I used to participate in distributed computing efforts and I doubt that such a project like Folding@home would use the hard disk extensively enough for it to be a significant performance factor. As long as your processors are busy, you don't have a bottleneck problem.

The 1 TB 32 MB cache Caviar Green is much faster than older drives, because its 5,400 RPM handicap is eliminated by much higher data density. And even then, you only need 1 Mbit/s to 8 Mbit/s bandwidth speeds to watch anime or HD videos, whereas most drives are capable of delivering 240 to 800 Mbit/s. External USB 2.0 drives are bottlenecked to about 240 Mbit/s. As you can see, there is a huge margin for error. I wouldn't worry about performance for video, picture and audio storage.

Regarding performance for everything else, like gaming or OS, higher performing hard disks do have a statistical advantage. But you are likely to forget the performance difference between a 1 TB Caviar Green and a 1 TB Caviar Black in daily use.

Now, for an extra RM 50 to RM 60, the 1 TB Caviar Black does have advantages like longer warranty (5 years instead of 3) and better average performance. But there's a problem with long warranties. I recently sent RMA my nearly 3 year old 250 GB WD, but I got back a Seagate 250 GB because they no longer have 250 GB WDs in stock. I was hoping for an upgrade to a 320 GB WD, but oh well.

In my opinion, both the Green and the Black are viable choices so I would choose according to my preference, which is the Green for me.

This post has been edited by everling: Jun 15 2009, 02:23 AM

chiakm, it's fine. It certainly pwns my old 250 GB 7200RPM drives.

Scandisk? Sounds like an ancient computer if you're using Windows 98 or others with scandisk. Most probably your HDD is on its last legs. Did you try the full test for bad sectors?

Modern HDDs should hit at least 30 MB/s write speed and well over 80 MB/s in best case. If you're using an ancient computer, you'll need to find a PATA HDD replacement. But you should also consider upgrading to something more modern because the rest of the hardware might eventually show its age.

This post has been edited by everling: Jul 30 2009, 09:47 AM

http://www.silentpcreview.com/article844-page5.html

Too bad the Velociraptor lacks in capacity and that SSDs are better at everything except capacity and, for now, price.

WD10EADS uses three 333 MB platters. WD20EADS uses four 500 MB platters.

Be sure to use an e-SATA external casing if you do get the Black 1TB.

USB casing will bottleneck your Black 1TB from ~90 MB/s (read) down to ~30 MB/s. If using a USB casing, you're better off with the cheaper Green.

I've heard of good things with some of Samsung's SpinPoints. I do not know of the specific models however.

And again, performance is not an issue if you get a USB 2.0 casing.

"TechWare Labs posted a mod article by Artiom that transforms a $120 Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1.5TB into a speed demon that outperforms a $230 VelociRaptor 300TB in almost every way."

Nice. Short stroking at work.

USB 2.0 will bottleneck any external hard disk down to 30 Mbyte/s effective. Ignore that 480 Mbps (60 Mbyte/s). It's the theoretical bandwidth that did not include the overheads necessary to communicate with a USB device.

To me, for an USB 2.0 external hard disk, purchasing a Black Caviar because of performance is wasting money. The Black has an average sequential read speed of 90 Mbytes/s. The Green clocks in at 70 Mbytes/s. E-SATA can support a maximum of 150 Mbytes/s.

Games are usually effected by the hard disks when first starting, loading, saving and level/scene transitions. Otherwise, they not much effected by the hard disks because they prefer to avoid the hard disk.

You have a few options:

• If you have the internal space, buy a new hard disk and install it as an internal.
• If you don't have the internal space and your current internal hard disk is pretty old, say smaller than 500 GB, consider switching it with the external hard disk. Modern TB sized hard disks tend to be much better performers but will be bottlenecked by the USB 2.0 interface. Warranty might be an issue to look out for.
• Continue as you had originally planned.

As for the comment that WD Green is not a gamer's HDD, it isn't strictly true. My definition of gamers include casual gamers and small games.

• Current big games will still get plenty of performance out of it. Older big games might not have an appreciable difference. Small, simple or rather old games will not benefit.
• The first 20% of the Green can hit 90 Mbyte/s sequential read speed, which is equal to the Black's average. (First 20% of the Black can hit 105 Mbytes/s.)
• If your current gaming hard disk is smaller than 500 GB, it will get pwned by the Green.

If you're on a tight budget, prefer to save money or don't mind not having as much performance, the Green will serve just fine for most people. If you don't mind spending that extra RM 50 to get all the frills, then the Black is generally the better choice.

This post has been edited by everling: Aug 12 2009, 12:07 AM

Why buy a second internal hard disk when your 640 GB still has 40% free space?

When it comes to external hard disks, there's only three main connectors: USB 2.0, e-SATA and FireWire (a bit rare).

USB 2.0 has a data transfer bottleneck of about 30 MB/s - performance will be poor no matter how much money you throw at it. e-SATA has a bottleneck of about 150 MB/s. I forgot FireWire's bandwidth, but it is higher than USB 2.0. FireWire and e-SATA externals are superior here.

Edit: You'll need to have either a FireWire port or an e-SATA port to support either FireWire or e-SATA devices. Most current motherboards or laptops support these, but not older ones. It is possible to buy expansion cards to add support for older desktop motherboards, but they'll cost you extra.

