Getting a new hard disk: Appreciate some advice

Hi,

Yesterday, out of the blue my Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 failed s.m.a.r.t. It's my second hard disk failure with this particular series (experienced the firmware bug failure 8 months ago), so I've decided to buy a new hdd or sdd to use as a primary drive and use my soon-to-be replaced seagate as a secondary.

I'm not up-to-date with the latest pc tech, so would love some advice.

Here's a list of the available sdds/hdds at my local store, prices are in AUD$

SDDs

Intel 330 120gb $152

Intel 520 120gb $182

Kingston HyperX SATA3 120gb $175

Kingston Sandforce2 SVP20053 120 gb $145

Patriot Pyro 120gb $127

Patriot Wildfire 120gb $199

Sandisk G25 ultra 120gb $135

Sandisk G25 Extreme 120 $129

HDDs

Western Digital Green 2TB $118

WD Blue 1TB $99

WD Black 1TB/2TB $129/$199

Seagate SATA3 1TB/2TB $95/119

Seagate SV35 1TB $135

My PC is several years old, so I'm worried if my current build is compatible with what's available. Here are my current specs:

Intel Q9550 2.83 GHz

Asus 9800GTX Dark Knight

Asus P5Q Pro XFire motherboard

2 x Kingston 6400/800 2 GB DDR2 RAM

Aerocool Horsepower 750w PSU

Besides playing FM, I use my pc for internet browsing/email and being a phd student I work from home quite a bit and use softwares such as MatLab, 'R' frequently. I can afford all listed hard disks, but I do not want to overpay for something that is too high-end for my use.

Your advice is greatly appreciated!

No disk is "too high end". The HDD is the biggest bottleneck in a modern PC - it is here that speed and responsiveness takes the worst hit.

So buy a SSD. You will appreciate the speed and responsiveness straight away, it's like getting a new, much speedier PC.

Reliability- and longevity-wise I would go for one of the Intel's. I am not sure, but I don't think your current motherboard comes with SATA 3 ports, so the 330 should be sufficient - you won't be able to take full use of the speed of the 520. Put your OS and your programs and games on the SSD, and put everything that's just for "keeping" on the old harddisk.

For FM, there's an advantage with SSD, apart from the general speeding up of loading and saving of data, the writing and reading of data: The slowing down that usually occurs after a number of seasons, specially if you play with quite a few legues and big database - is greatly reduced, or vanished.

Thanks for the advice. Yeah, I only see SATA cables..

You should really try Hitachi

Hitachi are good

Hitachi are good

Only hitachi available at my store is the deskstar 7200 500gb/1tb/2tb going for $85/108/139. Any good?

Hey there, not trying to overtake the thread, just I have a HDD/SSD question too.

I've had my Laptop for 3 years now and have considered ditching it for a brand spanking new high end laptop (since I want portability) and have looked at many different options from built systems to using sites like pcspecialist etc... This would obviously be expensive! (but I have the money to spend if I want)

Anyway, there's also a different option

Getting an SSD!? Although I'm not sure if the difference will be enough for me, So I wanted to know if people reckon my current laptop would benefit/see enough of an improvement for FM*. (from having an SSD instead)

*obviously it would be better, but hopefully you know what I mean!

In FM(11) terms I always play my Career Save which is now in 2034(addicted!) so as you can Imagine with 21(2 on view-only) leagues loaded and 4 of the top leagues on full detail it can take a while to process the fixtures, and can sometimes make FM not respond(though I feel this is more noticeable because I play windowed mode and without that you wouldn't know it had frozen)

My laptops (G1Sn 1.0) spec:

Board: ASUSTeK Computer Inc. G1Sn 1.0

Bus Clock: 200 megahertz

Processor: T8300 2.40 gigahertz Intel Core2 Duo

Graphics card: NVIDIA GeForce 9500M GS

HDD: 160GB 7200RPM HDD

RAM: 4GB Crucial DDR2 PC2-6400 (2GB x 2)

My RAM is maxed out since that was something I upgraded about 2 years ago.

So my main concern about this laptop is the processor since I know that is key to processing fixtures(hence why I have looked at new laptops). I tend to get 2 games done in an hour now where as before I did 3 or possibly more but I can't remember. Also, it gets the lowest score in the windows experience index ratings by a point or two.

Therefore the Hard-Disk is pretty much the only thing left to upgrade since trying to upgrade the processor in a laptop is as we all know pointless mainly for cooling reasons.(my laptop gets hot enough enough already!!!)

So a quick search brings me to something like this http://www.aria.co.uk/SuperSpecials/Other+products/Corsair+Force+Series+3+V2+120GB+2.5"+SATA-III+Solid+State+Hard+Drive+?productId=45836

The read/write speeds are impressive but I don't know if its wasted in a 3 year old laptop. I think I'm right in saying the laptop must use Sata 2.0

So thats pretty much where I'm at!

Upgrading your old laptop with a SSD, just for FM? No. I wouldn't. The performance improvement would not be worth the cost

Upgrading with a SSD to get your old laptop to perform better, feel faster and snappier, in everyday use? Yes, I would. That new SSD can easily be transferred the day you buy a new computer too. And the performance boost would be worth the cost, imo.

