Or is the problem that they are all to avoid and there isn't any good recent ones? I think the main problem is the lack of competition. Seagate has bought Samsung and WD has bought Hitachi. So the two companies who have been bought out are probably not doing any more research and development. And t...

i've seen another forum member get their x2 250 to 0.67v idle but i think that's the limit, i could probably go lower but i don't want to bother with k10stat, i just use the bios and cnq. That was me. :D 0.675V @ 800Mhz in K10stat, but CPU-Z shows 0.688V. I also have a Sempron 140 and the lowest I ...

Am I right in thinking that a 3TB drive, when used as a secondary, non-boot drive will still work in a 32bit OS, such as XP Pro? Or would I need to use that little doohickey WD included with the 3TB drive? http://www.hitachigst.com/images/stories/high_capacity_tablev2.jpg From what I've read, 32-bi...

Samsung has finally posted an Advanced Format Alignment Tool for their hard drives for those people using XP/2003 without access to Vista/Win7 machines to do the partitioning or don't want to use command line to create partitions with the proper offset.

Samsung Alignment Tool

SleepyBum, the WD 3200aaks is a 3.5" drive. Oopppss... You are right... For some reason I thought he was talking about 2.5" laptop HDs, because they have just recently made the transition to 320GB platters. Yes, a 320GB desktop HD is probably based on 320GB or 500GB platters. 6667GB platters have r...

According to Storage Review, it is a 5 platter drive. 600GB platters would make for weird configuration for the 2TB and 1.5TB models. 3.5 * 600GB = 2100GB 2.5 * 600GB = 1500GB Would be a waste to be using like 3-platters and 5-heads, unless they have a lot of bad platters. Or they could be using 50...

Any other suggestions on how I can find out? yertech has a blog in which he lists all the hard drive models by family with the number of platters. He's moved to a new site, but don't know if it's been updated with the latest models. HDD Platter Database - Western Digital - 2.5" Another thing you ca...

Nice spot... but I'd be more interested in the Hitachi Deskstar 5K3000 series Glad to see finally Hitachi introducing some green class drives. I don't buy 7200 rpm HDs these days, since I only use for media/storage. Haven't bought a desktop Hitachi/IBM drive since the 60GXP/75GXP fiasco. But will be...

I take it that write performance is almost double when 4k is aligned. I used linux to align my only partition to start at sector 64 (not sure why some sites recommend 2048??). I am not sure how to does this with parted. I would like to use a GPT partition table really - but parted can't align autom...

But it's still confusing me as to what cases they use, because in an older 3DGameman video, it was using the newer case, yet in an NCIX video it's been the older one... hmm... The older dated HD is actually the newer design. 667GB per platter: Western Digital Caviar Green 2TB WD20EARS-00MVWB0 The o...

Wow... Thanks for the heads-up on the 4k sector. Didn't think Samsung would move to it so soon. Here's the manual for the HD . Arrggghhh~~!`1`!~!!!! That manual is useless and doesn't mention anything about the jumper or the 4k sector. Definitely waiting for reviews/reports on how it plays with XP/2...

I don't know why everyone is recommending him 3.5" HDs, when he even thought about 2.5" 7200rpm HDs, which I think fits all his needs rather well. - the smallest 2.5" HD these days would be around 160GB. - 7200rpm 2.5" would probably be fairly speedy and probably faster than a desktop 3.5" 5400rpm d...

Look forward to your review on them. Newegg also seems to have just got them in stock this week. SAMSUNG Spinpoint F4 HD204UI 2TB 5400 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive Gonna wait a bit for reports to come back on these 667GB/platter drives. Hope both WD and Samung have made relia...

the "e" processors are hard to find, in my experience. Maybe are slightly better, but "regular" athlons if undervolted can perform also very well in power consumption. Yes... the "e" processors are just cherry picked. The regular ones can undervolt to about the same level. Also, like greenfrank sai...

Other than the scorpio, what other makes are recommended? I like samsungs for 3.5" drives, but their 2.5" ones seem to have a poor reputation... I don't like Hitachi desktop drives, but their 5400rpm laptop drives are very quiet and usually leads in power savings. They almost always publish data sh...

