Hard Drives... What is now reasonably priced but just behi..

Hey all!

I presently have 2 SATA HD's of 300 Gigs and 2 IDE HD's of 300 &
200-something Gig - and i can't tell the difference between the sppeds
of each. All are typical CompUSA/Best Buy WD Caviar or Maxtor units
and are 7200 with 4 or 8 meg buffers.

I'm gonna upgrade and spend a little extra this time. I don't want
the newest-high end (especially in price) HD's but I'd like what is
now reasonable in price and better than the advertised units in the
paper. What do I need to look for? Newegg has a WD Raptor that's
10,000 RPM 16MB Cache that's Serial ATA-150 for $200. 200 bones is
fine but it's only 150 Gigs! Yikes!!! I NEED capacity.

Any suggestions on fairly new tech and speed without getting soaked
for being the first one on your block to get the cutting edge stuff?

Thanks!!!!! And any "education" on HD's would be appreciated!

Thanks for your help!!!!

On Mon, 09 Jul 2007 21:31:43 -0700, nada.TakeThisOut@home.net wrote:

>Hey all!
>
>I presently have 2 SATA HD's of 300 Gigs and 2 IDE HD's of 300 &
>200-something Gig - and i can't tell the difference between the sppeds
>of each. All are typical CompUSA/Best Buy WD Caviar or Maxtor units
>and are 7200 with 4 or 8 meg buffers.
>
>I'm gonna upgrade and spend a little extra this time. I don't want
>the newest-high end (especially in price) HD's but I'd like what is
>now reasonable in price and better than the advertised units in the
>paper. What do I need to look for? Newegg has a WD Raptor that's
>10,000 RPM 16MB Cache that's Serial ATA-150 for $200. 200 bones is
>fine but it's only 150 Gigs! Yikes!!! I NEED capacity.
>
>Any suggestions on fairly new tech and speed without getting soaked
>for being the first one on your block to get the cutting edge stuff?

To be blunt, the answer is no. You want better performance
but that always entails spending more (if we rule out the
duds from any particular era and just focus on mainstream
performance vs a significant upgrade from that).
>
>Thanks!!!!! And any "education" on HD's would be appreciated!
>
>Thanks for your help!!!!


As always, define the budget and the required parameters
(capacity). From there, pick the most suited candidate.
FWIW, having both capacity and performance many people like
the Hitachi 1TB, though personally I'd prefer a larger # of
drives with fewer platters each, per same $$$, and some
people just think bigger is better so it's not so clear cut.
FWIW, I don't put any large drives in desktop systems
either, there's much to be said for having a RAID5 or at
least 1 across GbE and accepting some poerformance loss, as
these days DDR2 memory is dirt cheap and quite a lot can be
cached. IOW, hard drive performance is no substitute for
boatloads of main memory unless you do a lot of video
editing.