1300$ to spend.

[BoomerD]

If you want nVidia cards...EVGA.
If you want ATI cards...XFX.

I lived through too many crappy ATI drivers for my old X850XT PE card to have been willing to try another Radeon card. For my new build, I went with an EVGA GTX460 superclocked card.
IF you care about lifetime warranty, pay attention. Not all models offer that.

 

[darksidesteve]

Samsung makes great TV's, great monitors, & great cell phones. I've never been too hot on their hard drives however. And I've honestly just stayed away from their opticals, so I don't know about those. (you can't go wrong with Lite-On or Pioneer, even LG for opticals)

I'd buy either an Hitachi Deskstar or Western Digital Black Edition.
WD obviously has a great name, stands by their products and offers a 5 yr warranty on the BE & RE drives.

Hitachi drives seem to last forever. There's also some great free bootable DOS apps from Hitachi, like the Hitachi Feature Tool & Drive Fitness Test.

Feature Tool lets you change drive settings through software.
Enable or disable the read-ahead or write cache.
Change the predefined capacity of the drive.
- Used when BIOS limitation exists and the drive is not recognized.
Switch the Ultra DMA mode. Change advanced power mode.
- Switch between lowest and highest power consumption (maximum performance level).
Configure SATA interface.
- Adjust maximum speed and enable/disable spread spectrum clocking.

Drive Fitness test helps you determind if you have bad sectors on the drive and lets you map around them.

I'm running 4x 7200rpm Hitachi Deskstars in RAID 0 on one of my systems. These drives are used 24/7 and have been going strong for over 5 years. (I have them set to never shut down as well) I get 592MB/p/s in read data bursts, and a steady 375MB/p/s read speed with data blocks 2MBs or greater.

My experience with Samsung may have been unique, but I had bought a Spin Point a long time ago and had to return it to Samsung for repair 3 times within 4 months. By the 4th time, I took it outside and smashed it with a hammer. Compared to what I originally paid for the drive, my return shipping charges could have bought a new drive.

 

[csjesse]

My experience with Samsung may have been unique, but I had bought a Spin Point a long time ago and had to return it to Samsung for repair 3 times within 4 months. By the 4th time, I took it outside and smashed it with a hammer. Compared to what I originally paid for the drive, my return shipping charges could have bought a new drive.

hahaha...well, this WD here (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822136533) is 20$ more, but 6.0Gb/s and 64mb cache, opposed to the Samsung's 3.0 and 32mb. Not sure if this is worth it...

as far as the optical.. might use the lite-on instead.

 

[darksidesteve]

For that extra $20, you're getting sataIII, twice the cache, & 2 years more on the warranty. Not to mention, if you're buying from newegg, the Samsung they have priced at $69 has $7+change for shipping, which closes the gap even more.

 

[fffblackmage]

For that extra $20, you're getting sataIII, twice the cache, & 2 years more on the warranty. Not to mention, if you're buying from newegg, the Samsung they have priced at $69 has $7+change for shipping, which closes the gap even more.

SATA3 (SATA 6Gbps) is incredibly pointless for any and all HDDs. HDDs simply aren't fast enough to benefit from such a high bandwidth interface.

While a larger cache is nice, it's not going to make a significant enough difference to justify a price premium.

The additional 2 year warranty is the only thing worth the extra $13 or so over the F3 1TB.

 

[IanWorthington]

Looks like ssds are able to max out sata2 though, so if one was thinking of adding one of those in the lifetime of a mobo surely sata3 would be a good idea?

 

[Davidh373]

hahaha...well, this WD here (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822136533) is 20$ more, but 6.0Gb/s and 64mb cache, opposed to the Samsung's 3.0 and 32mb. Not sure if this is worth it...

No HDD makes use of 1.5GB/S of bandwidth, they may slap an expensive 6GB/S controller on the drive, but it won't make the drive any faster.

Yes, the Caviar black is a tiny margin "faster", but you won't notice a difference unless you are benchmarking. $20 is an extreme amount of money for such an insignificant difference.

SSDs with the Sandforce controller (the best choice IMO) do not have a 6GB/S controller, but they are the fastest on the market as of today.

Now if you heard or read that somewhere, it's likely the intended message was the tech "has potential" to max out SATA 2. No drives on the market are really capable of that yet though. Again, just because it has a SATA 6GB/S controller doesn't mean it makes use of it at all. Companies will do anything to make their tech look better than the competition...

 

[mfenn]

Samsung makes great TV's, great monitors, & great cell phones. I've never been too hot on their hard drives however. And I've honestly just stayed away from their opticals, so I don't know about those. (you can't go wrong with Lite-On or Pioneer, even LG for opticals)

I'd buy either an Hitachi Deskstar or Western Digital Black Edition.
WD obviously has a great name, stands by their products and offers a 5 yr warranty on the BE & RE drives.

Hitachi drives seem to last forever. There's also some great free bootable DOS apps from Hitachi, like the Hitachi Feature Tool & Drive Fitness Test.

Feature Tool lets you change drive settings through software.
Enable or disable the read-ahead or write cache.
Change the predefined capacity of the drive.
- Used when BIOS limitation exists and the drive is not recognized.
Switch the Ultra DMA mode. Change advanced power mode.
- Switch between lowest and highest power consumption (maximum performance level).
Configure SATA interface.
- Adjust maximum speed and enable/disable spread spectrum clocking.

Drive Fitness test helps you determind if you have bad sectors on the drive and lets you map around them.

I'm running 4x 7200rpm Hitachi Deskstars in RAID 0 on one of my systems. These drives are used 24/7 and have been going strong for over 5 years. (I have them set to never shut down as well) I get 592MB/p/s in read data bursts, and a steady 375MB/p/s read speed with data blocks 2MBs or greater.

My experience with Samsung may have been unique, but I had bought a Spin Point a long time ago and had to return it to Samsung for repair 3 times within 4 months. By the 4th time, I took it outside and smashed it with a hammer. Compared to what I originally paid for the drive, my return shipping charges could have bought a new drive.

From your posts in this thread, it sounds like your knowledge is quite dated to be honest. Any and all Samsung drives since the F1 have been rock solid.

 

[mfenn]

For that extra $20, you're getting sataIII, twice the cache, & 2 years more on the warranty.

None of which is worth $20. The first two items especially are worthless marketing checkbox features.