My priorities for a hard drive are as follows, in order of importance:
- Price in the range of $75-95 dollar/€50-60 euro
- Performance
- Silence
I was considering the following hard drives:
Samsung HD250HJ. Single platter 250 GB hard drive, prices start at less than €40. This is it's topic on the SPCR forum. Should be quiet according to the comments in the topic. No reviews found. This hard drive has 8 MB cache, would it offer less performance than other hard drives with 16 MB cache or more? HD Tune results are as follows: transfer rate maximum/minimum/average is 55/105/85 MB/s. access time is 14 ms, burst rate is 135 MB/s.
Samsung SpinPoint T166 320 GB. Two 167 GB platter hard drive, prices start at less than €50. A review can be found here. HD Tune results are as follows: transfer rate maximum/minimum/average is 40/80/65 MB/s. access time is 14 ms, burst rate is 150 MB/s. Unlike the HD250HJ the T166 has 16 MB cache.
Western Digital Caviar SE16 640 GB WD6400AAKS. Two 320 GB platter hard drive, prices start at over €90. A review can be found here on Anandtech and here on The Tech Report. This forum topic on the SPCR forums covers this hard drive. As you can read in Anandtech's review, the WD3200AAKS has a high access time of 16,4 ms, so it's out of question for me, even if it's 320 GB and fits in my budget nicely. If this drive would offer superior performance to the others while also being silent, I'd be willing to pay the high price. According to The Tech Report's review it is indeed very silent, but on page 5 of their review boot and load times are measured. It seems that there is very little difference between this hard drive and the cheaper hard drives like the T166 in the time it takes to load Doom 3 and Far Cry levels, it doesn't seem to offer a noticeable advantage. HD Tune results are as follows: transfer rate maximum/minimum/average is 55/115/90 MB/s. access time is 12 ms, burst rate is 150 MB/s.
Samsung SpinPoint F1 640 GB. Two 334 GB platter hard drive, prices start below €90. The 320 GB version of the F1 should fit nicely in my budget, but the 320 GB version still isn't widely available. A review in German of the 320 GB version can be found here. The F1 series is discussed in this topic in the SPCR forums. HD Tune results are as follows: transfer rate maximum/minimum/average is 60/115/95 MB/s. access time is 13 ms, burst rate is 160 MB/s. HD Tune results for 320 GB version are almost identical, which was to be expected considering that they both use the same platters, just one less for the 320 GB version.
Now my question is after these considerations, which hard drive should I buy? I like performance and silence, but the Western Digital and Samsung 640 GB hard drives are a bit expensive, and I'm not sure if they will make much difference in real applications (I'm a gamer, so I want fast loading times) compared to the other hard drives. The HD250HJ is cheap and probably silent, but I'm afraid it will underperform. The T166 320 GB hard drive is an older model with lower transfer rates in HD Tune. Maybe it would be best to wait for the 320 GB SpinPoint F1? There is so much to choose and it's driving me mad, so I'd really appreciate some help.
EDIT: I decided to run HD Tune on my current PC to compare my current hard drive with the ones I could buy. I have a Hitachi T7K250 hard drive which has two platters and 8 MB cache, it cost me €69 when I bought it in December 2005. HD Tune gives me maximum/minimum/average transfer rates of 10/60/50 MB/s, access time of 14 ms, burst rate of 120 MB/s. Good to see that my current hard drive bites the dust in terms of transfer rates, but rather surprising that there hasn't been much progress in access times at all. I don't know if one or two milliseconds less is going to matter in terms of performance though.
