Which hard drive?

I have recently upgraded my PC from media center pc to gaming pc after I have been away from pc games for a year or so. My current component list looks like this:Q6600@3GHz2GB DDR2 800@832MHzAMD4870(not overclocked yet)Cheapest 160GB i could find a year ago, made by Hitachi, it's SATA at least. :roll:I have recently loaded both Crysis and FSX and have had major issues with both. It will take a while to load a level and then everything is smooth as anything up until the point it needs more textures etc. The it grinds to a complete hault while my hard drive goes hell for leather for 30 seconds or so and then stops, at which point silky framerates return.I am also experiencing slow downs in Windows Vista whenever the hard drive is accessed frequently. My question is: would upgrading the hard drive remedy the problem, and if so what can you recommend? So far I have looked at a VelociRaptor but that's a little out of my price range. What's the fastest non Raptor drive out there?Many ThanksWhich hard drive?
1TB SAMSUNG HD103UJ HDDWhich hard drive?
Ah the F1, I have read reviews about that, supposed to be a nice drive, do you have any personal experience with the drive or is it just a cursory Google search?
I have 1 in this machine and 1 in my media center box. I wouldn't use any other drive in a desktop.
Thanks very much Cell you have been a great help, payday in two days, if I remember I'll update the thread to let people know if it cured the issue.
It sounds like your HD may actually be going bad. Does it sound normal? You might want to run a low level diagnostic on it if you haven't already. Are you saying games grind to a halt during a level (non-loading screen) when it hits the hard drive? Also, 4GB of RAM would likely improve FSX and Crysis as well.
Speedfan reports A'OK on the drive front and apart from the sound of it reading it doesn't sound unbalanced or really much different to the day I got it. Yep, that's exactly what I am saying; happily walking along and it tries to load some more scenery textures in the background(particularly noticeable on FSX as autogen popup) or a scripted event and the whole thing just stutters and then stops until the hard drive stops again. I will look into getting an extra few gig as it's cheap enough to take a punt.
Unfortunately a lot of hard drives are just slow. Seagate I'm looking at you!
They are not so slow that he should be seeing what he is seeing. And not that Seagate drives are particularly slower than any other similar class drive. I would download Seagates diagnotic utility (needs to be burned to cd or usb or something that can boot) and see if it comes up with anything.
Ah yes Seagate. Brilliantly reliable but slow and noisy. I've never had a Seagate fail on me but they have always been lacking that edge and I always felt that they were the bottleneck in my computers. I switched to WD for a bit and now it looks like I'm switching to Samsung. It's true what a reviewer said though, hard drives are one of the few things where brand always matters regardless of how much data there is in front of you to tell you that the drive is inferior lol.
If you compare the Seagate 7200.11 1TB with the Samsung you'll see an average difference in read speeds of 12MB/s and at max speeds it's closer to 19. I've owned both drives and I can definitely tell the difference betweent hem.
Gee that's a hefty old difference. How quiet is the Samsung F1 you have?
Reasonably quiet; I can't hear the 1 in this desktop at all. The media center box has a thinner case though and if the room is completely free of noise I can sometimes hear the drive.
Not a problem, as long as it doesn't sound like a freight train that's good enough for me. Well, off to play FSX for a bit, thanks for all your assistance.
[QUOTE=''tautitan123'']Ah yes Seagate. Brilliantly reliable but slow and noisy. I've never had a Seagate fail on me but they have always been lacking that edge and I always felt that they were the bottleneck in my computers. I switched to WD for a bit and now it looks like I'm switching to Samsung. It's true what a reviewer said though, hard drives are one of the few things where brand always matters regardless of how much data there is in front of you to tell you that the drive is inferior lol.[/QUOTE] I'd take reliable over speed any day. I have seen so many WDs fail i'd never use one again, even if whatever was causing the failures is no longer the case...
[QUOTE=''Captain__Tripps'']I'd take reliable over speed any day. I have seen so many WDs fail i'd never use one again, even if whatever was causing the failures is no longer the case...[/QUOTE]



Hard drive technology changes all the time. It's best to read up on the current technology and then make your mind up rather than being stuck in your ways for no real reason other than brand loyalty.
I have no brand loyalty, just one anti-brand.. lol And I still see way too many WD failures on recent drives. (in a server situation, on a very unbusy server no less)
I manage servers myself at work and have heaps of RAIDed hot swappable drives. I've never used any brand except Seagate at the server level. I've had a few drives crash but TBH who cares when you've got them RAIDed and hot swappable?
I thoguht the Samsung Spinpoint was one of the fastest drives out there at the 7200 rps range. Raptors are 10,000 rps and they are even making consumer drives now that run at 15,000 rps. For my first build I plan on getting a WD caviar se16 which is just as fast as the spinpoint.If you get the se16 just make sure you get the 640GB or the 1000GB since they have differences than those SE16s that are under.
Well, RAID can fail for one, or you could have two failures at once... plus you have to rebuild your RAID if a drive fails. I had seen 2,3 or maybe more WD 500GB ''RAID'' drives fail in around a 6-8 month period.