I haven't looked into 1TB+ drives for probably a year or two now. Are they reliable? Mostly music and DVDs and pictures. Let's go for "best value" (Cheap but reliable.) $200 is kind of my upper limit. Thoughts?
Samsung F3 are pretty good, i have 2 1TB F3's in my NAS in Raid and it's been flawless thus far. Western Digital is also a good bet, but i can't comment on models, but I have used their cust services and it's very good. Hope that's of some help. Sam
I use a WD 1TB Black in my gaming rig. And I have just bought two of the WD Green WD10EARS drives for my NAS. All very good so far.
Generally, the Spinpoint F3 drives are considered to be the best. However, the other options are pretty good as well.
Samsung Spinpoint F3 1000GB (HD103SJ) is the best HD you can get for its price. HD Tune (10 tests on different platforms from different users - source: CDRinfo.pl): - minimum transfer: 66MB/s - 77MB/s - maximum transfer: 139MB/s - 148MB/s - average transfer: 113MB/s - 119MB/s - access time: 13.7ms - 14.5ms - burst rate: 175MB/s - 192MB/s and 1 test in RAID0: - minimum transfer: 143MB/s - maximum transfer: 258MB/s - average transfer: 211MB/s - access time: 11.5ms - burst rate: 154MB/s
Yeah, the 1TB F3s are very good fast drives for the money... ...but as you seem to be after low priority data storage then it may be worthwhile waiting to see what kind of price the 2TB ecogreen F4s are pitched at when they're released (apparently next month). Okay, they're not going to be as fast as the 1TB F3s (though, as said, this doesn't appear to be necessary for your usage), but they 'should' be faster, use less energy & be cheaper than the 2TB F3 equivalent.
if it's just for mass storage then I'd go for the 2TB Samsung F3EG, it's a great 5400RPM drive that runs cool and quite. For speed I'd go for the WD 1Tb Black just because I have 2 of them
