New Hard Drive Needed. Any Advice?

[OverdrivePrime]

It's been just about 5 years, and so my hard drive has decided that it doesn't like working anymore. I'm looking at replacing it with something much larger, since I've recently gotten into digital movie work. Right now, a full Terabye is a bit pricey for me, but I've been able to find a good lookin' 750MB for about a $150 - 180, depending on where you look.

My requirements - I need a SATA drive. My computer is one of the early Mac G5 dual-1.7 towers, but I don't think that really matters. I'm not looking to replace the computer itself until 2009.

Anyway, I don't play video games (see Mac), and mostly do graphics work or digital editing. Speed and seek times are moderately important, but I'm primarily concerned with reliability, and to a lesser extent, noise and heat.

I'm currently strongly considering a Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 750 MB (http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/06/29/seagate_750_gb_barracuda_enters_the_big_league/), which seems to have gotten some pretty solid reviews.

*looks around a little longer*

Hmm... Western Digital's Caviar offering looks even better. I'm lookin' at a price of 181.39. (http://www.eworldsale.com/wd-750gb-wd7500aaks-stat2-16mb-7200rpm-hdd_5905_17012.html) Maybe as low as 169.99 but the seller looks a tad sketchy. (http://www.directron.com/wd7500aaks.html)

Reviews seem to put the WD Caviar slightly above the Seagate 7200.10 series, though I'm wondering if I should go for Seagate's 7200.11, but with a 750 or 500 instead of a big T.

Hmm... a 500 GB 7200.11 is just $125 at NewEgg (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822148288&ATT=22-148-288&CMP=OTC-Froogle&cm_mmc=OTC-Froogle-_-Hard+Drives-_-Seagate-_-22148288), but the lowest I can find the 7200.11 750 for is about $210.


Any suggestions / advice?

[The J Pizzel]

We use Seagates at work. We have 4 250 gig SCSI that are raided together. The speed is pretty good but I had to replace them once about 3 years after buying them. We put hella long productions on ours though. And we have a huge turnoever. We're constantly dumping video in and out our system.

The only big problem I had with them is that they don't delete video that well. I found myself "defragmenting" way more than I should.

IMO, Seagates are good for home editing and light production (comercials, music videos, PSA's). If your planning on creating larger scale productions I'd go with something else.

I'll go check on what we put in the VideoToaster (VT4), those are some great drives.

Be back in a sec.

JP

[Greebo]

Make sure your criteria are rotation speed, seek time, THEN size.

Get the best of the above you can, then go for size.

[mause]

if you buy a hard drive of 1 tetrabyte It may take too long to respond

I suport 4 hard drives of 250 gb each

[Greebo]

if you buy a hard drive of 1 tetrabyte It may take too long to respond

I suport 4 hard drives of 250 gb each
The time to respond is based on seek time and rotation, not size.

Buffering capacity also has an effect...

Size tells you only what it can store.

[BugFix]

Make sure your criteria are rotation speed, seek time, THEN size.

Get the best of the above you can, then go for size.

That's pretty terrible advice in the general case. Performance numbers are almost never critical requirements. Storage needs, on the other hand, are always 100% inflexible. The fastest drive in the world will do you no good if it doesn't fit your data.

And even performance for storage isn't usually limiting for desktop applications. It affects things like boot time, which you might care about. Some games are limited by level load times. Program startup is usually seek-limited, but most people don't care too much about how long that takes.

Honestly, drives are drives. To the OP: if you're at the point of reading reviews, you're more than competent to make your own decisions. The only real thing I look for is reports of "bad batches" with high failure rates.

[Greebo]

That's pretty terrible advice in the general case. Performance numbers are almost never critical requirements. Storage needs, on the other hand, are always 100% inflexible. The fastest drive in the world will do you no good if it doesn't fit your data.

And even performance for storage isn't usually limiting for desktop applications. It affects things like boot time, which you might care about. Some games are limited by level load times. Program startup is usually seek-limited, but most people don't care too much about how long that takes.

Honestly, drives are drives. To the OP: if you're at the point of reading reviews, you're more than competent to make your own decisions. The only real thing I look for is reports of "bad batches" with high failure rates.
Note what the OP said he does:
"Anyway, I don't play video games (see Mac), and mostly do graphics work or digital editing. Speed and seek times are moderately important, but I'm primarily concerned with reliability, and to a lesser extent, noise and heat."

To each their own, but in my own experience of doing some video work, the drive response time is critical.

You can get VERY fast half TB drives, but if you go for a full TB, its harder to find the fastest models.

[Dispozition]

If speed is what you want, use a solid state drive. Problem is, you want size, ruling these out. They're pretty much a normal hard drive, but they don't use discs, they use solid data encryption thingies...I'm not totally sure on the details, but they're a hell of a lot faster then disc hard drives. Thing is you can only get them at about a 150gb maximum capacity and they're decently expensive.