Hey all, press F to pay respects to my hard drive on my gaming PC, which committed seppuku earlier today in the morning. To be fair, I was tempting fate quite a bit, as I had been using the same HDD for well over 5 years now. It's likely to be a mechanical failure. Something may be salvageable if I plug it into an external cradle, but seems like there's no way I'll get it working as a boot device again (even Windows refuses to do a reinstall on it when I boot from disc). At the very least I can count myself lucky that I separated my work from gaming long ago, and there was nothing of genuine importance on that PC.

Anyway, I'm treating this as an opportunity to finally buy a new HDD and an SSD for the first time. Here's the parts list of the place I'm likely to be buying from : http://cdn.msy.com.au/Parts/PARTS.pdf. Internal HDD is straight-forward for me, but I have no idea with regards to SSDs. I'm just looking for something that functions well and is large enough to have the Windows install placed on it. Thanks in advance, and feel free to tell me anything else you think I should try to do with my PC seeing as I am already at this point.

My hard-drive died on me a few months back and so I got one of the Samsung 850 EVO SSD (500GB, so that's $205 on your pdf sheet) and I'm happy with it.

If you're buying a hard-drive though I guess you could go for the smaller sizes. I didn't put too much effort in reading up on SSD's but from what I remembered Samsung were a pretty reliable brand.

I've put Samsung EVO-series SSDs in about a dozen machines so far, and they're all working great. I'd get one that's large enough for Windows and your games, and use a regular HDD for media storage.

I've been running Samsung EVO SSDs in both my PCs (Boot drive on my NAS/Plex/game server box and my main use PC) and my girlfriend's PC. No complaints. Was using Crucial's before that, and while I never lost data on them, the firmware fiasco kind of sucked.

Right now, I've got 2x 256 GB SSD and a 1TB WD Black. My most played games are on the SSD and smaller titles/general files get tossed on the WD Black. My boot drive is sitting as an image on the NAS so if that drive goes out, I can just restore to another SSD. Anything important gets backed up to the NAS.

Well this was a timely article.

http://www.pcgamer.com/the-best-ssd-for-gaming/

Samsung SSDs have worked great for me. I have a 120GB and a 250GB drive.

Different site than you posted but I'll toss this your way.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820147372

Did someone say HOT TIP?

In all seriousness, though, go for a SSD. Samsung all the way. It's been a world of difference for me.

My Samsung EVO Pro has been treating me well. I also have a Corsair SSD that I have since my system was built in 2012 and is still going strong.

If you have a newer motherboard, you might have one of those cool new M.2 slots... which means you can leave SATA3 in the dust with one of these NVMe SSDs: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820147467

If you want to splurge: $205 for 1TB Mushkin Reactor

I figure you all deserve a bit of closure of this mini-saga, thanks a lot for the advice by the way.
Anyway, I can be a bit of a cheapskate at times, and I discovered that SSHDs are things that exist. So I just got a 2TB SeaGate SSHD. Personally, I saw little point in getting a separate SSD that I will only really be using in dumping the system files onto.