Hard drive choices - Now with solved drive letter assignment problem!

sesselpupser

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neema_t
Hey guys,

So I messed up and now I need a 2TB drive to replace the exFAT formatted (long story) one in my PC. I haven't bought any hard drives since 2010 and at the time the Hitachi Deskstar 7K2000 (which I currently have) was one of the best around, I imagine that's no longer the case but I can't really tell what I should be looking at instead. I wouldn't want anything slower than the drive I have but I don't want to pay way over the odds for the highest speed possible, I'd prefer reliability, but I also don't want to spend more than about £80 or thereabouts. Oh and the 2TB drive is where I keep my Steam library, that's why it needs to be NTFS; some games don't like the exFAT format but I have too much stuff to be able to move it to a different drive unless that drive is 2TB or higher (and empty)!

So in summary my requirement is a 3.5" hard drive with at least 2TB, 7,200rpm, respectable speed, decent reliability for about £80.

Seems to me like the choices are another Deskstar 7K2000, which I would be happy with, a Seagate Barracuda (but their rep for reliability was pretty poor when I was last buying drives, this may have changed in the last two years), a Samsung Spinpoint or Western Digital Caviar Black.

Also, SSDs: what's good right now? I've heard Samsung are making the best there is but that was a few months back. I'd quite like to get a 128GB for my Mac to boot from or a 256GB for my PC and put the 128GB I have (a Crucial M4, which I believe is SATA II when my PC can do III I think) in the Mac, that is if there's an easy way to clone a Windows drive without having to go through the hassle of reinstalling everything.

Oh, it may be useful to know that my motherboard in the PC is an ASUS P8Z68-V Pro and my Mac is a 2009 Mac Pro so it can't go faster than SATA II, unless you can get a PCIe SATA III controller or something. I think my PC has a SATA III controller though.

Cheers!
 
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WD Black are not needed.

A WD blue 3TB will be more than fine.
And you wont find a WD black 2TB for £80, but maybe a 1TB.
And you will have a hard time finding a 7200rpm 2TB+ drive for £80

A Western Digital WD Green 2TB (WD20EARX) will come around $105 or £70.
It is a SATA 3 but it will be fine and run at SATA 2 speeds.
 
Grayfox
WD Black are not needed.

A WD blue 3TB will be more than fine.
And you wont find a WD black 2TB for £80, but maybe a 1TB.
And you will have a hard time finding a 7200rpm 2TB+ drive for £80

A Western Digital WD Green 2TB (WD20EARX) will come around $105 or £70.
It is a SATA 3 but it will be fine and run at SATA 2 speeds.

Well that's weird, I'm absolutely certain my 7K2000 was £80 (roughly) two years ago, I remember being pleasantly surprised by how cheap it was! Damn. Well it's got to be 2TB but won't the Green (5,900rpm) be much slower than the 7K it's replacing? Unless, of course, I get a 5K drive, copy everything onto it, format the Hitachi and copy everything back then use the slow drive in my Mac as its only for media storage, no games.

A 2TB Seagate Barracuda 7200.14 is £76.43 on Scan, though... What's their reliability like nowadays?
 
Well that's weird, I'm absolutely certain my 7K2000 was £80 (roughly) two years ago, I remember being pleasantly surprised by how cheap it was! Damn.

That was before the Thailand floods made 500GB worth £70
WD.jpg

wd-thailand-floods7.jpg
 
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WD all the way. Have 12 of them running nearly 24/7, of all sizes (from 500gb to 3tb), with different speed and different versions.

The only one that broke is the one that fell down 3 times and the head was slightly bent.
 
Grayfox
That was before the Thailand floods made 500GB worth £70

Oh right, I (naively) thought that was all sorted out by now.

So, WD Caviar Green (5K) and Seagate whatever it was (7K) for the same price, which one do I go for? I mean I probably trust WD more than Seagate but the Seagate should be faster, right? But then the fact does remain that I don't need a fast drive in my Mac so I would probably be better off with the WD, it just means I have to shuffle the data off the exFAT Hitachi to the WD, format the Hitachi as NTFS, move the data back then put the WD in my Mac. I think that's what I'll do unless there's some reason not to?
 
Oh right, I (naively) thought that was all sorted out by now.

So, WD Caviar Green (5K) and Seagate whatever it was (7K) for the same price, which one do I go for? I mean I probably trust WD more than Seagate but the Seagate should be faster, right? But then the fact does remain that I don't need a fast drive in my Mac so I would probably be better off with the WD, it just means I have to shuffle the data off the exFAT Hitachi to the WD, format the Hitachi as NTFS, move the data back then put the WD in my Mac. I think that's what I'll do unless there's some reason not to?

They have started making new drives before the start of the year but they are still expensive due to it.

It cost about $55,000,000 to fix all the damage to each factory which was covered by their insurance so they are a little pricy to cover costs.
 
Seagate or Western Digital. You had good luck with a Deathstar and that's amazing.

I work as service manager for a small IT company. 95% of drives in our build servers/workstations are all seagate. The remaining 5% would be western digital. Usually only go with WD if there is a shortage of what I need for a specific build.

