First choice for reliability and with 5 year warranty Western Digital 2TB WD2003FZEX Black 'Value' option Eco and cheap(er) Western Digital WD20EZRX 2TB Green
Should have said I have a 480gb SSD for the main drive. This is purely for storage. Can't really stretch to the black. So is WD the brand to go for then?
Sorry, but I am confused now. When someone says, "main drive", that typically means the boot drive, the one that contains the operating system and typically installed programs, My Documents, email, etc. The "main drive" is not normally used "purely for storage". When I think of a storage drive, I think of a drive used to store backups of the main drive, large numbers of photos, tunes and videos, etc. A SSD is ideal for the main or boot drive. A large HD is ideal for backups and storage of large files that typically are never modified.
Ah! Thanks! Then you are looking for a big fat "secondary" drive. You might want to look at this and be sure to avoid Seagate Barracuda drives.
I have a Seagate 2TB SSHD as my main games drive and I've been very impressed - I definitely noticed a speed increase over a standard HDD. Might be worth considering?
I'd go for the cheapest drive that has a warranty that seems reasonable to you. I find 2 years is fine, as after 2 years if it dies there is probably something a lot cheaper and better available to replace it. This assumes good backups or course.
Isn't that usually a contradiction in terms these days? As far as I know WD Blacks are pretty much the only consumer drives with a 5 year warranty and they are one of the most, if not the most, expensive available.
Not at all. A quick look at Newegg or Amazon will reveal many examples of 5 year drives costing the same or even less than same size 3 year. I would not even consider a 2 year or less. And who says consumers cannot buy enterprise class drives? And definitely WD is not the only one either.
Check these out and note the cheapest one has the biggest cache at 128Mb and longest warranty at 5 years. And note the most expensive is a WD with only 32Mb cache and a 3 year warranty. The other WDs have 64Mb cache and just 1 and 2 year warranties. The clear winner is the Seagate!
That Seagate is pretty heavily reduced though, so maybe not a totally fair comparison. In the UK at least you're looking at typically £95-100 for the 2TB Black and £110+ for entry level 2TB enterprise drives with 5 years (that Seagate for example). On the other hand you can get a 3TB consumer drive with 2 years for around £70. Long warranties and enterprise performance has it's place (and value) but for relatively light mass storage use in a desktop were high performance isn't a big factor I'm taking the extra storage and the money instead.
Oh come on! You said 5 year warranties were the most expensive and I showed if you shop around they weren't. Now you are just making excuses and changing tunes. Different makers heavily discount different models all the time. Next week it may be some other brand. Light mass storage? Since when is 2Tb light? I just showed you 2Tb drives and showed where you can get a better 2Tb drive, one with twice the cache and a 5 year warranty for less money that the WDs. Do I really need to do the same for 3Tb drives? Will you then claim you really wanted 4Tb? Maybe you don't value reliability or performance that much - and that's fine. But when it comes to mass storage, I do and I think most users do - especially since, sadly, most users don't make regular backups. But I also value money and sure don't want to waste any. For 127 quid, you can get a 3Tb, 7200, 128Mb 5-year warranty Seagate. It costs less than twice yours but has 2 1/2 times the warranty. What does that 2 year warranty £70 drive spin at? How big is the cache? And to that, what are you going to backup that drive to? Another entry-level budget drive that the maker only has faith will last 2 years? Then what, spend another 70 quid for another entry-level drive and still not match the 5 year warranty?
