For those who don't like to read (TL:DR)
1. Looking for an SSD and HDD with a price range of $200-250 (USD)
2. Preferably a 250GB SSD and a 2TB HDD
3. Reliability over Performance
4. Want to install some games and programs on the SSD
5. Might want to get a 3/4TB HDD
Intro
For the past few months I have been struggling with hard drive space having to constantly delete, compress, and convert my content to lower quality files to keep more than a few gigabytes available on my hard drive. Since the holidays are here I plan on spending around $200-250 (USD) to buy two new drives to solve this issue.
The SSD
With my current motherboard I am facing the problem of only having two SATA ports and without opening my chassis or going into the bios I want to say they are SATA II connections, which would unfortunately bottleneck any SSD I put in it. Regardless I want something that is relatively high performance, I don't plan on constantly writing to it so write performance isn't terribly important to me. Once I'm done getting my programs on it ill leave it be for a while. As long as the SSD is reliable, well built, high quality, and will last a long time then I'm fine. I'm not looking for balls to the walls performance if it will cost a lot.
I plan on using it as a boot drive primarily and installing a few programs onto it that I want to be extra snappy and responsive. These programs include Chrome, Steam, Skype, Foobar. Depending on the capacity I may want to put on a few games and programs such as Photoshop, Visual Studio, Maya, LoL, Civ V, CS:S, CS:GO L4D2, JC2, GTA IV, BF4, and Gmod, all of which seem to have terrible loading times.
I was looking at SSD's in the $100-150 range and found these drives on newegg.
SanDisk Ultra Plus SDSSDHP-128G-G25 2.5" 128GB SATA III MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) for Notebook $105.72
http://www.newegg.co...N82E16820171741
ADATA XPG SX900 ASX900S3-128GM-C 2.5" 128GB SATA III MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) $119.99
http://www.newegg.co...N82E16820211597
Kingston HyperX 3K SH103S3/120G 2.5" 120GB SATA III MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) (Stand-Alone Drive) $99.99
http://www.newegg.co...N82E16820239046
SAMSUNG 840 EVO MZ-7TE120BW 2.5" 120GB SATA III TLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) $85.99
http://www.newegg.co...N82E16820147247
All of which cost around $150 for the 240/250GB variants, except the Samsung drive which goes up to $190. Im leaning to the Samsung drive because the 120GB variant is cheap, reliable, and uses 3bit TLC flash. On the other hand the other drives have slightly higher performance and their higher capacity components are cheaper. I know Logan recommends the heck out of the ADATA drive so thinking about picking that one up.
The HDD
With the HDD I want a high capacity drive around 2TB or more, and after seeing a deal on amazon for a 4TB drive for $160 I though it was a steal. However after looking at the WD Black drives I have to ask if there is a performance reliability difference between the WD and Seagate Drives considering the huge price difference? Anyways I'm also fine with getting a 2TB drive and they cost around $90, and $120 for a 3TB drive. If I were to get a lower capacity SSD I might consider on of the higher capacity hard drives. i know at this point you will probably tell me that I will never use that space but trust me, I will find a way to use it, probably with loss-less music and every single episode of my favorite TV show in HD, regardless, I will use it.
Regarding large capacity HDD I read that not all BIOS' can handle hard drive above 2TB, and since I don't have a UEFI bios on my motherboard I was wondering if this would be problem.
This is the drive I was looking at.
http://www.amazon.co...ardwarevol03-20