I'm starting to get a bit worried about my laptop (well, actually Tablet PC)'s hard drive, especially considering I'm getting an assortment on hard drive controller errors in the Windows Error Log every once in a while. I have an SSD in my netbook, and it's a great boon to when I toss it around or drop it, and I think an SSD would be perfect for my laptop, considering how much I carry it around and bang it about. I'm thinking of a 120GB HDD, because my current 300GB hard drive's contents will fit comfortably, even more so after I delete a few old backups and files. I see a lot of NewEgg options under 120GB and 128GB, and I have no idea where to start. I of course would like to balance price and quality, but if I have to sacrifice one thing, I'd rather sacrifice price before quality, because my data is very important to me, even though I do hourly and daily geographically-distributed backups. Any opinions or suggestions?

Also, my desktop has a 2TB Western Digital Blue hard drive, and I want a second 2TB drive to mirror it for the purpose of duplication, especially since 2TB drives tend to fail more often than smaller drives, from what I've heard. Any suggestions balancing price and quality, once again?

Edit: This SSD looks pretty solid, any thoughts?

Edit #2: This HDD is among the cheapest, and is second in terms of ratings. What gives?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227706



Sure, why not? Eco drives are terrible for RAID (the aggressive spin down on them tends to screw with RAID controllers), but otherwise looks fine.

Good thing I'm not going to be doing real RAIDing on it, then. If I was, I'd try to get an identical drive, probably. Regarding your SSD pick, what do you say to all the comments saying it causes BSODs? For example, just from the past two weeks: "Cons: Paid $300 - cost of being early adopter. Freezes on daily basis -- sometimes 1-3min, sometimes requires reboot. 1000s of same horror stories on OCZ forum. If daring enough to try firmware upgrade, seems very complicated and very, very time consuming."

I say why the hell are you reading newegg comments?

So I looked it up, looks like there is a potential bug in the Sanforce controller. Bad news? The vast majority of SSDs use the same controller. The good news? Looks pretty rare and OCZ ships firmware updates pretty quickly.

But if you don't want to risk it at all, your only real option is the Intel 510 series: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820167042 But that said, the 120gb 510 series is slower than the 240 one, which is then slower than the Vertex 3. Of course, they are all smashing up against the limits of SATA 3GB anyway, so unless you have SATA 6GB you might not care about that.

Wait, you don't bother reading NewEgg comments? Well, I guess I'll get the one that you suggested, then, and run a firmware ungrade on it.

*bump* What do you think of this one?

http://www.jr.com/crucial/pe/CRT_CT128M4SSD2/

The m4 is a pretty good drive. That's a pretty good price, too.

Indeed, only problem is they don't have it in stock in their store at the moment. They have a $15 off any purchase over $150 until Tuesday, so that would be great.

OK, so I can get the Vertex 3 for $199 (random sale?!) or the Crucial m4 for $193. Which one should I go for?

I have a pair of Crucial RealSSDs in my computer right now and have been happy with the performance of them. I doubt your laptop is going to be able to take advantage of the 6gbps of SATAIII, so you might even be able to save some money by picking up one on SATAII and not see a real difference in performance between either setup.

Flip a coin

@rivereye: The newer SATAIII drives are still faster than the old SATAII drives, and more importantly they have new tricks and improvements to things like wear leveling, TRIM, and even compression.

Alright then, my mistake. My drives are SATAIII drives anyways, but my desktop also has the SATAIII Ports.

Well, Paypal magically decided my address is unconfirmed, so NewEgg is out until I can resolve that, which leaves me with J & R and the m4. Unfortunately, I have to pay tax, since it's in-state, but a 2TB HDD and a 128GB SSD for <$300 is still pretty sweet, if you ask me.