storage for htpc

[ra74]

What is the best hdd for the htpc. Requirements:
- low energy consumption
- silence
- reliability
- can read stream of data without freeze
- capacity 1.5TB has good price

According to the reviews WD Green series should be fine though it's 7200 and I don't trust this company. Maybe I'm wrong.

[swivelguy2]

Fortunately, you're wrong! WD Green is 5400 RPM. Those, or the Samsung F2EG (Eco-Green) are a good choice.

Edit: 5200 was a typo. 5400 it is.

[ilovejedd]

Fortunately, you're wrong! WD Green is 5200 RPM. Those, or the Samsung F2EG (Eco-Green) are a good choice.

I thought they were 5400RPM?

[plympton]

I've had 2 flavors of Green drive in my HTPC - a 1 TB 4 (5?) platter original version, and now a 4 (3?) platter 2 TB version. Both are super quiet, and cool (THAT'S a must).

I also had a 2.5" drive for my system drive (easier to back up in case of a HD crash), but swapped it out for a 40 GB Kingston SSDNOW SSD - MUCH improved boot time in Win7. Unfortunately, I reboot a lot (Media Center keeps crashing out on me.. ).

I also have 3 Samsung 500 GB drives, and a 1 TB drive, and like them a lot. They run a bit hotter than the Green drives, but not much, and are 7200 RPM. I'd recommend them, too.

-Dan

[ra74]

Fortunately, you're wrong! WD Green is 5200 RPM. Those, or the Samsung F2EG (Eco-Green) are a good choice.

I thought they were 5400RPM?

I've found that rpm is variable up to 7200 and many shops sells it as 7200

[PartEleven]

I've found that rpm is variable up to 7200 and many shops sells it as 7200

And you've been misled by WD marketing. It's been confirmed here at SPCR that the original Green drives were fixed at 5400 rpm. I haven't heard of any news indicating that the new ones are different. There is no such thing as a variable rpm hard drive.

[plympton]

There is no such thing as a variable rpm hard drive.

I swear that they were at least announced - I recall that some Hitachi's would spin down to a certain speed on idle. Didn't take off, obviously, as VS motors probably made it really tough to balance & added cost/complexity.

Only thing I saw was an announcement here a few years ago:
http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/storage/di ... 23416.html

-Dan

[whiic]

Hitachi's never ceased to have variable spin speed feature. It's just that the HDD really has to be idle and there's several second spin-up phase from low-rpm to high-rpm before HDD becomes operational (shorted than it is to spin-up from dead halt, though) and the HDD cannot be accessed at all when in low-rpm mode.

Because of these delays, the feature is turned off by default, and even if manually configured to maximum power saving mode, the timer to enter low-rpm mode is 10 minutes. Hitachi's timer to head unload is 2 minutes in maximum power saving (default: disabled) where as WD for example has default of 8 seconds.

Also, variable rpm (configured through APM (Advanced Power Management)) is nothing new to Hitachi. I think it has been around since 75GXP, along with several other "oddities" of IBM/Hitachi HDDs:
- unload technology for desktop HDDs (nowadays also seen on WD Greenpower)
- 5-platter construction in low-profile 3.5" HDD (yeah, Seagate has had a 12-platter drive but that was so called "half-height")

And as a result to 75GXP fiasco, IBM was also the first(?) manufacturer to include wear leveling / background scanning for HDDs, earning the reputation of sounding like a banshee during these scans. (Nowadays commonplace among all manufactured HDDs by any manufacturer.)

After that there's been a few more additions to oddities of Hitachi, like dual-cone fluid dynamic bearing (i.e top screwed FDB motor) (today also seen on 4-platter WDs) presented with 7K400.