Hard Disk Storage–

Like DDR2 memory prices, hard disk storage costs have plummeted the past year. The usual technological march continues as performance is improved through higher density platters and larger cache sizes while costs continue to drop. A year ago, we highly recommended 320GB drives at the low end and now we see no reason not to buy 500GB or larger drives if your budget permits it. In fact, our minimum recommendation for most systems are the newer 500GB~640GB drives with 1TB+ drives quickly becoming the norm in the mid-range to upper range markets. You might not ever need that much storage but the price to performance ratio on the larger drives are just too enticing for us to pass up.

For specialized applications we still see value in the WD VelociRaptor series in the enterprise, workstation, and high-end desktop markets. For the general desktop space, we think the performance of the WD Caviar Black or Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 drives are more than capable for most users. We were initially impressed with the Samsung F1 series, but as of late we have had a higher than normal failure rate, something we notice other users have also experienced. It seems as though you either get a really solid drive or not. As far as Hitachi is concerned, well, we just have not seen anything compelling out of them recently. However, their current drive lineup is still competitive from a performance viewpoint for the most part.

We will concentrate on the HDD and ODD desktop market today and follow-up in early 2009 with a look at several new SSD and SAS drives that were recently released. This along with detailed looks at NAS (hint, Promise SmartStor NS4300N would make a great holiday gift) and other external storage products should bring us up to speed in the world of storage on the desktop.

Entry Level Drives –

Western Digital is one of our favorite drive manufacturers and the new WD Caviar Green 640GB (WD6400AACS) drive offers a great blend of capacity, performance, and quiet operation for $70. The Green series of drives offers lower power consumption, improved thermals, and very quiet operation. We highly suggest this drive (or the 500GB version) for systems that will be placed near the user or in HTPC systems.

Performance is just a few percent lower than the WD SE16 or Seagate Barracuda series and most users will never notice the difference. For the same price, you can purchase the WD Caviar Black 500GB drive that offers faster performance but at the expense of acoustics and thermals, although both are still tolerable in most HTPC conditions.

The WD Caviar Black (WD6401AALS) 640GB drive is the new favorite in the labs, replacing the WD 640GB SE16. This $85 drive offers a larger 32MB cache, improved acoustics, and around a 3% improvement in application performance for about $10 more than the SE16 version. The biggest change for us is this drive’s warranty is extended to five years instead of the typical three that WD offers on other desktop drives. We highly recommend this drive or several of them for a very fast and secure RAID 10 or 5 setup.

If you are on a tighter budget or feel like 640GB is too much capacity, we suggest the Hitachi P7K500 320GB or WD Caviar SE16 320GB drives selling for around $50.

Mid-Range Performance Drives-

Once again we will turn to Western Digital for their impressive Caviar Black (WD1001FALS) 1TB drive that features excellent performance along with very good acoustics and power consumption in this market sector. This $129 drive also features a 32MB cache, 334GB platters, and five year warranty. For those users wanting a very low power consumption drive, excellent acoustics, and solid performance, we highly suggest the WD Caviar Green 1TB drive (WD10EADS). This update to the GP series now features 32MB cache, 334GB platter sizes, idle power consumption around 2.8W with a load power rating at 5.5W in our testing. It is also quiet with a 23.6dBA rating.

Our other choice (maybe primary shortly) is the new Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 (ST31000333AS) 1TB drive featuring the same 375GB per-platter technology from their up market 1.5TB drive. This $110 drive has been every bit the equal of the WD Caviar Black in early application and thermal/acoustic testing. It has already impressed us enough for a very strong recommendation.

We have been bitten by a couple of failures in the labs with the Samsung SpinPoint T and F1 series of drives, but we still have several running perfectly fine. It could be bad luck or just luck of the draw. If that is the case, we still think the Samsung SpinPoint F1 (HD753LJ) 750GB drive at $75 is very good deal for a top performing drive.

High-Performance Desktop Drives-

There really is only once choice here in the HDD desktop market. That being the WD VelociRaptor 300GB (WD3000GLFS) drive featuring 10K RPM platters, 32MB Cache, incredible performance, and very good acoustics and thermals for a drive in this category. Without moving to high end SSD or SAS drives, this is the drive to have on the desktop if performance is paramount and storage capacities be dammed.

Optical Storage –

The optical storage market has consolidated greatly in the last year with top-tier suppliers like Plextor and BenQ basically opting out of the market and other manufacturers merging together. The SATA interface has finally replaced the IDE interface on the desktop. Features that we have always considered important like bitsetting, overburn, disc scanning, fast reads, and high-quality writing tend to be worse now than they were a couple of years ago. We guess price and marketing features have overtaken performance and quality in some regards now. That said, there are some decent drives available and we basically have narrowed our choices down to a couple that will suffice for most users and a Blu-ray playback unit.

DVD Writers –

Our two choices are both 22x SATA units that feature street prices around $25. We like the Samsung SH-S223F and LG GH22NS30 drives for general desktop usage. Both offer very good compatibility with a wide range of discs and above average performance across the board. We just received the Sony NEC Optiarc AD-7220S drive and in the first round of testing, it appears to be a good drive and would certainly deserve a look before purchasing either one of the other drives. We still favor the Pioneer DVR-116DBK considering its $22 price tag and overall performance.

Blu-ray Playback Drive –

If you are building an HTPC then we highly suggest the $99~$119 LG GGC-H20LK drive for playback duties and general DVD burning activities. If you are looking for a good Blu-ray burner, we once again turn to LG for their GGW-H20LK unit. Sony just introduced their BWU-300S Blu-ray burning with the capability to write at up to 8x speeds on certain BD-R DL discs. The drive currently goes for about $399.