Never heard of the Firecuda drives. Those look awesome! My suggestion would be 10k Velociraptors. In hardware raid 0. Because thats what I think of when I think of fast XP HDD's

Why don't you use for example Intel 520 series SSD ?
They can do TRIM manually (from SSD Toolbox).

Source : LINK

ODwilly wrote:

Never heard of the Firecuda drives. Those look awesome! My suggestion would be 10k Velociraptors. In hardware raid 0. Because thats what I think of when I think of fast XP HDD's

Those things are too noisy for me. And not the good nostalgic noise like early 90s IDE and SCSI drives - 10k and 15k drives make noises akin to an air powered angle grinder.

I prefer regular 7200 SATA drives for my XP builds. The newer the better.

kanecvr wrote:

ODwilly wrote:

Never heard of the Firecuda drives. Those look awesome! My suggestion would be 10k Velociraptors. In hardware raid 0. Because thats what I think of when I think of fast XP HDD's

Those things are too noisy for me. And not the good nostalgic noise like early 90s IDE and SCSI drives - 10k and 15k drives make noises akin to an air powered angle grinder.

I prefer regular 7200 SATA drives for my XP builds. The newer the better.

heh i can totally see the noise being a concern. On that note I love WD Black drives. Epic reliability and they are blazing fast for a mechanical drive.

RAID 0 is a no go for me, I've seen too many bad things happen. I don't want to be reloading when I could be playing.

WD Velociraptors seem too expensive and others say they are loud.

The manual TRIM thing is just something I would have to do and think about plus the time it takes to run.

In short, I want a simple machine to fire up, play games, shutdown and repeat without doing anything else. I'm not saying any of the options are wrong, they just aren't right for me with what I'm trying to do with this box.

I like to stick to Hitachi Deskstars SATA 7k series 7200RPM drives, as personally I've found them reliable, not managed to kill one yet. but any quality drive should do really.

unless you wanna go bling n go with thw WD Raptors or Velociraptors, think they done a model of the Raptor 10k with a cutout window in it.

Buy WD EZEX 1TB or Seagate ST1000DM003.
If you want used : HD502HJ is good bet (Samsung F3 500GB).

SSHD learn's what to put in NAND flash with time (it's not a simple solution to all your problems also - it can cost few $$ more than standard HDD).

synrgy87 wrote:

I like to stick to Hitachi Deskstars SATA 7k series 7200RPM drives, as personally I've found them reliable, not managed to kill one yet. but any quality drive should do really.

unless you wanna go bling n go with thw WD Raptors or Velociraptors, think they done a model of the Raptor 10k with a cutout window in it.

^this^ - Hitachi enterprise drives are awesome. You gen get brand new HGST drives if you're looking for reliability. Presonally I don't trust seagate drives and WD is a "meh" alternative.

kanecvr wrote:

^this^ - Hitachi enterprise drives are awesome. You gen get brand new HGST drives if you're looking for reliability. Presonally I don't trust seagate drives and WD is a "meh" alternative.

Don't shoot the messenger : LINK
Basicly by the end of 2017 or in early 2018, Hitachi brand may be no more :

The companies are still restricted from offering a united portfolio of products, and they must maintain both separate product lines and sales teams for two years. This provision of the merger will automatically expire in two years.

No info of how combined brands portfolio will look like (but WD in theory owns HGST so "Hitachi" may not be represented in new lineup).

agent_x007 wrote:

Don't shoot the messenger : LINK Basicly by the end of 2017 or in early 2018, Hitachi brand may be no more : […]
Show full quote

kanecvr wrote:

^this^ - Hitachi enterprise drives are awesome. You gen get brand new HGST drives if you're looking for reliability. Presonally I don't trust seagate drives and WD is a "meh" alternative.

Don't shoot the messenger : LINK
Basicly by the end of 2017 or in early 2018, Hitachi brand may be no more :

The companies are still restricted from offering a united portfolio of products, and they must maintain both separate product lines and sales teams for two years. This provision of the merger will automatically expire in two years.

No info of how combined brands portfolio will look like (but WD in theory owns HGST so "Hitachi" may not be represented in new lineup).

