For HDD I use exclusively Western Digital Black Drives. They are very very good drives with a very good warranty (5 years). As far as speed goes, they are high performance 7200. Even when I do go SSD, I'll be using black drives as my backup and sample storage.

TerraSin
For HDD I use exclusively Western Digital Black Drives. They are very very good drives with a very good warranty (5 years). As far as speed goes, they are high performance 7200. Even when I do go SSD, I'll be using black drives as my backup and sample storage.

I totally agree with you.
 
I've been using WD Blacks for several years now and so far, touching anything remotely resembling wood, I've not had a single problem with them.
 
Maxtor on the other hand, I had 3 different ones die on me over a period of about 18 months which is WAY outside the curve of "expected failure rate"
 
 
Stupid question - and one I should really know the answer to by now - but if you reformat your system drive, your BIOS settings remain untouched yes? This is all held on the battery backed CMOS motherboard chips isn't it?
 
I'm planning well ahead here and might, maybe next year, do a complete system rebuild.

WD and Samsung seem solid enough from where I'm sitting and neither of mine are very noisy either. Just avoid any of the "green" drives that alter their speed to save power. Go for a steady 7,200rpm or better.
 
For performance SSDs are the way to go, the only thing against them is their cost/GB ratio, though prices do seem to be starting to drop now.

+1 on the WD black drives.

Bristol_JoneseyStupid question - and one I should really know the answer to by now - but if you reformat your system drive, your BIOS settings remain untouched yes? This is all held on the battery backed CMOS motherboard chips isn't it?

Correct, BIOS is part of the motherboard and not something saved on a HDD so formatting your system drive will not affect the BIOS settings.

Heads up NewEgg has WD Black 2TB 7200 drives for $120 today only.

Interesting that 3TB drives have had higher failure rates than 4TB. Seagate especially.
 
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/how-long-do-disk-drives-last/
 

It's because of the way they are designed. More platters = more points of possible failure. That said, I have a 4TB drive that (knock on wood) works fine for my media storage.

What SSD brand are the DAW makers using?

strikinglyhandsome1
What SSD brand are the DAW makers using?

If I were a gambling man, I'd bet they're be using Samsung's......they've been proven to be very reliable......(now where's that piggy bank at??)