I've never seen DDR2 sticks bigger than 2GB.
Now you have.On the other hand, I have never seen DDR2 ram bigger than 4gb, while I have seen 8gb sticks of DDR3. You pay a premium for it though, an 8gb stick seems to be roughly 4 times the cost of 2 4gb sticks.
I think that if you're getting to the point where you need a lot of ram, to the point where you're packing 4 8gb sticks onto a board so you can have 32gb, at that point it may be cheaper to buy more than one computer. This is well outside the scope of the target audience of this thread but it's certainly the appropriate place to discuss it.
Yea reading some more into it, I see that the disk spin rate is important too, and whatever weird thing they had listed as spin rate actually equated to poop. Its not poorly made, its just slow reading, although I wonder how that works with 6gb data transfer rate. Do both the spin rate and transfer rate affect how the hard drive performs, or is it a matter of whichever one is the slowest determining actual speed?
First of all there is nothing wrong with caviar green drives. They're not low quality and I am skeptical of the claim that they're unreliable. As I recall they do spin at 5400 rpm which makes them slower than a 7200 rpm drive. I would consider 7200 rpm standard for a consumer computer. This simply means it takes longer to perform operations on the drive. In general, this means it will take longer to save and load files, boot your computer, etc, but not always. If you run an operating system off a CD, boot time and program launch speed will depend on how fast your CD drive spins. If you're using a thin client or something, it's the speed of the hard drives on the second computer you're logging into and the speed of your local network that will influence this stuff.
I would probably use the 1TB caviar green drives if I needed massive amounts storage. They're cheaper than the faster spinning drives, and for long-term storage 6.0gb/s vs 3.0gb/s isn't so important. They also require less power so they're cheaper to operate. I have to admit I haven't looked into mass storage yet because I don't have a need for it right now. It's very likely that there may be denser and cheaper media, with lower power requirements that I have overlooked. For a lot of storage that didn't need to be fast, I would go for a 5400 rpm drive with a 3.0gb/s SATA connection, low power requirements, and low in cost and right now the 1TB green caviar drives are looking pretty good.
I would put a 7200 rpm drive in my desktop. On the topic of drive size, I put the 500GB drives in all the computers I build for myself, but this is because I have never managed to fill a 500GB drive so the extra money spent on a larger drive is money wasted for me, even if the price difference is negligible. I also have strict data retention guidelines I try to follow, I absolutely refuse to save any kind of video on my computer, and I always try to keep drives half empty. I have a very aggressive file management strategy, and as a consequence I do not need large drives. Your mileage will obviously vary and I would probably advise most people following Ethan's guide to go with a 1TB drive.
Spinpoint F3 is the best for the money. That drive is low quality, look at the multiple reviews of it dying.
Maybe I'm mistaken but so far it looks like you made this assessment based on 9 reviews. If you look on Newegg, the same part has another
413 reviews. It has another
45 on Amazon. I usually read a couple hundred reviews before I buy a part. I skim them to see if I start to see a pattern emerge that suggests low quality. The number of bad reviews is arbitrary and I just do it on instinct, but let's say if 1 in 10 mention that it broke in a couple months I would start to question it. I just flat out don't buy parts that do not have a bunch of reviews.
After I've made that judgement, then I start looking for reviews that I'll call "case studies." For example, if I'm shopping for a graphics card, I will look for other people that bought the card and see if it can do the stuff I want it to do. For example, if I was just building an entry level computer, I would look for something that said "runs WoW on medium settings at 45 fps, plays dvds without skipping." In my mind, that's what an entry level computer is, so that's what I look for in a card. Once I've found one possible card, I'll start to look at similar cards and see if I can get better performance for the same price or the same performance for a lower price. I know I could look at benchmarks on a tech blog and get an overall picture, but there's more things at play here. There are different operating systems, drivers, interaction between different parts, etc. Benchmarks are all done on one system, sometimes it's a high end system sometimes it's a more consumer level system. Individual reviews by people with systems that more closely match my specs provide finer granularity in determining how all the parts will work together in a system.
Also, reliability is a key right here, what would you rather have, a solid hard drive that will last you a year, or one that dies in a few weeks?
Neither, I think a year is a pretty short lifespan. Obviously everyone wants the one with the longer lifespan, however; you have failed to show that the drive actually has a short lifespan. I have been purchasing caviar green drives for years and haven't had a problem with them. My server has a 3 year old 500gb caviar green drive in it and so far I haven't had a problem with it and the
SMART data suggests that it will continue to run fine for the near future, baring physical damage.
