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Disk Drive recommendations

March 8th, 2004 · 1 Comment · PCs

Can it be that another quarter has passed. Here again are the recommendations for the best hard drives to buy. It basically is that you should get the WD740GD for system drive, the Hitachi Deskstar 7K250 ATA-100 for your data drive. If you are on a budget, then get the WD2000JB or the WD1200JB if you want an ultra cheap machine.

  • Western Digital Raptor WD740GD. This is the fastest biggest drive you can buy for your system disk where you need the incredible performance of a 10,000 RPM drive with 4.5ms seek time. It’s the fastest single user drive you can buy. Regardless of whether it is SCSI or 15,000 RPM even. And of course its expensive at $229 as of today or $3/GB. Get one if you want the most performance and pair it with a really big drive for your data.
  • Hitachi Deskstar 7K250. This was the fastest drive of 2003. But, compared with the WD2000JB below, its not clear the price/performance is that great. As of today, it costs $252 or about $1/GB. The Serial ATA version is a little less at $207 or $0.80/GB and basically no difference in performance at all.
  • Western Digital Caviar WD2000JB. If you want a big drive for less money, then the 200GB ATA-100 drivers are the place to go. As the best drive of 2002, the performance compared with the SATA 250GB drive is actually better for Office and Gaming benchmarks, so you don’t give up much compared with the Hitachi. It’s a good tradeoff at just $142 or $0.71/GB. One big change though is that these drives now only have a 1-year warranty, so that’s a real cost difference.
  • Western Digital Caviar WD1200JB. The stars of the ball in 2001, these are great budget drives. Great performance and just $92 or $0.69/GB. Get for your budget system.
    Benchmark Unit of Measure WD740GB Hitachi 7K250 SATA WD2500JD SATA WD2000JB PATA
    Average Read Service ms (lower better) 7.8 12.1 14.1 14.8 13.5
    Transfer Rate Beginning MB/s (higher better) 71.8 60.4 57.9 56.5 48.8
    SR Office DriveMark 2002 IO/s (higher better) 606 459 417 431 413
    SR Gaming DriveMark 2002 IO/s (higher better) 749 588 541 546 505
    SR File Server DriveMark 2002 IO/s (higher better) 213 127 124 130 126
    Idle Noise (in dB/A @ 18mm) 42.3 41.5 46.1 46.7 47.1

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1 response so far ↓

  • 1 a little ludwig goes a long way // Mar 9, 2004 at 13:00

    Rich’s Disk Drive Guide

    Tong Family Blog: Disk Drive recommendations—a good overview. I have the little brother of the 10,000 RPM SATA drive rich mentions and i’ve been very happy with it, it has a material impact on system speed….

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