Recommend me an hdd for gaming please

[Shutendouji]

As the title says, I am looking for an hdd recommendation. What I want mostly is 4tb of space to keep most of my games on and everything else like music, movies, etc, maybe 5 or 6tb if it stays within the price range. Would like it to have 256mb cache on it for my games, from what I understand it doesnt really affect gaming performance but rather load times, which is why i would like that much cache. 128mb cache will also be fine if 256mb makes it too expensive. Speaking of price, I am willing to spend around $150 on the drive. Also just to throw this out there, please do not suggest the wd black 4tb with 256mb cache, that drive is terrible, I went through 4 drives in a little over 1 month and they were all DOA, in order to make it usable, i had to unplug the sata power cable and plug it back in the drive for it to turn on properly every time i booted my pc. I have tried many things to fix it and tested everything just about, nothing works so no thanks on that one, dont think i can use another WD drive after that hellish experience. Im not too fond of seagate either since I had a couple of their external drives and both died inside of a year which wasnt pleasant. I dont know how reliable their drives are now but if they have improved since then, which was about 8 or so years ago btw, then i may give them another chance. Apologies for the rant there but if anyone has any recommendations, it would be most appreciated, thank you.

 

edit:Just a note, in case you ask why not get an ssd if i want performance, I am already using an m.2 NVMe 1tb addlink s70, and i do have games installed that I want to have performance on. It's been very nice so far and no complaints.

[Electronics Wizardy]

The cache in a hdd doesn't really matter, don't look too much into that

 

going through 4 drives seems like its anouther issues, extremly unlikely its the drives.

 

Id just get a 4tb barracuda, its smr, but that shouldn't matter here.

[Bazzzza]

Just get some cheap western digital drive use pc part picker and use filters to find what u want 

[Shutendouji]

11 minutes ago, NZgamer said:

What country are you in? What countries dollar? Over 20 use the dollar so just saying "$" is very vague

Apologies, I am located in the US, so am using US dollars

[Shutendouji]

7 minutes ago, NZgamer said:

I set my PCPP to USA and went to the HDD section and put in your criteria and these two drives came up

https://pcpartpicker.com/product/kJfmP6/toshiba-internal-hard-drive-hdwe150xzsta

https://pcpartpicker.com/product/YVhKHx/toshiba-s300-6-tb-35-7200rpm-internal-hard-drive-hdwt360uzsvar

I may consider that toshiba 5th, I will take a look at these.

23 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

The cache in a hdd doesn't really matter, don't look too much into that

 

going through 4 drives seems like its anouther issues, extremly unlikely its the drives.

 

Id just get a 4tb barracuda, its smr, but that shouldn't matter here.

out of curiosity, what makes you say that the drives aren't the problem?

[seagate_surfer]

With respect to the waiting time when the video game is loaded, this is the only thing that is affected when using an HDD. If you were to have an SSD, the waiting times would be shorter but nothing more, the performance of a video game really depends on other components of the machine, so don't worry too much about the HDD, if you don't want to wait a few more seconds, you can use an SSHD instead, but if you want to wait even less to enter the game you definitely need an SSD. Do not worry about the FPS when selecting the type of storage, as it does not make the difference between one and the other, only shorter waiting times...

[seagate_surfer]

5 minutes ago, Abyssal Radon said:

Hahaha, that is not the case anymore. There are a lot of games that can experience performance degradation from a HDD. Games constantly streaming in assets can perform better with an SSD. Considering games are getting larger, there is somewhat of a need for HDD's, but with how slow they are these days SSD's are a must IMO. 

I would love to see an FPS improvement when I use my internal SSD, I would love to...

[Electronics Wizardy]

29 minutes ago, Shutendouji said:

out of curiosity, what makes you say that the drives aren't the problem?

The chance of a doa failures is something like 1%, to see a 1% chance 4 times in a row is like .000001% of the time. Another issue is much more likely

 

[Shutendouji]

 

24 minutes ago, seagate_surfer said:

With respect to the waiting time when the video game is loaded, this is the only thing that is affected when using an HDD. If you were to have an SSD, the waiting times would be shorter but nothing more, the performance of a video game really depends on other components of the machine, so don't worry too much about the HDD, if you don't want to wait a few more seconds, you can use an SSHD instead, but if you want to wait even less to enter the game you definitely need an SSD. Do not worry about the FPS when selecting the type of storage, as it does not make the difference between one and the other, only shorter waiting times...

I am not really concerned to much about fps, i always thought thats more of a gpu/cpu thing rather than an hdd issue. If i had a choice id love to get a 4tb ssd, but the price point for one is not exactly ideal, which is why im going for an hdd. 

[AndrewJB]

Have you considered getting a 4TB Datacentre grade hard drive?

[RejZoR]

Buy whatever HDD because ultimately, they are all equally crappy slow. Also buy PrimoCache (around 30 bucks) and then use the NVMe SSD that you already have as cache for it. You'll have a massive storage capacity that will essentially behave like SSD. It'll dynamically cache stuff from HDD to SSD, meaning you'll just install games on HDD and not worry if it should be installed on SSD or HDD. It'll just always be on HDD and SSD will do the heavy lifting for you automatically via PrimoCache. It's all seamless and it just works. You can thank me later

 

I'm starting to repeat myself and by now it must look like I'm shilling PrimoCache. I'm just doing that because I actually used it this way for many years and it worked amazingly well. It's just a shame how underrated and little known hybrid storage is. Probably partially SSHD fault with its garbage worthless 8GB caches... I was using 256GB cache and I had hard time populating it with 2TB HDD. You'll have 1TB cache. You can even just use 512GB if you want, it should still be tons of cache with minimal wear impact on SSD.