IT/PC guys - best hard drives?

[MDV]

Revisiting new PC build. Need most reliable high performance hard drives. PLease advise

[Adam.M]

Samsung Spinpoint F1's

Fast, reliable and well priced.

[MDV]

I've heard problems with their reliability.

I was looking at, mainly, barracuda 12s and WD caviar blacks. Any thoughts?

[_tom_]

I've been using a Seagate Barracuda for over a year now and it still seems to be working fine. I dont know if its high performance enough for you though?

[MDV]

Well I have barracuda 10s at the moment, and they're ok. I have 2 in a raid 0 thats held up over a year now, so I like them.

But this will be in an i7 rig
- i7920
- 6Gb 1600Mhz CL8
- Asus P6T V2

As a pure audio PC, so I need to know that the HDs can live up to this setup, at least a bit. I cant be bothered paying for the overrated difference of raptors and SSDs are out of the question, so in the mortal realm of modern HDs, whats good? Spinpoints duly noted, but there are more reports of failure than the competitors on amazon reviews (the closest thing I have to statistical assement of reliability), the caviar blacks look good, but WD is untested for me, the baracuda 12s I'd go for but they're slower than the 11s, which had shite firmware, leaving me with 10s, which arent fast enough.

What to do?

[MDV]

While were on it - are DFI motherboards good?

DFI LAN Party UT X58-T3eH8 Vs Asus P6T

Any thoughts?

[Adam.M]

I've heard problems with their reliability.

I was looking at, mainly, barracuda 12s and WD caviar blacks. Any thoughts?

I've got 4 1TB drives in Raid 4, never had a problem with them. Even when my PC reached nearly 100c inside. Graphics cards gone, though...

But, these were insanely popular for a short period due to low price and rave reviews, I'm not surprised there hasn't been failures. This is the first time I've bought a non Western Digital hard drive, they've never given me a problem either, not once.

After 12 years of slotting PC's together I've still got my 8GB drive still going strong. I've never come across a hard drive failure where a cloth eared, ham fisted moron wasn't involved *grin* except for the old Hitatchi Deskstars or whatever those horrible things were called... don't the new hyper expensive Mac's come with those now? hmm.

Stick with Asus for the motherboard, I've never even heard of DFI and Asus have never ever gone wrong for me. Gigabyte have, though, horribly wrong...

Either way, sounds like it's going to be one hell of a machine :)

[MDV]

Just to be clear, its the spinpoints that you have in 4Tb raid 4, and you used WD without any trouble until said raid, which is also fine?

Thanks for the advice, its appreciated. I was wary of DFI, no matter how good (they seem to be well respected from what I can dig up) because I'm used to ASUS really, even if they have given me jip (what mobo doesnt at some point?) I've always got them working alright in the end; I'm not very computer literate and dont want a learning curve of very different bios or any other surprises! Plus I seem to remember people going nuts over the P6T when it first came out.

I hope its a hell of a machine too. My current PCs held up ok - an E6600 on a striker extreme with 4Gb of 800Mhz CL4; that really had legs - its about 3 years old now and still rarely bats an eyelid at anything. I just want a pure audio machine, so I'm not screwing with the most important thing about my PC; sound and the stability of sound hardware and software. The other one can be for games, films and daftness.

[Adam.M]

Yeah, Spinpoints on the RAID. the 1TB models. No idea what the other capacity drives are like but they were all the rave back then.

I am a big WD fan though... The only one I've ever avoided is Hitatchi, though I hear they're just as good these days I'm unlikely to take the risk. I'd go with whatever you feel safest using, which sounds like a WD to me, thank god your not being a sucker for the Raptors... my spinpoints are nearly as fast.

Get the Asus! you know the system and if things go wrong theres a massive user base of geeks to draw support on if required.

I'm doing similar to you soon, got a Mac Mini very cheap for internet/movies/music/general use and a main system for audio and gaming, avoiding real internet use as much as possible after i do a clean install on it. And put a new graphics card in it... gah.

[JDC]

personally I'll only get western digital and seagate drives, I tend to look out for a 5 year warrenty, my new pc has a 1tb western digital drive, it makes more noise than all my fans so I'd probably get a seagate next time

I used to like maxtor drives as well until seagate bought them out

[MDV]

I'll go with the spinpoints. Thanks.

If it wasnt that it would have probably been barracudas, tbh, just because I've used them without trouble more than anything else.