In 2011 I would estimate we put out over 124 new PCs running seagates and 1 western digital. Out of those 125 we had two failures. Both were seagate. One was DOA and the other failed around the 6 month mark, but gave enough warning through (Acronis Disk Monitor) that we were able to save any data that hadn't been backed up.

Seems that Hard drive prices won't go down until about 2014.
 
Seagate or Western Digital. You had good luck with a Deathstar and that's amazing.

I work as service manager for a small IT company. 95% of drives in our build servers/workstations are all seagate. The remaining 5% would be western digital. Usually only go with WD if there is a shortage of what I need for a specific build.

In 2011 I would estimate we put out over 124 new PCs running seagates and 1 western digital. Out of those 125 we had two failures. Both were seagate. One was DOA and the other failed around the 6 month mark, but gave enough warning through (Acronis Disk Monitor) that we were able to save any data that hadn't been backed up.

Seems that Hard drive prices won't go down until about 2014.

Well that's some pretty compelling information, I think I'll get the Barracuda! I don't think there's anything on my Deskstar that can't be readily downloaded again so really all I'll lose is a whole load of time and bandwidth but nothing vital. Touch wood...

Thank you all for your responses, much appreciated.
 
Samsung master race, my two 1TB F3 HD103SJs are still going strong two and a bit years after getting them and the 128GB 830 SSD in my new setup is mint as 👍 Pretty sure Samsung makes a 2TB 7200rpm now, a good while ago they had 2TB F4s but they were only 5400rpm...
 
24k and only a three year warranty? For the price of a damn nice "new" car, it should be lifetime lol
 
Samsung master race, my two 1TB F3 HD103SJs are still going strong two and a bit years after getting them and the 128GB 830 SSD in my new setup is mint as 👍 Pretty sure Samsung makes a 2TB 7200rpm now, a good while ago they had 2TB F4s but they were only 5400rpm...

Well there's this, but it's more expensive than the Seagate one I just bought and half the capacity. I'm starting to wonder if I bought a mislabelled product!
 
Thanks guys but I ordered the drive last night, settled on the Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 2TB. The only other 2TB drive that came close in price was the WD Green which, as terminator363 said, is no good.
 
Some say Seagate are crappy... But I have had an external 2TB drive for 2 years which is now an internal drive, along with another Seagate 7200 rpm 1TB. I haven't had any problems as of yet.
 
WD has a good one, and where i work WD gives us permission to open external drives to get customer data off without voiding warranty.
 
So I got my Seagate drive, installed it, copied everything across and it's all working and good and that's nice. However, predictably, I now have a slight problem! Basically, as I had to install the drive alongside the drive it was replacing and had to copy stuff manually as the drive I was copying from was exFAT (hence cloning wasn't what I wanted as I need NTFS), I had to assign it a different letter, of course.

Now, when I go to Computer Management and try to assign the new drive (E:) the old drive's letter (D:), it says the parameter is incorrect. As far as I can tell this is because the new drive is being used for the page file, as that was the reason given for preventing me from unmounting the drive. So now I'm stumped, as usual.

Any ideas please?
 
Won't you eventually remove the old drive? Then you can re-assign your new drive to whatever letter that old one is using?

Do you have 3 drives installed? or just two? If there are 3 (other being an OS drive) move your paging file there, get rid of it on your new drive, then change your old drive letter to something obscure, then change your new drive to what your old drive was.

That make sense?
 
Won't you eventually remove the old drive? Then you can re-assign your new drive to whatever letter that old one is using?

Do you have 3 drives installed? or just two? If there are 3 (other being an OS drive) move your paging file there, get rid of it on your new drive, then change your old drive letter to something obscure, then change your new drive to what your old drive was.

That make sense?

Sorry, yeah, should have said: I copied all the stuff across and removed the old drive, then verified that the games that weren't working on D previously worked on E (they all did, so that's good). Then I deleted the mini-Steam library I had on C for those three games plus Arma II (for better performance from the SSD).

Then after some Googling I found out how to move the page file, moved it to C, rebooted, changed E to D, moved the page file back, rebooted again aaaaaaaaaand! Steam no longer works. It said there's a problem with my installation so I tried deleting all but steamapps and Steam.exe, no dice. Then I moved the steamapps folder, renamed it then uninstalled Steam properly with the installer, then reinstalled it back to D. Now it says I'm a bad man for trying to use it in compatibility mode even though I'm not, none of the compatibility tab boxes are checked. I'm tempted to just click 'cancel' and ignore the warning forever but I might try a reboot first.

As much as I doubt I'll have to, I really hope this doesn't mean I have to reinstall each and every one of my games as that would take some time. Sorry if this was a really inarticulate post but I spent all day trying to get a server up and running, given how much of an idiot I've proven myself to be in this thread alone you can imagine how well that's going. Very tired.

Ah, got it. Had to delete a registry entry as per these instructions. Now I'm copying my steamapps folder back into place... Funny how it only took a second to move to where I wanted it to go but takes ages to move back.

Finally, it's done. Everything is as I'd expect, listed in that sort of mustard colour waiting for me to launch it so it can instantly 'download' and be fine again, I hope. Problem probably solved!
 
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