Hard Drives

[Col_StaR]

I've never seen those really, heard a bit about that they had a high failure percentage compared to the slower HDD's though :S

Well, yeah. When you're driving a car, you're more likely to crash going 80 mph than 40.
Now that SSD's are so prevalent, though, I wonder if WD plans to phase out the Raptors since they're technically obsolete.

 

[MoLoToV]

Well, yeah. When you're driving a car, you're more likely to crash going 80 mph than 40.
Now that SSD's are so prevalent, though, I wonder if WD plans to phase out the Raptors since they're technically obsolete.

Ohwell, that sounds very logical indeed. I also just compared the two, of-course a SSD takes the lead with the writing speed, but there are 10.000 RPM HDD's out there with 1.8 TB space for a fair price, I'm sure there are a lot of people who'd like to have a SSD for their windows etc. and consider 1.8 TB more then enough space for their files, from what I've read I'm pretty sure there is atleast a little future for the 10.000 RPM HDD's.

 

[Col_StaR]

Ohwell, that sounds very logical indeed. I also just compared the two, of-course a SSD takes the lead with the writing speed, but there are 10.000 RPM HDD's out there with 1.8 TB space for a fair price, I'm sure there are a lot of people who'd like to have a SSD for their windows etc. and consider 1.8 TB more then enough space for their files, from what I've read I'm pretty sure there is atleast a little future for the 10.000 RPM HDD's.

Oh really? Dang. In that case, it'd be a good compromise between a standard 7200 rpm drive with large sizes, and an SSD with a small size. But at prices like THIS and THIS, I'd probably suggest a two-drive combination- one small SSD and one large hard drive- for most users. Maybe for servers, I'd suggest picking up a 10000 rpm drive, but probably not due to the reliability issues.

I kind of hope 10000 rpm drives become the new standard for hard drives, so long as they improve on the reliability issues; either that, or SSD's become larger and cheaper to make hard drives obsolete altogether, which seems to be coming true year by year.

 

[smashmaster]

Yes, this too. Only reason you'd ever use 5,200 rpm hard drive is for big storage of something you don't use often, like media files on a home network or messes of documents for a business.

A good comparison video of 5200 rpm speeds vs 7600 rpm speeds: LINK.

MoLoToV : ever tried one of the 10,000 rpm drives, the WD Raptors? Those things were pricey, but blazing fast. They were SSD's before SSD's; too bad they're now basically obsolete due to the improvements and prevalence of SSD's, but they're still cool.


That really depends on what you want to do with your hard drive, and how you want to configure it.

The way you described the set-up in your original post, you planned on keeping your old hard drive that already has Windows on it and simply add this drive as an additional drive to it. This means that you'll have your old drive that your computer will boot Windows from, and then the new second drive that will hold all of your additional data.
This is the easiest set-up, since you're simply adding a new drive on top of an already functioning one. All of your programs, data, and Windows functions will not be changed since we haven't changed the old drive. Just slap in the new hardware and run Disk Management to format the drive (thus turning raw storage space into storage space Windows can allocate data to), and you're done.

The only time you would need to reload Windows is if you wanted to have Windows on your new drive instead of your old drive. I would suggest this if there's a definitive speed boost between your old drive and your new drive; if you do find that you can upgrade performance by using SATA III with a new drive, I would put my OS on that drive. It's more inconvenient, but you'll get performance boosts in the long run.
That's a bit more of a complicated process, and I don't think that's what you want to do, so I'll just leave it at that.

Thanks so much! My current drive is 7200 rpm so no I don't want to switch windows to the new drive.