Advice needed for buying new hard drive.

[dafoe]

I just picked up a Popcorn Hour on Ebay. Now I'm looking for an internal Sata drive.
I was going to go with the Seagate Barracuda because it was the only 1.5 TB I could find. I saw one at newegg for $130- which is pretty much my limit. But after reading all the bad reviews and issues with this drive bricking, I decided to settle for 1tb.

I don't have any preference as to manufacturer other than Maxtor. I've had several problems with Maxtor drives. Maybe I'm just unlucky and they were just flukes. But I'm never buyimg Maxtor again.

I narrowed it down to two drives: A Hitachi and a Samsung. One has a 16mb cache and the other has a 32mb cache. Will this make a big difference? The drive is going to be the internal drive for my Popcorn hour. I plan to watch DVD isos from the internal drive.

I narowed it down based on price, since I know nothing about sata drives. Any suggestions would be appreciated. I plan on ordering by Monday.

[Soopafresh]

Poor Seagate. Lots of layoffs over there as well. The 1.5TB drives aren't supposed to be problematic, but the 1TB ones are.

[GKar]

Tom's Hardware has a couple of things for you to look at:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/hdd-terabyte-1tb,2077.html

Performance Charts:

http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/hard-drives,3.html

[greymalkin]

I decided to settle for 1tb

i never thought i'd see this day

[TooLFooL]

get the 32mb!...

i too went with 2 1TBs after reading the bad reviews on the 1.5's, but i have recently discovered the 1TB have a f/w update available as they are also bricking randomly.