I'll admit I'm no genius when it comes to storage technology, but have been holding off for about 2 years on getting a 1TB hard drive for prices to come down a tad. I grabbed a W10EARS (Western Digital Caviar Green 1TB) from MB today, it's being shipped out should be here tomorrow.

I have 2 aging hard drives currently that replaced. ST3160212SCE and one ST3160815AS. These are 160gb Seagate drives that replaced two caviar 160gb's that were a tad slower.

Time for an upgrade.

Couldn't swing $120 for the Black, but I'm told these new Green's are actually quite fast with the 64mb cache. In fact, upon reading comparisons, I'm told that even though my older drives were 7200rpm, this 5400-7200rpm caviar green will blow it out of the water.

If that's the case, this will be a performance upgrade as well, but really I'm just on a "no compromise" pc diet. I no longer want to run games at lower settings, delete my last 2 downloads so I can download something else, etc.

The most hard drive intensive thing I do on my pc is recording with fraps, which I know kills slower hard drives, since its recording about 4gb per minute and a half.

I need some reassurance....

The Greens are supposed to be pretty fast. I just got my Blue back from RMA, took 3 weeks to the day that I shipped it. I'm not really noticing the Black I got to replace it being any faster.

Supposedly the 64mb Green's were supposed to be Blue's but since they had 8 sec head park and intelliseek and all that garbage they were dubbed Green cuz of their power consumption.

Also, I heard the drives with 8 sec head park can fail pretty easily..

Of that I'm not concerned too much though, $88 leaves me with a really good per gb price so as long as I get lots more storage and a decent performance boost I'll be happy.

EDIT: Also heard that I should use a WD utility to align my hdd. I can only assume this was bad chinglish and meant align my partitions which I probably won't be using anyways.

you only need that if you are a multi-partition user, a cloning software user or a windows XP user.
there are directions printed directly on the drive.

Looks like I have a job ahead of me tomorrow!

Definately going to make the 1TB my OS partition, because it's going to give me a boost in desktop performance. I was thinking of maybe partitioning after all, with 2x500gb partitions (500 for OS and games, 500 for video/recording) My older 160's will be used as archived storage, and will probably hold a disk image as well.

I think I'm finally going to get the chance to tidy my case up a little bit tomorrow as well, finally making it picture worthy

Ew Green as an OS drive. Let me know how it turns out. I would have suggested a 750GB Black drive for the same price.

Remember, I've been running my OS off of a 2mb cache 160gb drive for quite some time with little to complaint about performance...

Was that 1TB drive the 64MB or 32MB cache one ?

Running some sort of virus scanner in the background would probably eliminate spindown/park function thingy.

For me having the green drives in the Jesusbox it the best case scenario, as they do nothing 99% of the time, but the computer is still on doing, uh, things.

When I was backing up to my first 2TB drive from the 1TB, windows was reporting 70MB/s throughput. Now that was using a BlackX thingy, which I don't have anymore due to redundancy (hot-swap bays in the 800D). I'm going to be be upgrading another 1TB to 2TB this weekend so I'll see what the throughput is on the mobo instead of using eSATA.

Slick, the price has gone down 2$ in 2 weeks, yippee!

It's the 64mb one which I'm told rivals the speed of the blacks in most applications.

This is the result of my 32MB cache 1TB green drive. It's as fast as the 1TB seagate drive w/32MB cache i used to have.

In HDTune, I hover around 80 and as low as 60, dunno if that's what it should be running at or not there, because it still is quite a boost from my last drives...

Here is my HD Tach results though:

your results and my results are quite similar. so it's likely as it should be.

when you moved over to your Green drive did you ghost or do a new install?

New install to be safe. Then split the drive between the two 500gb platters, one for OS and one for Downloads and Video. Tomorrow after I install all my essential games and software I'm going to image this drive and store the image on one of these 160gb drives.

Then since I'm a backup whore and love redundancy I'll use the other drive for backup, mirroring to a 400gb external once a week.

I think I got this down now lol, never had size like this on my own desktop, yet I stare at servers with 6 1TB SAS drives hummin and buzzin every day and just wanna get a fraction of that capacity lol.

You now have 1/6th, a fraction! My present to you.