Holiday Buyers' Guide: Cases, Power, and Storage

Hard Drives

We are starting to see wide spread adaptation of SSD and Hybrid drives in the high-end portable markets, and these technologies should hit the mid-tier systems by 2009. On the desktop, we see a renewal of the capacity race with all of the major players now offering 1TB drives and looking to break those levels in the first quarter of next year. In the meantime, Western Digital has decided to go "Green" with their Caviar GP drive series and we tend to favor this trend. While the performance of these drives are not up to the latest speed demons from Seagate, Samsung, Hitachi, or even WD's own Raptor/RE2/SE16 drives, it is enough to be competitive for most users while offering superb acoustics, thermal management, and power savings.

We have listed our favorite drives, but really, just about any of the latest generation of drives will suit the majority of users, so choose on brand preference, warranty, or support services. You might notice the WD Raptor is missing; we still love and recommend the drive, but our quest for the ultimate performance in SATA drives means a trip to Korea is in order. MTRON has surpassed their original 3000 series and is now shipping the 7000 series that offers blistering performance at an equally blistering price.

In fact, the 32GB drive costs more than most families will spend on Christmas, but being the performance junkies we are, it has to go on the list this year. Not to be outdone, Samsung has a new 64GB SSD drive that we will compare to the MTRON 64GB drive shortly. While the MTRON offers better performance, the Samsung drive should cost about 40% less. We also understand that Super Talent is launching a new series of high performance SSD drives shortly and hopefully we can provide some initial results with one in the near future.  It should be an interesting battle for this upper-end segment, and more importantly, an interesting 2008 for drives as everyone jumps into the SSD pool.

General Use

Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 SATA 3.0Gb/s 250GB Hard Drive - $64
For those needing a nice size drive for a SOHO setup, or if you just want to upgrade Aunt Harriet's system to hold more Christmas pictures, then this is the drive to buy. While we typically like the 500GB drives to hold all of our "stuff", this drive will suit most desktop users and offers very good performance for the price.

Overall Value

Samsung SpinPoint T166 HD501LJ SATA 3.0Gb/s 500GB Hard Drive - $99
One of our favorite drives over the last year has been the Samsung SpinPoint T166 500GB drive that offers an almost perfect blend of performance, price, acoustics, and thermals in a package that still amazes us. It might not win many synthetic benchmarks, but this drive is always close to the leaders in actual application results and is the first drive we grab in the labs when looking to put together a quiet system… or for that matter, just about any desktop system.

High Capacity

Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD7500AAKS SATA 3.0Gb/s 750GB Hard Drive - $150
We were going to recommend a 1TB drive (Hitachi) at the high-end of our selection, but the recent price drop on this drive makes it a bargain in the big drive market. The price is right, and the performance of this drive is impressive to say the least. While the new Samsung SpinPoint F DT HD753LJ is a hair quicker overall, it's not readily available yet and will probably cost around $209 at launch. If you want to increase capacity now, we cannot think of a better drive in this size range.

Solid State

MTRON MSP-SATA7025 SATA 1.5Gb/s 32GB SSD Hard Drive - $1199
If you are looking for the ultimate in SSD performance then the MTRON 7000 series is the only way to go. Featuring 120 MB/s read and 90 MB/s write speeds, this drive will make a Raptor weep. Of course, the price tag makes us weep. However, our initial tests show a drive that will have the benchmark junkies salivating, and notebook users can have the Rolls Royce of drives protecting their data. MTRON promises a 10 year data retention rate and a write endurance of 140 years at 50GB of write activity per day. Expect to see a review up shortly where we put two of these drives in RAID 0 and set out to destroy the PCMark05 and PCMark Vantage benchmarks. We know it means little in the real world, but hey, we like having a little fun now and then. $2400 can build you an excellent high-end gaming system… or you can get the fastest RAID 0 storage this side of 2010.

Other Possibilities

Western Digital Caviar GP SATA 3.0Gb/s 500-GB~1TB Hard Drive - $139~$249
Western Digital recently released their Green series of drives and we came away impressed, even though its overall performance will not set any speed records. This is fine with us, and the drive is a natural in a HTPC setup as the low power consumption leads to less heat and the variable speed design leaves us with one very quiet drive.

Seagate DB35.4 SATA 3.0Gb/s 160GB~1TB Hard Drive - $99~$349
If you are an HTPC fanatic, then the new DB35.4 series of drives will be right up your alley. Based on the new 7200.11 design, these drives feature multiple stream recording capability with up to 10 streams at once. Seagate has also improved the power consumption, acoustics, and reliability of these drives while offering a 5-year warranty. Our 1TB sample will hold approximately 1,000 hours of SD content and close to 175 hours of HD recordings.

Samsung MH80 SATA 1.5Gb/s 80GB~160GB Hybrid 2.5" Drive - $80~$169
Samsung continues to be a leader in the Hybrid drive market that features a combination of the standard 5400RPM mechanical hard drive design boosted by the addition of 256MB of NAND flash memory. This large NAND cache along with specific OS improvements in Vista allows users of these drives to experience performance that is close to 7200RPM drives, almost instant-on capability, and power savings that show an average 10% improvement in battery life over conventional drives. Seagate and others are introducing similar drives, but for now Samsung is our choice.