Sata is meant to be fully backwards compatible so it shouldn't be a problem. One funny thing to note the first and only harddrive failure i have ever had occurred last year and it was a 500gb WD caviar blue. Altho i do have 2 more of them that are still working perfectly happily. And the drive was kind enough to keep giving me smart warnings for over 2 months before it died completely so i was able to save all the data from it.

barracuda 7200.12/11 or samsung f3 m8

stay away from hitachi deathstars and WD blue

WD black are pretty good though

I would go with a 500GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.

I've had a WD Caviar Blue and it was a horrible experience compared to this Seagate. Everytime I carried out a task such as unzipping a large file, I wouldn't be able to anything else on the Western Digital Drive.

I've also found the Seagate to be quite a bit faster at data throughput.

cheap slow drives imo

i got st7200.11 sata 3 in raid zero and it pumps out over 275 mb/s on raid 10r

ideal movie unrar and encoding

In reply to a post by Stanman_24:

barracuda 7200.12/11 or samsung f3 m8

stay away from hitachi deathstars and WD blue

WD black are pretty good though

hitachi drives have improved a lot, got a 250Gb on in my computer as a data drive now and it is fine. Worried about what WD will do with them now.

I also got myself a second hand 2.5 640Gb drive for my PS3 yesterday which is also Hitachi, cheaper than buying new and comes with a 12 month warranty

just sent my 1tb back yesterday

smart data showed up pending sector counts

My personal opinion would be Western digital, Hitachi (if you don't mind lots of noise) or Samsung (just got one recently for and older laptop and it is VERY quiet and fast for an older IDE type).

Seagate drives seem to have gone downhill these days and Maxtor are owned by Seagate so...

But that is just my opinion based upon past experiences, with hard drives its mostly just pot luck. But I do believe Seagate have gotten worse though.

Edited by deleted (Tue 13-Mar-12 14:36:45)

In reply to a post by Stanman_24:

just sent my 1tb back yesterday

smart data showed up pending sector counts

Oh dear, not good. but then most of us no doubt got stories of different makes of hard drives and problems with them.

For me it is seagates, always have problems with seagates, which is why I went for a Hitachi, thinking they could not be worse than Seagate and the drive have lasted and is still working, but only as a data drive.

In reply to a post by Alex1M6:

My personal opinion would be Western digital, Hitachi (if you don't mind lots of noise) or Samsung (just got one recently for and older laptop and it is VERY quiet and fast for an older IDE type).

Seagate drives seem to have gone downhill these days and Maxtor are owned by Seagate so...

But that is just my opinion based upon past experiences, with hard drives its mostly just pot luck. But I do believe Seagate have gotten worse though.

My hitachi is quiet, much quieter than the seagate/maxtor drive I have got.

My idea at some point is to take all the drives out of my computer apart from the SSD and 500GB one , add a 1TB and then put the drives i removed into external units.

it is pot luck and how you look after em imo

performance is a different story

i got st7200.12 500gb running raid 0 and get 270mb/s read / write

thats pretty impressive imo