eTeknix Christmas Hardware Buying Guide

The best Storage Drives for Christmas

When it comes to buying hard drives these days it really isn’t as simple as which drive has the best performance. There is an increasing diversion of mechanical hard drives primarily being for storage of media, games and music whilst a solid state drive stores the operating system and frequently accessed programmes or files. Lets take a look at mechanical drives first.

Best 500GB Mechanical Drive

If you are in the market for a hard drive, the lowest entry point we think is 500GB for a desktop system. Any amount smaller than that is not really worth the money. Samsung have been a particularly successful manufacturer of hard drives and the spinpoint series has been a great success. We would say at the 500GB level the Hitachi Deskstar 500GB 7200RPM drive and the Samsung Spinpoint F3 7200RPM drive offer really solid performance for the £70/£75 price tag.

We would recommend: Samsung Spinpoint F3

Best 1TB Mechanical Drive

1TB drives have inflated beyond recognition rising from around £35 to £80 for the cheapest drive now. We would say in the 1TB price range you have two decisions you can make. Firstly, you can go for a 1TB ‘Green Drive’, the cheapest of which we found to be the Seagate Barracuda Green 1TB drive coming in at £82. This is an ideal drive for storage of media, games and music but if you intended to use a 1TB drive as your boot drive (as most people would do since a solid state drive is still expensive) then we would argue that you should go for a 7200RPM drive. And again  we feel Samsung wins here, their 1TB Spinpoint F3 drive has read/write speeds which are superior to most other mechanical drives on the market (it performs faster than some hybrid drives) and yet this drive is one of the cheapest 7200RPM 1TB drives on the market coming in at £93. Even if you weren’t intending to use this as your boot drive we think an extra £10 for a much more responsive drive is well worth the investment.

We would recommend: Samsung Spinpoint F3

Best 2TB Mechanical Drive

Chances are if you are investing in a 2TB drive you really do need a lot of storage and you probably won’t be booting from the drive. And that really is a good thing since you cannot pick up a fast 7200 RPM 2TB drive for less than around the £150 mark. The best one we could find was the Hitachi Deskstar 2TB 7200RPM drive at a staggering £145. But there is a much better deal to be had, so good in fact we would say if you were planning on getting yourself a 1TB green drive, scrap that idea altogether. Samsung offers a 2TB Spinpoint F4 5400RPM drive for just £99, meaning you can double up capacity for just £17.

We would recommend: Samsung Spinpoint F4 

Best SATA II SSD

Most of us still use a SATA II connection. So it makes sense to buy a SATA II solid state drive instead of a SATA III one which would be bandwidth constricted. We think the ‘ideal’ size in relation to price (if there ever was one) is 128GB. That way you have adequate room for your operating system and some frequently accessed programs. At the 128GB mark there are a couple of good value contenders in our opinion. The OCZ Vertex 2E offers very good read/write speeds of 285/275 mb/s and comes in at a shade over £1 per GB with a price of £130. But we think the Sandisk Ultra 128GB drive is better value and tends to have more stock as well. Costing £126 for 128GB of SSD storage with practically identical speeds (280/270 mb/s) to the OCZ Vertex drive this really is a fantastic deal.

We would recommend: Sandisk Ultra 128GB SSD

Best SATA III SSD

The SATA III solid state drive market is highly competitive with most manufacturers offering ‘different’ drives using the same NAND flash memory chips and identical sandforce controllers. So it really is down to brand preferences. We again think 128GB is the sweet spot of SSD pricing, and at this capacity we have two contenders from Corsair and OCZ. OCZ offer the Agility 3 drive with read and write speeds of 525/500 mb/s respectively for a price of £122. Whilst Corsair in our opinion just steals this one by offering better speeds with their Force 3 Series of 550mb/s read and 510mb/s write for an identical price tag.

We would recommend: Corsair Force 3 128GB SSD