I know - sadly. I use HSGT drives when I have a choice in the matter.

I'll tell you what, a hybrid drive like that would be f***ing sweet in a Windows XP system. I wish they made a hybrid laptop drive in a PATA format I could use for my Dell Inspiron XPS Gen 2 laptop. I'm just stuck with a 250GB regular hard drive. Hell, I'm lucky that worked, because apparently the BIOS has a 137GB limit.

It took me two years to figure that out. I kept downloading XP updates and eventually the system would just NOT BOOT. Like, nothing I'd do short of a wipe and reload would get it to boot. At some point, the 137GB limit clicked. So I partitioned it to 40GB first, then 200+GB second and installed XP on the first 40GB partition. It's been rock stable since. *shrug*

agent_x007 wrote:

Buy WD EZEX 1TB or Seagate ST1000DM003.
If you want used : HD502HJ is good bet (Samsung F3 500GB).

SSHD learn's what to put in NAND flash with time (it's not a simple solution to all your problems also - it can cost few $$ more than standard HDD).

If i remember. Most SSHDs are 5400 rpm which means in some tasks which the SSD cache is not used. I'll be no better or even worse than a standard HDD. Also i'm not sure if Windows XP can or can't take advantage of an SSHD. I think a good/fast HDD is still the best choice for XP

Tested this a while ago 😀

Ultimate retro hard drive? Seagate SSHD

Everyone can make up their own mind, but for me, it IS the best option. Regarding 7200 rpm, just stick with 2 TB max. It's the 4 TB model only that spins slower.

Well heck. Seems like every good idea I get Phil already had... 🤣.

I'm gonna grab one.

i am using n Intel 320 SSD in my XP system. The Intel SSD toolbox will schedule the TRIM to run automatically, not that the drive gets lots of writes.

squareguy wrote:

Well heck. Seems like every good idea I get Phil already had... 🤣.

I'm gonna grab one.

Haha, yea you will love the drive. So fast.

I never quite convinced myself to buy one, but I agree the Seagate SSHD 2TB 7200rpm drive looks interesting for an "ultimate" WinXP build presuming you prefer a simple single drive setup. In general I bet it would be the fastest desktop experience you can get with 2TB on a single drive (ignoring a very expensive SSD).
The only thing that is a little disappointing about the 7200rpm Seagate SSHDs is that the mechanical side of them has mediocre access performance. Still, they're a lot better than the 5400rpm models would be. I just wish there was an SSHD with the mechanicals of a WD Black or a competitive equivalent. But given what's really available, the 2TB 7200rpm SSHD is the fastest one they'll probably ever make.
To get really picky, I also wish there was some way to instruct the drive *not* to prioritize boot speed in it's usage of the 8GB flash storage. Boot speed is an easy thing to advertise so they put a lot of emphasis on that, but I personally don't care much about it. I especially feel that way with XP which is already fast anyway, and even more yet with the dual boot of XP and Linux that I run, where the cost of optimizing both boot scenarios is doubled.
To get really nerdy, it might be cool if Seagate had an optional software utility that would permit manual tweaking to the flash algorithm. But I think Seagate likes to keep things simple and would be loathe to publish something like that to the public.

I'm a "smartalign" skeptic. I thought I read an article once which tested it and found it to be marketing fluff, but last time the conversation came up I wasn't able to find the article. I remember that alignment was shown to still affect performance on those drives. What I don't remember is whether "Smartalign" made the issue less significant than other drives, or if it was the same.
In any case, aligning partitions is easy. Just boot up with a gParted CD, check the box that says "align on 1MB boundary" and make your partitions. Then boot the WinXP CD and tell it to format the existing partition without letting it create them.

I'm not sure what the current models are, but up until recently the Toshiba MD04ACA400 (retail model PH3400U) was an awesome deal. They are the equivalent of a WD Black but they were much cheaper up until they got discontinued. The succeeding model might still be the same drive though, I think they just rebranded it. It's a 4TB drive but at the price they were selling for, they cost about the same as a 2TB Black so there was no reason not to get it anyway. The extra density of storage just meant that real world access time would be that much quicker.
Toshiba's 2TB drives are a completely different model, not comparable to a Black, their performance is just average.