Well I use it everyday for everything and have FM open pretty much everytime I turn it on... Thats one consideration I had, if it doesn't make enough of an impression on me, I could use it in a new laptop when I did decide to get one.

OZD made the best SSD a year ago. You should check out the prices on them too.

Depends on what you mean by "best". SSD's are allready on a level that you won't notice any difference between them, no matter what the speed spec lists says.

The most reliable SSD's however, I would say are the Intel's, the Samsung's and the Crucial's. One of the latest generation of one of these, and you can't go much wrong.

Hey there, not trying to overtake the thread, just I have a HDD/SSD question too.

I've had my Laptop for 3 years now and have considered ditching it for a brand spanking new high end laptop (since I want portability) and have looked at many different options from built systems to using sites like pcspecialist etc... This would obviously be expensive! (but I have the money to spend if I want)

Anyway, there's also a different option

Getting an SSD!? Although I'm not sure if the difference will be enough for me, So I wanted to know if people reckon my current laptop would benefit/see enough of an improvement for FM*. (from having an SSD instead)

*obviously it would be better, but hopefully you know what I mean!

In FM(11) terms I always play my Career Save which is now in 2034(addicted!) so as you can Imagine with 21(2 on view-only) leagues loaded and 4 of the top leagues on full detail it can take a while to process the fixtures, and can sometimes make FM not respond(though I feel this is more noticeable because I play windowed mode and without that you wouldn't know it had frozen)

My laptops (G1Sn 1.0) spec:

Board: ASUSTeK Computer Inc. G1Sn 1.0

Bus Clock: 200 megahertz

Processor: T8300 2.40 gigahertz Intel Core2 Duo

Graphics card: NVIDIA GeForce 9500M GS

HDD: 160GB 7200RPM HDD

RAM: 4GB Crucial DDR2 PC2-6400 (2GB x 2)

My RAM is maxed out since that was something I upgraded about 2 years ago.

So my main concern about this laptop is the processor since I know that is key to processing fixtures(hence why I have looked at new laptops). I tend to get 2 games done in an hour now where as before I did 3 or possibly more but I can't remember. Also, it gets the lowest score in the windows experience index ratings by a point or two.

Therefore the Hard-Disk is pretty much the only thing left to upgrade since trying to upgrade the processor in a laptop is as we all know pointless mainly for cooling reasons.(my laptop gets hot enough enough already!!!)

So a quick search brings me to something like this http://www.aria.co.uk/SuperSpecials/Other+products/Corsair+Force+Series+3+V2+120GB+2.5"+SATA-III+Solid+State+Hard+Drive+?productId=45836

The read/write speeds are impressive but I don't know if its wasted in a 3 year old laptop. I think I'm right in saying the laptop must use Sata 2.0

So thats pretty much where I'm at!

firstly... that ram is slow ... its DDR2... you can cheaply and effectively upgrade to DDR3 (if its compatible.. check)

secondly... SSD wont make a discernible difference over a long term game.. you're correct, its the cpu that will bottleneck this...

your SSD will only help with the swapping and frankly, although spectacular when you first get it as your lappy will boot up in super speeds etc.. but as a i said.. getting an SSD as a primary drive for a game is just not sensible..

i would much rather spend 500 odd notes on a new machine which is worth upgrading.. as your current setup is old architecture/hardware and wont be sustainable.

firstly... that ram is slow ... its DDR2... you can cheaply and effectively upgrade to DDR3 (if its compatible.. check)

Well, I wouldn't buy an SSD for gaming and everyday applications either - in particular not when being on a budtget. But it would likely still be a much more sensible investment than switching from DDR2 RAM to DDR3: http://www.tomshardware.de/Core2Duo-ubertakten-DDR2-speicher-DDR3,testberichte-239899-15.html. Whilst faster RAM makes systems slightly to modestly faster depending on the application, gaming applications are bottlenecked by video cards (FM not in the slightest) and central processing units (very much so in this case). There isn't anywhere he can go in the future from his Core 2 Quad, but it should still be perfectly fine for FM as is, unless he expects the machine to breeze though every compeition available in the database in full match details week in week out.

Besides, he just wants a new system drive, nothing else. If your point was telling him to save the money for an all together new PC in the forseeable future, if one is on the cards and planned, I concur though. The SSD will give him a quick system drive, but those 120 GB will get him nowhere. Buying an SSD means buying a replacement of his current drive on top of that as he won't have enough space available to do much of anything. Decisions, decisions!

Why are you talking about upgrading the RAM from DDR2 to DDR3? The modules wouldn't even fit since the notch is in a different place. The only viable thing left to upgrade is to an SSD. I think i could survive with 120GB since I only save my pics/music on my external drive anyways...

If I were to get an SSD I'm currently between

http://www.ebuyer.com/268693-corsair-120gb-force-3-ssd-cssd-f120gb3-bk-cssd-f120gb3-bk (same as the last one i posted but different site so cheaper)

and

http://www.ebuyer.com/268244-ocz-120gb-agility-3-ssd-agt3-25sat3-120g-agt3-25sat3-120g

£80 isn't really a lot

Or you might consider a Seagate Momentus XT hybrid.