- 9,046
- United Kingdom
- 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!
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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