• New HDD(s) wanted, no idea what to try
    9 replies, posted
I'm using an HP Pavilion p6511f as a prebuilt setup. The only piece I've put in is a PNY NVidia GeForce 210 from an older PC. There is support software that came installed on the computer, nothing that I've had any trouble with, and in fact relied on at one point. (some thing that required a bugcheck to fix itself) Today the Hardware Diagnostic had run its monthly test and returned an error for the drive, HD512-2W (SMART Short Test failed) I've looked it up and many of the results are having to do with it being a warning for imminent drive failure. Now, I turn to you, Facepunch. What kind of hard drive would you recommend I get? I'm looking for at least a terabyte to pass by on, as well as a $50-150 price range looking at some products Supposedly RAIDs are the best way to go, so either 2 500gb's or 2 1tb's will be fine for me? I had been using the computer for just about every day for the past three years now, so it's no surprise if the hard drive is starting to go out. So, another requirement would be durability. How long would the HD's last?
RAID is a mixed bag- depends on your motherboard support and if you want to spend the extra dosh on a 10k spinny hd. IMO you should get a 128 gb ssd (Samsung 840 pro is a nice one) and a 1 tb spinny- a seagate or something in the $80 range. Total would be ~ $200 for both
[url]http://pcpartpicker.com/part/seagate-internal-hard-drive-st1000dm003[/url] It is faster and just as reliable than the very expensive WD Blacks. And I would not recommend going RAID. It saps your CPU power unless you have a RAID card, which they are very expensive.
[QUOTE=H8Entitlement;44085281]RAID is a mixed bag- depends on your motherboard support and if you want to spend the extra dosh on a 10k spinny hd. IMO you should get a 128 gb ssd (Samsung 840 pro is a nice one) and a 1 tb spinny- a seagate or something in the $80 range. Total would be ~ $200 for both[/QUOTE] I've been curious as to how I would use an SSD/HDD mix, would I just be putting the OS on the SSD and everything else on the hard disk? The Barracudas have been a common recommendation, so that's almost solid. I am wondering if there's any other HDD's (and SSD's?) I can compare them to
Pretty much you install most of your Operating System and most of your regular programs on the SSD, and then use the HDD for storing anything that is either convenient to put onto the HDD (Images, Music, Games, Videos) or anything that is too large to put onto the SSD, such as Steam (Or other similar things, It's recommended to install Steam on the HDD), and then you can either use Symbolic Links or steam's built in feature to install a specific game onto the SSD if you wish that game to have much faster load times (Either because it's very, very slow on your HDD, or because you play it very, very often) I've had an SSD for a while now, and with 4-5 large games on it, I'm still at only 118GB/220GB capacity, and instantly restarting and booting into my computer is super nice. (As is installing Dragon Age Origins on it, holy shit that game's load times were so slow on an HDD).
I'd recommend a 1-2TB barracuda and a 120GB-250GB Samsung 840 EVO, depending on how much you can afford of each. An SSD is an astronomical difference from a HDD, so there's no reason not to get it if you can afford it. Install steam on the SSD but games on the harddrive by making a separate steam library on the harddrive, not all on the harddrive.
Some games don't give you the option to install it on a seperate drive, thus you'd have to use junctions to move it to the HDD if it's too large for your SSD and doesn't support the feature, and when you only have the 120 or so GB, if you do very much gaming at all, you'll most likely have more games on your HDD than SSD, so it's kind of make more sense for that to be the default.
[QUOTE=Levelog;44085290][url]http://pcpartpicker.com/part/seagate-internal-hard-drive-st1000dm003[/url] It is faster and just as reliable than the very expensive WD Blacks. And I would not recommend going RAID. It saps your CPU power unless you have a RAID card, which they are very expensive.[/QUOTE] I went looking at the site, but I don't think the motherboard can use 6gb/s SATA. I did find this, though, and it looks like a pretty nice buy [url]http://pcpartpicker.com/part/seagate-internal-hard-drive-stbd2000101[/url]
[QUOTE=lNloruzenchi;44094791]I went looking at the site, but I don't think the motherboard can use 6gb/s SATA. I did find this, though, and it looks like a pretty nice buy [url]http://pcpartpicker.com/part/seagate-internal-hard-drive-stbd2000101[/url][/QUOTE] Not bad. Also, it can use a SATA 3 drive, you just will get SATA 2 speeds. Also [url]http://pcpartpicker.com/p/1svna[/url] fits in budget, but if you don't have SATA 3, a lot of the SSD's performance is lost.
Alright, thank you all for clearing it up!
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