What notebook HDD should I get?

I have an SSD I put in my laptop along with a hard drive that came installed by default. I dropped my laptop months ago and ever since the hard drive has been making clicking noises occasionally and often times the computer beeps after the clicking noise happens. Disk access has been getting really slow and so I'm assuming the hard drive is failing (although the laptop was sleeping when I dropped it).

These are the two most highly rated 500GB HDDs on amazon -- which would your recommend (alternatives are welcome)?

Amazon.com: Seagate 1TB Solid State Hybrid Drive SATA 6Gbps 64MB Cache 2.5-Inch ST1000LM014: Computers & Accessories
Amazon.com: Western Digital Bare Drives 500GB WD Blue SATA III 5400 RPM 8 MB Cache Bulk/OEM Notebook Hard Drive WD5000LPVX: Computers & Accessories

 

Seagate 'hybrid' HDD's - not even for free with a $50 debit card included.

WD HDD's - probably most widely available that are above the 'good enough' mark.

Hitachi Travelstar HDD's - the only ones that have proven themselves to me over many years of service, but have been long sold off.

With Crucial MX100 512GB drives available for ~$200, putting a HDD inside again is not something I would be recommending for that capacity point at this time. Highly recommended.

Depending on what SSD (and capacity) you already have installed, I would be tempted to do a clean Win8.1x64 Pro install to the MX100 instead too.

 

your HDD's head got damaged when you dropped the laptop, hence the ticking sound. It's dead! Save whatever data you can while you can.

At this day and age, and with the prices that SSDs have fallen to, I would never buy an HDD. Get a Crucial MX100 512GB as your secondary drive and enjoy extreme snapiness in anything you do, even if it's not your OS drive, accessing or copying any of your files will be blistering fast, that, and SSDs aren't so fragile like HDDs so the risk of losing your data is much less

 

Most 500GB drives are generally all at least one generation older at this point and not as fast as the current generation of hard drives. I highly recommend the HGST 5K1000 drives as cheap, high performance, and reliable storage drives. HGST drives are the best in the business.

Amazon.com: HGST Travelstar 2.5-Inch 1TB 5400RPM SATA 6Gbps 8MB Cache Internal Hard Drive (0J22413) (HTS541010A9E680): Electronics

Unless you have money to burn and want or need very little storage space, just stay away from SSD's as storage drives. I really fail to see the benefit.

 

One word: durability (vs. a fragile spinning disk with even more fragile heads).

 

Come on, they aren't that fragile. It takes quite a wallop to damage a 2.5" drive.

 

Nathand, get Hitachi 5K 1TB-1.5TB or 2TB Seagate-Samsung M9T. Stay away from WD and <1TB drives.

 

I'd suggest the Hitachi 7K 1000 7200rpm 1TB drive.. Its been epic for me and I would stay away from the M9T or any Samdung crap..

 

Yeah, actually they are (even with the system 'sleeping' and the heads parked). Especially compared to an SSD. When I booted up my notebooks in years past with HDD's, they were not allowed to be moved (at all) by anyone of my staff and all my desktop workstations are on the (very stable/substantial) desks - not under them (where feet have been known to give the kick of death without warning).

 

Based on what evidence...I use WD and they worked fine. This is more of biased wording then real world usage.

Again more biased reporting not based on any real world usage....

 

For a few bucks more you can get the 1TB 7200RPM version.

Amazon.com: HGST Travelstar 7K1000 2.5-Inch 1TB 7200 RPM SATA III 32MB Cache Internal Hard Drive 0J22423: Computers & Accessories

 

Even in real world usage, the 7K1000 owns the M9T... 7200rpm will always win against 5400rpm whichever way you look at it (unless you have a hybrid hard drive but that's cheating ).. Anyways, I can't recommend anything Samsung due to having bad experiences of every Samsung product I've bought..

 

Both drives are great. Saying the 7k1000 owns the M9T is kind of an exaggeration in my opinion. Sure its a tad faster but 2TB of data is preferable for me. I just swapped out my 2 x 7k1000's for 2 x M9T's and can tell you there is not much difference. I consider it to be an upgrade although I am caching it with an SSD too.

 

That 64 GB mSATA has a lot to do with it, that's a lot of caching space, so most of your commonly used data is likely on it. AS for media files, the difference between 5.4K and 7.2K isn't that high, where a 7.2K RPM drive usually wins out is in random I/O and faster seek time. The margin is far from the difference between HDD and SSD, but it can still make a difference. I definitely felt a tad more responsiveness between 5.4K and 7.2K before I went all SSD. If you need the space, get the larger drive though.

I will say that I am partial to Hitachi drives, but Seagate drives have worked perfectly for me, so have WD drives in fact. The scorpio blacks are just noisier in my opinion.

 

Even without cache, for data and games I've found the speed difference is negligible. Having an OS run off it might be a different story. It's kind of either SSD speeds or HDD speeds in my view.
As far as reliability goes those Hitachi's didn't miss a beat. I've had Seagate fail on me twice about 13 years ago. But here I am now being a nice guy and giving them another chance.

 

Not surprising, I've found that some games don't see much improved load times even on a SSD and other where running from a SSD did make a decent load time difference, but other than initial loads, that was mostly about it. I have seen some games that are know for textures to pop in exhibit less of this behavior while running from a SSD though. I certainly wouldn't want an OS on a 5.4K drive, any spinning rust feels slow once you've gone SSD, but there is slow and slower.