Where can I find the HDD Tier List?

[DanielMDA]

So, I know a member of the forum made a tier list of hard drive disks, but I can´t find it ans I dont remember his/her name. Could please someone link it to me?

[Electronics Wizardy]

its really not a great list. it really depends on what your doing with the drive.

[Oshino Shinobu]

I don't think anyone has. At least, not one that's comprehensive enough to be referenced a lot. It's also pretty difficult to make one that's actually useful, as drives that are good for one thing can be crap at something else. 

 

There's an SSD tier list 

 

 

 

[DanielMDA]

1 minute ago, Oshino Shinobu said:

I don't think anyone has. At least, not one that's comprehensive enough to be referenced a lot. It's also pretty difficult to make one that's actually useful, as drives that are good for one thing can be crap at something else. 

 

There's an SSD tier list 

 

 

 

I saw it for a second, but I cant remember the users name, thanks for this though.

[Mooshi]

We're comparing slow to more slow..not very exciting. There isn't much of a difference between standard 7200rpm drives to feel in real world use.

[PianoPlayer88Key]

Imo, a HDD tier list should focus more on reliability, rather than performance.

 

For example, the Seagate ST3000DM001 and Deskstar 75GXP would fall in one of the bottom tiers.

 

Any HDD that's NOT at least as reliable as Backblaze says HGST drives are would be in a not-recommended tier.  (As in, "run away like Satan himself is chasing you!")

 

Drives that prove they still work after nearly 20 years, or that start to die (click of death) then resurrect themselves with no loss of data, would possibly get honorable mention.  (I have drives that meet both those criteria.)

 

HDDs that survive being dropped while accessing data, with no ill effects, would be in one of the top tiers.

 

[Pyramiden]

Maybe even have 2 different charts. One for reliability and one for performance.
Especially the performance can be easily measured, and I think there are rather big differences. A WD Gold drive is in a completely different class of performance compared to a simple Toshiba ACA300.

Reliability is more difficult... By the time you have discovered which drives are reliable, they can already be out of production...
It would be interesting to keep stats of all the forum members on their drives:
1. Is the drive used as a boot drive, data drive, or is it inside a NAS/Server?
2. How long has it been alive?
3. Other data, like average temps, power-on hours, etc.

[seagate_surfer]

It's an interesting discussion. The trouble is that with different hard drives come different use-cases. Is it going in a console? Gaming tower? Laptop? Primary drive or secondary for bulk storage? NAS? Enterprise? Cost-effective for what it does? How many hours a day does it need to be spinning?

A lot of questions. For example, our SkyHawk drive can either be a great drive for your needs or be incredibly slow depending on what the need is. If you're putting together a surveillance camera system and recording it to look at later, it's definitely something we'd recommend. If you're building something to play games like Fortnite, PUBG, etc. on, then we'd likely recommend something else because reads would be slow for that situation. Likewise, the same firmware that makes our IronWolf fantastic for NAS/RAID arrays can also make it not ideal for non-RAID desktop use. You'd almost need a separate list or section of list for each common use-case of a hard drive and which drives fit those well.

We have 2 big rules-of-thumb with storage in general:

1. Always use any hard drive for the purpose it was engineered for
2. Always, always back up your data.

[DanielMDA]

9 hours ago, seagate_surfer said:

It's an interesting discussion. The trouble is that with different hard drives come different use-cases. Is it going in a console? Gaming tower? Laptop? Primary drive or secondary for bulk storage? NAS? Enterprise? Cost-effective for what it does? How many hours a day does it need to be spinning?

A lot of questions. For example, our SkyHawk drive can either be a great drive for your needs or be incredibly slow depending on what the need is. If you're putting together a surveillance camera system and recording it to look at later, it's definitely something we'd recommend. If you're building something to play games like Fortnite, PUBG, etc. on, then we'd likely recommend something else because reads would be slow for that situation. Likewise, the same firmware that makes our IronWolf fantastic for NAS/RAID arrays can also make it not ideal for non-RAID desktop use. You'd almost need a separate list or section of list for each common use-case of a hard drive and which drives fit those well.

We have 2 big rules-of-thumb with storage in general:

1. Always use any hard drive for the purpose it was engineered for
2. Always, always back up your data.

OMG! A Seagate employee! I love your Drives! Barracuda and FireCuda are great! Hey, question, can you put two FireCudas in Raid or a FireCuda with an Optane accelerator? (Just for science)

[seagate_surfer]

13 hours ago, DanielMDA said:

OMG! A Seagate employee! I love your Drives! Barracuda and FireCuda are great! Hey, question, can you put two FireCudas in Raid or a FireCuda with an Optane accelerator? (Just for science)

Cheers & thanks for the support. We love that you love them.

With the FireCuda, you technically can put them in RAID or use an Intel Optane module. You just likely wouldn't see as much result as you'd hope for, the idea behind RAIDing 2x FireCudas being that you'd hope it would "stack" the SSD caches of the 2 drives and give you double the SSD caching performance effect, the problem is the firmware & controller don't really know how to do this. Same concept applies to using an Intel Optane module with the FireCuda. If you're going to be investing in an Optane module, it may actually just be a more cost-effective solution to pair it with BarraCuda because of how the firmware works together.

Check out this YouTube vid from ZONEofTECH for more info: 
 

 

SSD Performance + HDD Capacity

[DanielMDA]

On 4/27/2018 at 10:03 AM, seagate_surfer said:

Cheers & thanks for the support. We love that you love them.

With the FireCuda, you technically can put them in RAID or use an Intel Optane module. You just likely wouldn't see as much result as you'd hope for, the idea behind RAIDing 2x FireCudas being that you'd hope it would "stack" the SSD caches of the 2 drives and give you double the SSD caching performance effect, the problem is the firmware & controller don't really know how to do this. Same concept applies to using an Intel Optane module with the FireCuda. If you're going to be investing in an Optane module, it may actually just be a more cost-effective solution to pair it with BarraCuda because of how the firmware works together.

Check out this YouTube vid from ZONEofTECH for more info: 
 

 

SSD Performance + HDD Capacity

Hey, final question, if I have a FireCuda SSHD, will it work with AMD`s StoreMI or Entomus FuzeDrive?

[seagate_surfer]

1 hour ago, DanielMDA said:

Hey, final question, if I have a FireCuda SSHD, will it work with AMD`s StoreMI or Entomus FuzeDrive?

These appear to be software-based solutions for utilizing an SSD to speed up a HDD. The firmware of the FireCuda is already designed to do this on its own, as the FireCuda intuitively takes the data you access most frequently and places that on the SSD cache to speed it up. So, ultimately hose solutions seem to be for if you have a separate SSD and HDD, while the FireCuda is one drive which has firmware that does this on its own.

[DanielMDA]

7 minutes ago, seagate_surfer said:

These appear to be software-based solutions for utilizing an SSD to speed up a HDD. The firmware of the FireCuda is already designed to do this on its own, as the FireCuda intuitively takes the data you access most frequently and places that on the SSD cache to speed it up. So, ultimately hose solutions seem to be for if you have a separate SSD and HDD, while the FireCuda is one drive which has firmware that does this on its own.

But theoretically, would a FireCuda function properly when paired with an SSD on one of those softwares?