Other considerations are power supply. 2.5" USB external hard disks can run entirely off that USB cable, any FireWire device could potentially run off that FireWire cable, but anything else requires a separate power cable.

RAID is not related to SATA. SATA is a connector and RAID is treating multiple hard disks as one.

RAID doesn't really apply to simple externals. The best place to get them is with a NAS or a SAN (they're actually the same thing - some network attached storage). As RAID requires more than one hard disk, they're not cheap.



This post has been edited by everling: Sep 28 2009, 05:12 PM

There are:

• SATA 1.5 Gbit/s aka SATA1 (max 150 MB/s)
• SATA 3 Gbit/s aka SATA2 (max 300 MB/s)
• SATA 6 Gbit/s (max 600 MB/s)
• e-SATA (same as SATA 1.5 Gbit/s or max 150 MB/s)

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_ATA

Only e-SATA is usable with external hard disks.

However, it may be possible to remove the hard disk from the external casing and put it in your desktop or laptop (depending on size).

On another note, most hard disks have a sustained read/write that is much slower than 150 MB/s. The 7200 RPM WD 1 TB Caviar Black for instance maxes out at ~110 MB/s, quite a distance from the 150 MB/s theoretical limit of e-SATA.

Only the SSDs need SATA 3 Gbit/s to perform well and they're best used as internal drives because they're wasted as externals.

I assume that your current Seagate is not a single 500 GB platter, so their performance is likely to be a lot more slower than any decent 1 TB and above. You can confirm by running some hard disk benchmarks. For comparison, the WD 1 TB Black maxes out at ~110 MB/s and Seagate's 2 TB monster maxes out at ~140 MB/s.

If your current hard disk is substantially slower, I recommend splitting your new 1 TB into two or more partitions, then use the first partition for the OS and the other(s) for storage. The overall performance improvement should be worth it.

It means that your 500 GB 7200.11 hard disk uses two 250 GB platters to make that 500 GB capacity. It is not related to your logical partitions.

The bigger the capacity per platter, the higher your data density is and thus better read/write performance. 500 GB per platter will outperform 250 GB per platter significantly but all hard disks using 250 GB platters will perform generally the same regardless the capacity.

Sorry, I had forgotten about it dying.

Depending on why it is dieing, you might get more of your data quickly by copying the folders or files one by one or by groups, aborting a copy if it's not progressing reasonably; sometimes the problem are with a few files. After copying most of your stuff out, go back to the problem folders or files. Also, if the hard disk becomes unresponsive after a while, it might be because its too hot. In that case, try turning your computer off for a while until the hard disk is back to room temperature or cooler and then try to copy the remainder.

The average speed ranges between 60 MB/s to 220 MB/s, depending on your SATA storage device.

Yes, it's meaningless information because you didn't give enough details.

You need to know your hard disk model first, then you can either google for information or ask us about it.

Burst speed is meaningless, because it only last for less than a second. Sustained throughput rate and random read/write are far more important.


You could try using a benchmark tool. HD Tune and HD Tach are popular benchmarkers.


If your computer supports eSATA, then you should get an external with eSATA support. USB 2.0 has a 30 MB/s bottleneck, so no point getting an expensive hard disk for it - any decent one will do.

At least you should be able to replace one to one on the spot. Much better than waiting a few weeks for the RMA.

Breaking in the new hard drive? Made a mistake and did a full format twice? It doesn't really matter as read/writes on platters is free and doesn't hurt the life span in any significant way. Doing a full format on SSDs twice otoh is just bad.

It's possible to defrag, but you'll lose a tiny bit of lifespan and it's not needed. Heavy fragmentation causes a performance drop in HDDs, which can go below 1 MB/s read/write. SSDs with good controllers (Intel or Indilinx) won't notice it, and Intel's will maintain random read/write at 60 MB/s.

Any idea on how much an Intel G2 160 GB costs and where we can get one?

Not afaik.

Why is the longer warranty attractive? Anyhow, I too would recommend the Green. You don't need the tiny bit of extra performance, it draws much less power and is normally cooler.

True, but I was wondering how much cheaper the 160 GB is on a RM per GB basis.

I think you can send it to the shop for RMA.

If it's still accessible, you should backup all your data. There's a good chance, despite telling them otherwise, that they'll simply give you back another empty replacement hard disk because they think it's too troublesome to fix it.

If you have any personal files, you may want to securely delete them. Windows doesn't have the ability to securely delete files. CCleaner provides the feature for free, but you'll need to turn it on to at least 'Simple Overwrite' in the 'Options' > 'Settings'.

I wouldn't recommend moving your user profile. One of the more noticeable issues to me is that it takes forever for my Start Menu to list the shortcuts available from a cold start. SSDs excel with thousands of little files or shortcuts.

A simpler solution would be to simply not store anything big within your user profile. Be anal about it. If it was big or worth keeping, it should be stored outside of the OS partition anyway. And run CCleaner or similar programs, say once a week, to keep the rubbish out of your temporary folders.

Not in no time. It may take many months before all that shortcuts and tiny temporary files start to have a noticeable negative effect. By then, you'll have your TRIM command and the utilities to clean up older unTRIMed stuff.

I do hope CCleaner will be able to issue TRIM commands, if it doesn't already use the OS APIs that would automatically calls it. My only concern is wear leveling making secure erase ineffective.