Is that for a laptop? You can get various faster than most drives for more $ but for most purpose= s a 7200 RPM is fine. Bigger cache is better. You can now get SATA 3 drives but odds are your system is more than well enough served by SATA 2. Some drives ARE more reliable than others BUT Google won't tell you who. Th= e least eliable may have been those who went to the wall recently. Maybe not. I buy WD or Seagate but am leaning towards WD mainly because of Seagate's immoral (albeit understandable) approach when faced with massive failures caused by a firmware bug. As far as mere mortals can tell WD & Seagate are about as good. I run 8 x USB2 external "bricks" on this PC (mix of 1, 1.5 and 2 TB) and al= l seem about equally well behaved. I have not done power tests or looked into this in detail. 1 Watt 24/365 costs GBP 1 - 2 depending on your supplier. About GBP1 here. Google mass drive analysis said that a drive reporting S.M.A.R.T. diagnosti= c errors usually failed within 30 days BUT that about half of drives that failed did so with no prior warning. I'd run a mile from a drive with inbuilt encryption key that can be permanently disabled by deleting the key. Each to their own. All hard drives fail. Most somewhere between 10 years and half a day after installation. April 26th post: "There is a large hall in a castle. On one side of the hall there is a massive roaring open fire from which sparks sometimes leap or drift. On the other large of the hall there is a vast sheet of fine tissue paper. Scribes inscribe (as they do) crucial information on the tissue paper. One day a spark ..." R On 3 June 2011 02:02, Oli Glaser wrote: > Hi All, > > I have a sneaky feeling that my hard drive will be an ex hard drive > soon, so I am going to pre-empt disaster and but a new one now. > My current one is a 5400 rpm SATA 2.5" 160GB drive by Toshiba: > http://bit.ly/iJMH2q > < > http://www.google.co.uk/products/catalog?q=3Dmk1637gsx&cid=3D459486762331= 2224930&os=3Dtech-specs > > > > The one I am considering (or something like it) is a 7200rpm 250GB one: > http://bit.ly/jH5n6c > > I don't care too much about cost or capacity - my main concern is with > raw speed and reliability. It will be on 24/7 like this one has been for > the last 2 years and used constantly. > So, any advice? Who make the best drives nowadays? > I will (probably) be buying in the next hour or so (would like it > tomorrow if possible) so some quick thoughts would be great. > TIA > > > -- > http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive > View/change your membership options at > http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist > --=20 http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist .