Hey! So after a couple weeks of avoiding spending my beer money, I've finally decided to get my bad sector ridden HDD replaced - it's a Toshiba, and it's worked very reliably for the past couple of years, no bad experiences whatsoever. Since this laptop's already a couple years old and will probably only last another year or so, I don't really want to push the boat out too much for the replacement drive, but I would like to get something with decent performance to cut down on the excruciating load times that our beloved Sims series is known for. I've looked around on Newegg and at various review sites, and Western Digital's latest line, the black series in particular (which has a very nice 7600 RPM and 16MB cache) seems well-priced and has an inviting five-year warranty - however, I've also read plenty about frequent failures after a few months and lots of DOA drives from them, which makes me wonder if maybe their QA is slipping. I've also heard good things about Samsung drives, and I do like Samsung's products in general, but I've never experienced any of their lovely offerings. I've had mostly Toshibas (current model is Toshiba MQ01ABD075, basic 5400 RPM and 8MB cache), and my last laptop had a chronically bad Seagate HDD that I had replaced under warranty four times before they just gave me a different model laptop for free, so I am wary of all the recommendations I've seen for a Seagate model. I'm not too well versed in the disk drive field, so any recommendations would be nice - I only need 500 GB, and keep it under $70 if you'd kindly!

I've also heard lots of great things about hybrid HDDs, but all of the models I have seen so far only have 8 GB of NAND memory, which makes me wonder how good the performance gain for The Sims will really be? From what I can tell, it should help TS2's long initial load screen a little, and TS3's long world load times a little less, since the files causing the long load are used less often, but what about TS4? TS3 takes a while to load each world because they tend to be several hundred megabytes in size, not to mention the ~2 GB cache files for each world, but TS4 takes a while to load a single *lot* - why does TS4 have these seemingly unnecessarily long loading times, what files is it loading and how could a mere 8 GB of NAND help?

I guess I went on a bit of a tangent there, sorry! tl;dr: recommend me a fast, reliable ~500 GB HDD for under $70. Scared of Seadrive, Toshiba OK, Western Digital Black Series and Samsung worthwhile?

Western Digital Black 750GB:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...N82E16822236561 ($61.99)

or

Seagate Hybrid 1TB + 8GB ($79.99):

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...N82E16822178340

I personally would just get the WD Black. Or even a cheaper and lower capacity WD Blue/Green and just live with the slow load times until you replace the laptop.

Thanks, I settled on the WD Black. Should be here Monday!