Hard Drive Recommendation? (HDD Only!)

Hey guys,

Zeth here with a question. I'm planning to swap out the optical drive in my HP Envy 14 (1st generation) for a hard drive and was hoping you guys could give me a few recommendations on decent 2.5" hard drives out there. My notebook already has a 120gb SSD, so I'm looking more so for a hard drive that is decently speedy, reasonably priced ($100 or less), and spacious (500gb give or take). This obviously rules out SSDs.

I know now's not the best time to buy a HDD with prices just starting to fall post-Thailand floods. But would you guys recommend Seagate's Momentus XT drives? Seems like hybrid drives are the midpoint between SSDs and pure HDDs with the balance between price and performance.

Would this be a good drive to get?


Appreciate any help I can get in advance. I'm not familiar with terms such as "Sata III" and the like as I haven't been keeping up with tech lately.

 

Will you be installing any programs to this drive? If you will, then the Momentus XT is a good idea. If not, then it's a waste of money and you should just get a cheaper standard HDD rather than a hybrid drive.

With regards to terms such as SATA III, this is a simplified view, but SATA generations are analogous to PCIe generations:

1) So far there have been 3 generations of SATA, hence the term "SATA III"
2) Each generation doubles the bandwidth of the previous generation
3) Just as a PCIe 1.0 card can be inserted into a PCIe 3.0 slot and vice versa, an SATA I drive can be plugged into an SATA III port and vice versa. In other words, backward compatibility is not an issue.
4) Unlike PCIe, even the fastest desktop HDDs can barely saturate an SATA I port, which provides 1.5 gigabits of bandwidth per second. There are equivalents of SLI and Crossfire (SATA port multiplication), but it only matters for eSATA external HDDs.
5) Finally and most importantly, your 1st generation HP Envy doesn't support SATA III

 

Zeth,

In regards to the XT as primary or secondary drive, it depends on what you'll do with it. Take a look through this thread - http://forum.notebookreview.com/har...s-xt-750gb-w-8gb-nand-more-9.html#post8115119 and http://forum.notebookreview.com/sag...te-momentus-xt-750gb-500gb-2.html#post8141112 for some discussion.

In regards to SATA, just make sure the optical drive you are replacing has a SATA connection. As long as you have that SATA port (which most likely is SATA I or SATA II), the XT *should* work out fine in terms of operating within your system.

HTH