[cheesepuff]

ok, i suck at finding good hard drives. but i know what i need. as a video editor and game semi-game maker, and game player, i need a lot of hard drive space. i need an SATA2, 500GB or more hard drive for under $130 that has been shown in most cases to be reliable, not too noisy, and fast. i would also like to see reviews of the hard drive if you can link me to them on the one you recommend.

[hAvAAck]

why not just check newegg.com and do so by filtering specs. read all the reviews. I'm a fan of WD, but a lot of people like maxtor, etc

[philthomas]

Yep .... WD are quite respectable these days.

I was considering a 500gb drive, but I am not so sure I would want to trust so much important data to one drive .... 500gb is an awful lot to lose.
One thing that I have observed is .... larger drives seem to fail more often than smaller ones.
For example, I have an a couple of old 80gb drives that seem to go on and on for ever, but recently I lost a 400gb drive, as did a few friends of mine.

I know for convenience a 500gb or a 1tb drive is good, but if you have 2 or more 250gb , you can minimise your losses

[alex]

Samsung T166 500gb:

Anandtech:

"Samsung's SpinPoint T166 delivers excellent performance for the money in our opinion. The overall performance of the drive in the 500GB category remained consistent, and while not always class leading it certainly was not the class dunce. The drive's placement in our actual application tests is always near the top along with very good scores in the iPEAK productivity and general task tests.

While the speed of the drive was at question in our iPEAK game play tests, we really never noticed it during actual game play unless we had just used the Raptor drive as our comparison drive. The true strength of the Samsung SpinPoint T166 500GB drive is its incredible showing in the acoustic and thermal tests while having excellent power consumption numbers and competitive performance.

For all intents and purposes, the drive is whisper quiet - maybe not a perfect soft whisper, but quiet enough that we would not hesitate to use this drive or a combination of drives in an HTPC setup. As a matter of fact, you will see this drive featured prominently in an upcoming article centered on HTPC components and it is our drive of choice to compare against the PVR specific DB35.3 series from Seagate and the CinemaStar 7K500 drives from Hitachi.

Our opinion of the SpinPoint T166 is very high right now and unlike previous Samsung offerings we think this latest series delivers a near perfect combination of performance, quiet operation, thermal management, and price. In terms of pure performance, the Hitachi 500GB drive might be slightly faster, but in practical use it is extremely unlikely anyone would notice the difference in performance. Noise levels on the other hand definitely favor the Samsung T166 drives, and we really see no reason to spend $30 more to get the Hitachi drive. If you are looking for a hard drive in this capacity range then the Samsung HD501LJ should be at the top of your list."