interface, capacity and performance are the most important factors to consider. Warranty, noise and temperature are not as important. |
The table is sorted by drive capacity (GB) and then RPM.
| Price | GB | $/GB | RPM | Model | Speed | Warranty |
| $120 | 74 | $1.62 | 10,000 | Western Digital Raptor WD740ADFD | SATA 1.5Gb/s | 5 years |
| $37 | 80 | $1.46 | 7,200 | Western Digital Caviar Blue WD800JD | SATA 3Gb/s | 3 years |
| $170 | 150 | $1.13 | 10,000 | Western Digital VelociRaptor WD1500HLFS | SATA 3Gb/s | 5 years |
| $42 | 160 | $0.26 | 7,200 | Western Digital Caviar SE WD1600AAJS | SATA 3Gb/s | 3 years |
| $55 | 250 | $0.22 | 7,200 | Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 ST3250410AS | SATA 3Gb/s | 5 years |
| $230 | 300 | $0.77 | 10,000 | Western Digital VelociRaptor WD3000GLFS | SATA 3Gb/s | 5 years |
| $75 | 640 | $0.12 | 7,200 | Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD6400AAKS | SATA 3Gb/s | 3 years |
| $105 | 1,000 | $0.11 | variable | Western Digital Caviar Green WD10EACS | SATA 3Gb/s | 3 years |
| $130 | 1,000 | $0.13 | 7,200 | Western Digital Caviar Black WD1001FALS | SATA 3Gb/s | 5 years |
| $130 | 1,500 | $0.09 | 7,200 | Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 ST31500341AS | SATA 3Gb/s | 5 years |
Buy a 10,000rpm and a 7,200rpm Hard Drive
Buy a terribly over priced, but worth every penny, 10,000rpm hard drive and use it as the C: drive. Windows will boot up faster and applications will load faster. It's a nice complement to a dual core or quad core processor. All of the hype about the Western Digital Raptor and VelociRaptor 10,000rpm drives are true.
Buy a 1TB (1,000GB) drive to use as the D: drive for you data files, music, movies and photos. It's big enough to allow for future growth. This two drive setup is simpler than setting up a multiple hard drive RAID array (see below).
Bare Drive v. Retail Kit
The retail kit is sold in stores and contains a box, cables, screws, installation diagram, and software. The bare drive includes the drive and screws. Most computers already have an extra cable inside and if you need the software, it can be downloaded from the web site. Bare drives carry a longer warranty than retail kits.
Brand Name
Seagate and Western Digital offer the best drives in terms of quality, price, and performance. Hitachi Deskstar drives are known for their speed, but they are more expensive than other drives. Samsung drives get some good reviews, but they are hard to find in America.
Size
Buy at least 1TB for future needs. I'm tired of adding hard drives every year when I run out of space. It was nice to replace four drives with a single drive and still have half the drive empty.
Speed
10,000rpm drives are faster than 7,200rpm drives. The speed difference is noticeable.
SATA is faster than EIDE. In March 2005, PC World said, "On average, the SATA group copied files and folders in 17 percent less time than the PATA {EIDE} drives, and copied a single 3GB file in 20 percent less time."
EIDE / ATA / PATA Interface for Older Computers
EIDE, ATA, and PATA are all the same thing. Confusing. ATA/100 can transfer data at 100MB/second, even though the drive itself may never go that fast. The newest drives can transfer 60-75MB/second for long periods of time. Serial ATA/150 (SATA) can transfer data at a theoretical 150MB/second. It replaces the 80 wire drive cable with a 4 wire drive cable that has a side benefit of better airflow within the computer case. SATA offers some performance improvement on certain tasks. SATA II/300 can transfer data at a theoretical 300MB/second, but doesn't offer any speed benefits; even on RAID 0 arrays.
All new computers have built in SATA capability, but older ones may not.
Warranty
Hard drive warranties have gone from 5 years to 3 to 1 and are working their way back to 5 years. Using RAID 0 doubles your chances of loosing data since one bad drive will corrupt the data on both drives. The warranties on retail kits are shorter than the warranties on bare hard drives. I refuse to buy a drive that doesn't include a 3 or 5 year warranty. Here are the warranties for Seagate and Western Digital.
Noise
Noise is not an issue. Tech-Report.com compared hard drives in March 2003 and discovered all 5 drives ran nearly silent. This continues to be the trend almost five years later. I suspect the liquid bearings helped significantly. Older or less expensive drives using ball bearings are noticeably louder, but not loud. Hard drives spinning at 10,000rpm run a bit louder and hotter than 7,200rpm drives, but are still suitable for a home or office environment. There are a number of things louder than a hard drive including a graphics card fan, chipset fan, CPU cooler fan, case fan, and power supply fan.
RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 0+1
Redundant Array of Independent Disks (RAID) used to be exclusively for servers to add hard drive speed or redundancy, but is now available for desktop computers.
RAID 0 takes two identically sized hard drives, connects them together, makes the computer think it's one big hard drive, and increases the data transfer rate. The rate will change from about 50MB/second for one drive to over 70MB/second using RAID 0. The graphs on Tweakers.net show that doubling the number of drives does not double the speed. The downside is if one drive goes bad, all of the files on both drives are lost. To minimize this, make good backups, buy a hard drive with a 3 or 5 year warranty, and buy the drives from different places. The theory is if you buy two drives that are manufactured by the same company at the same time and the first drive dies, then perhaps both hard drives are part of a bad batch of drives. After buying a new hard drive to replace the dead one, reformatting both drives, and reinstalling the software, the second old hard drive may die too. The theory will hold true that both drives came from a bad batch of drives, but now you have to reformat the drives and reinstall the software a second time. Minimize the odds of this happening by buying the drives from different companies. Chances are the drives will be manufactured at different times.
RAID 1 takes two identically sized hard drives, connects them together, makes the computer think it's one drive, and duplicates every file by placing one copy on each drive. This cuts the storage capacity in half since the second drive is a mirror image of the first drive. If one drive goes bad, the second drive drive still has a good copy of the files. The upside is there isn't a performance hit.
RAID 0+1 requires 4 hard drives and has the speed advantage of RAID 0 and the mirroring advantage of RAID 1. RAID 5 is supposed to offer the same thing with only three drives, but it has proven to be way too slow.
Installing a New Hard Drive
See the installing a new hard drive section. Seagate and Western Digital come with drive copying software that may save you money.