Looking for best 2tb internal drive and dock

[neworldman]

I am getting ready to buy four 2tb internal hard drives and a couple of docking stations to upgrade my HD media players (PopCorn Hour C-200 & Dune player) 2.0 & 3.0 2tb external usb hard drives. Are these any good? Looking for reliability and fast HD movie transfer speed. Have any recommendations on a good dock and internal hard drive? What is the difference between green and black WD drives? What is the difference between 64MB Cache & 32MB Cache?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=22-152-245&SortField=0&SummaryType=0&P...ab=true&Page=2

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817153071&cm_re=sata_to_esata_do...-071-_-Product

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=22-136-514&SortField=0&SummaryType=0&P...ab=true&Page=2

[edDV]

Thanks for the heads up on that Samsung 2TB $79.99 (free shipping) Newegg deal. I may buy 2.

The "green" drives emphasize power down during non-use. A major issue for DVR use is noise rating when active.

Internal drive replacement needs to match power, heat and noise specs of the original drive. Most important for power is amp draw during spin up which can kill DVR power supplies.

Cache size is unimportant for DVR duty (important for OS or server drives).

Compressed HD movies don't break 10% of drive sustained speed rating during playback even for a 5400 RPM drive. Drive sustained rate will only affect copy speed. Fast drives will be throttled by a USB2 interface. Better to mount the drives internal to the PC (SATA or eSATA) during ingest. It takes a long time to fill a 2TB drive.

[neworldman]

Thanks for the heads up on that Samsung 2TB $79.99 (free shipping) Newegg deal. I may buy 2.

The "green" drives emphasize power down during non-use. A major issue for DVR use is noise rating when active.

Internal drive replacement needs to match power, heat and noise specs of the original drive. Most important for power is amp draw during spin up which can kill DVR power supplies.

Cache size is unimportant for DVR duty (important for OS or server drives).

Compressed HD movies don't break 10% of drive sustained speed rating during playback even for a 5400 RPM drive. Drive sustained rate will only affect copy speed. Fast drives will be throttled by a USB2 interface. Better to mount the drives internal to the PC (SATA or eSATA) during ingest. It takes a long time to fill a 2TB drive.

Thanks for the info. So I won't see any difference between 32mb or 64mb Cache? I copy HD movies from my pc the drives all the time. So the fastest transfer speed would be nice. Some files are 20gb or more. These drive will be used only for storage of HD movies not any DVR functions. They then get played with my HD media player.

[edDV]

The cache only speeds up repeated requests for data. It stores the most recent requests so it doesn't have to wait for the drive to spin around and read again. None of this applies to video playback which by definition, never repeats the same data over the short term.