Athlon II X2 250 in a Shuttle SA76G2 barebone AMD 760G + SB710 There is no FSB or voltage control in BIOS so all undervolting was done in K10stat Stock: 3000Mhz 1.440V Speed __ K10stat CPU-Z 3000Mhz 1.1500V 1.168V 2800Mhz 1.0875V 1.104V 2200Mhz 0.9500V 0.976V 1500Mhz 0.8125V 0.832V 0800Mhz 0.6750V 0...

What about the WD Scorpio Blue series (WDxxxxBEVE) drives? Or Samsung Spinpoint M HM080CG or HM160HC? Like you suggested, those are the only two 2.5" PATA on the market today and probably your best bet for a quiet PATA drive. I have the Samsung HM160HC in an old ThinkPad and I think it works pretty...

I just picked up this board for a NAS build. If you have a Fry's near you, they have a combo with this board + a Athlon II X2 250 for $50AR. The $10 rebate might be a bit flaky, so actual cost might be $60. http://slickdeals.net/forums/showthread.php?t=1756164 The Athlon II 250 is overkill for a fil...

I just noticed that Tiger Direct here in the US has all the new "e" line of AMD's up for sale. The 240e from the review in the OP is $85 for the retail version. I can't wait to see more reviews and benchmarks on these cpu's. I am considering opting for the 240e for my upcoming whs build. Ouch! I wa...

If it's a choice between the Athlon II 240 and E3200, there's no clear cut answer, as the Athlon II 240 is a much newer chip. There's a nice write up on cheap, low-end CPUs at xbitlabs: Value CPUs Roundup: Is There Life in Low-End? Seems like the Athlon II 240 leads the E5200 in most benchmarks. Th...

Saw this drive while browsing newegg. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822152202 Can't find much info via Google and haven't seen any news released via tech news sites. Looks like it's an EcoGreen, but it's under F3 family. From newegg's product picture, it's shows it's a 5400rp...

HD features utility What is this and where does one get it? Thank you. I've been using the Hitachi Feature Tool to set the AAM status in drive. Works for Samsung, Western Digital, etc... Does not work for Seagate because they have removed the AAM feature from all their drives. You need to find vers...

Alright... I bought these drives back in August and was too lazy to write up on it, so I'm finally I'm getting to it. I purchased one from newegg and then another from Fry's when they had them on sale in October. The newegg one is Made in Korean 2009.07, the Fry's one is Made in China 2009.08. Both ...

Seems like this (WD10EADS-00P8B0) is 5000rpm (not 5400rpm) model. Is there any improvement about noise level? :) Also does it make load/unload all the time? I've been testing this HD externally. Some of quirks which freaks me out a bit. At startup, it makes that click-of-death sound two times. That...

Are you going to use this drive for the OS/boot or just a data drive to store media? I think 5400rpm is fine for as a HTPC boot drive, if all you intend to do is to just boot, load up the media player, and play back videos. But if you want to use it beyond that, like playing games, running programs,...

The HD Tune graph of my drive shows a 13.6 ms access time, which seems normal. http://img407.imageshack.us/img407/9804/hdtunebenchmarksamsungh.png I have 2 of these drives, one from Newegg and one from Fry's, and they have pretty much identical stats. I haven't had time to post a review on these, be...

Amazingly (though not cheap), my one and only local computer shop had a Shuttle PC60 power supply, which has solved the problem. Modding the fans wasn't in the cards. There is one bad power supply in the G case that makes really horrible noise. It's the ENG power supply, that seems to come on the S...

Fry's is having a sale on WD10EADS drives this week for $60. So I went down today to pick one up. As usual with WD products, there's are a lot of different sub-models on available. From the deal forums, people have been getting WD10EADS-00L5B1 (3-platter), WD10EADS-00M2B0 (2-platter), and WD10EADS-0...

Okay 47 views and nothing What I'm wondering is the platter density very low therefore the drive is slow? I'm finding it difficult to get any specs on this drive as its from an Xbox 360 Looks like that drive is from the Samsung M40S Series: http://files.hddguru.com/download/Datasheets/Samsung%20Ser...

Like kal001 stated, if you know how to decode Seagate model numbers, you can tell the number of patters each drive has very easily. For WD, you need to look at other specs to determine platters. The other specs that can show the number platters are weight and power usage. More platters = more weight...