Best Single hard drive in the reliabilty/performance category?

[chew*]

Brand loyalty put aside what hard drive has the most to offer in the 250g to 500g size for performance and reliability. Haven't been keeping up with the times, Still rocking hard drives that came out when sata first arrived, which appear to be my weakest link performance wise in this PC.

Will not be running raid so looking for single drive performance, 1 for XP and 1 for vista.

Was looking at these. Last time I upgraded seagate was IT......Not to sure about now.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822148309

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822148288

[SlyMaelstrom]

I've owned several harddrives from all of the major players; Seagate, Western Digital, Hitatchi, Samsung, and Fujitsu. Probably about 30 or so in total between all of the builds I've done for myself and my family and to be honest... I've yet to see one fail after years of use. Maybe I'm just lucky, but to me all most all brands are reliable to such a degree that seeing one fail is nothing more than dumb bad luck. That said... from people that I know with more hard drive experience... everyone tells me that Western Digital is supposed to be the most reliable. As far as performance... in the more mainstream sizes, they are perform very, very close to each other. The technology of getting 500GB on a 3.5" HDD is pretty much perfected. From various benchmarks, I'd say that performance can vary just as much between two hard drives from the same company as they could between two hard drives from two different companies. That said, in most benchmarks, you'll normally see either Western Digital or Seagate taking the lead in read and write speeds.

[little_scrapper]

Actually from my readings and experience it the SAMSUNG harddrives that are pretty much the best. The Seagate 7200.11 drives seem to be commonly problematic and you can see it in the reviews. Just look at how many RECERTIFIED 7200.11's there are for sale. And you can see it in thier pricing also, a 500GB for $60 or a 250gb for $75... now tell me which one has more quality parts?

[zanzabar]

the fastest 500GB is the samsung f1 without any competion, but if u want fast step up to a samsung or WD 640GB 2 platter

[chew*]

Is this the 2 platter WD?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822136319

[zanzabar]

yes

[RPGWiZaRD]

I'd vote WD 320GB or 640GB. Personally I got the WD6400AAKS version as I've had great experience with my WD7500AAKS drive and in general read great stuff about the AAKS drives. What's the difference between the AAKS and above linked version I have no clue about though but I know at least WD6400AAKS got 2 platters which also benchmarks prove, ~88MB/s avg read and only a stunning 11.9 ms response time in HD Tune benchmark for my sample (which is far less than any other 7200rpm HDD). I can really recommend WD today for reliability though and while it's a difficult matter to talk about or proof any points I'd say Seagate has a bigger lack in quality control than ever before today so I'd suggest staying away from those if wanting reliability. This doesn't of course mean that whatever brand you choose you could still get a very good or bad sample but I'd say chances or this happening is more or less depending what you choose. I mean I've had 7 Maxtors and none of them have broke down on me even after 5 years but I don't trust Maxtor anymore since Seagate owns them. Seagate used to be great in the past I think and Samsung and Hitachi I've got no experience about so don't wanna talk about those but I've read lots of issues about the new Samsung F1 series though.

Anyway I can really recommend WD6400AAKS, it really stands among the rest IMO, cheap, silent, fast and hopefully reliable due to the few platters (2). Long-term reliability in HDDs shows it's signs years after the release which is a bit hard to talk about now.

EDIT: Now I see, the version you linked to got 32MB cache instead of 16MB, hench the price difference. And being the "Black" series this "AALS" version's got a bit more noise than AAKS version and this one also got 5 year warranty too but performance should be pretty much the same I think.