Review: Six top hard disk drives for speed and capacity
You have to ask yourself whether you want speed, battery life or capacity?
Over the past few months, Computerworld has reviewed the latest in hard disk drive technology, from large-capacity 1TB models and energy-efficient "green" drives to solid-state disks that outpace their spinning disk counterparts on every dimension of speed and power consumption. For your perusal are six of the best drives we could find that you might want to consider for your computer or a friend's this holiday season.
Review: Samsung's 64GB flash hard drive
The Samsung 64GB SSD drive The drive has the capacity to be your workhorse and is heartier than others in that it can withstand a 1,500G shock, and it has a mean time between failure of over 2 million hours, versus under 500,000 hours for the company's other drives. It sips power at just 1 watt when active, 0.1 watt when idle, and 0.06 watt in standby mode.
Review: Samsung Electronics Co.'s 32GB, 1.8-in. SSD drive -- the fastest yet
The Samsung 32GB SSD drive At 32GB, its capacity hardly competes with the 1.8-in. hard drives inside current-generation 60GB or 80GB iPods or even the little 40GB drive inside the iRiver H340. As well, Samsung's SSD commands pricing that hovers around $500 for just its 32GB model. But this is one fast drive with random data access times of 16.3 milliseconds and an average read of 30.6Mbit/sec. It's also quite miserly with a 10% CPU utilization rate.
Review: Seagate's whopper of a drive -- the 1TB Barracuda
The Seagate Barracuda 1TB drive The odds are excellent that Windows will never again tell you that you're running low on hard disk space with this 1TB drive, and that alone might be worth the price of admission. Seagate Technology LLC's latest data monster uses a Serial Advanced Technology Attachment NCQ interface and carries a rather sizable 32MB of cache.