Any good deals for 7200rpm 4TB 3.5 hard-drives? (EU)

[Mark Kaine]

It's like black Friday and cyber Monday don't exist anymore... I can't find anything!

 

Maybe except that X300 for 100 euros,  but I'm not sure it's regular price or what.  Seems definitely cheaper than comparable drives from other brands? 

 

But yeah if someone knows some good deals for 4TB 7200rpm drives,  hook me up please!  

 

 

[Juular]

https://de.pcpartpicker.com

[mariushm]

You could look at external drives. For example WD 4 TB Elements is 73 uk pounds on Amazon UK : https://www.amazon.co.uk/WD-Elements-Portable-Hard-Drive/dp/B0713WPGLL/ - That's 85 euro ... but inside it's either WD Green or WD Blue.

 

If you hurry (2 hours left on the sale) you can get an 8 TB drive: Seagate 8 TB Expansion Amazon Special Edition USB 3.0 Desktop External Hard Drive for PC, Xbox One and PlayStation 4 (STGY8000400)

 

They're regular SATA drives inside, but they're SMR (shingled magnetic recording) ... which means slow writes but reasonable read speeds... for storing games it's good enough at that price.

[Mark Kaine]

2 hours ago, Juular said:

https://de.pcpartpicker.com

Heh,  thanks, but I'm not seeing anything that looks like a bargain,  the x300 is even more expensive for example.  It just doesn't look like there are any deals but at least I now can conclude that 100 is really cheap for that drive (x300 4tb)

1 hour ago, mariushm said:

You could look at external drives. For example WD 4 TB Elements is 73 uk pounds on Amazon UK : https://www.amazon.co.uk/WD-Elements-Portable-Hard-Drive/dp/B0713WPGLL/ - That's 85 euro ... but inside it's either WD Green or WD Blue.

 

If you hurry (2 hours left on the sale) you can get an 8 TB drive: Seagate 8 TB Expansion Amazon Special Edition USB 3.0 Desktop External Hard Drive for PC, Xbox One and PlayStation 4 (STGY8000400)

 

They're regular SATA drives inside, but they're SMR (shingled magnetic recording) ... which means slow writes but reasonable read speeds... for storing games it's good enough at that price.

Thanks but it'd really need to be reasonable fast as I'll record a lot, also prefer internal,  don't like having stuff laying around

[mariushm]

Just now, Mark Kaine said:

 

Thanks but it'd really need to be reasonable fast as I'll record a lot, also prefer internal,  don't like having stuff laying around

You can open the case and take out the hard drive. They're regular SATA drives with a tiny board that converts SATA into USB.

 

I agree though that a SMR drive would not be good for recording continuously. There are however other drives like the wd deal which is regular mechanical drive which would be suitable.

[Juular]

6 hours ago, Mark Kaine said:

Heh,  thanks, but I'm not seeing anything that looks like a bargain,  the x300 is even more expensive for example.  It just doesn't look like there are any deals but at least I now can conclude that 100 is really cheap for that drive (x300 4tb)

Thanks but it'd really need to be reasonable fast as I'll record a lot, also prefer internal,  don't like having stuff laying around

There's NAS drives for about the same price tho, they're designed for continuous operation at least. WD Purple\Red, Seagate SkyHawk\IronWolf NAS all for ~110 EUR. Also, from my experience, Toshiba\HGST drives are rather loud if that matters for you.

[dgsddfgdfhgs]

4tb range , no deals

8tb range >> WD HGST goldstar, roughly 2x 4tb wd blue

[GDRRiley]

X300s are some great drives.

[Mark Kaine]

1 hour ago, Juular said:

There's NAS drives for about the same price tho, they're designed for continuous operation at least. WD Purple\Red, Seagate SkyHawk\IronWolf NAS all for ~110 EUR. Also, from my experience, Toshiba\HGST drives are rather loud if that matters for you.

I see,  though those are 5400rpm  probably also why they're more silent. 

This site is interesting, it's good for comparisons sake for sure, but I have the feeling they're not that great for Germany, usually Geizhals is reliable, and maybe idealo. And yeah hearing about loudness was the only thing holding me back - I really wish they'd make my Toshiba 5400rpm SSHD in higher capacities... The thing is *very* silent cheap and fast, unfortunately they only made them up to 1TB...

 

 

anyway here's what I found on partpicker. 

7200rpm, between 64-118 euros

(the 64-118 is randomly picked since max I want to pay is ~100)

 

And interestingly the x300 is far from the best offer since it's available from several sellers around €100.  

 

I have no idea if the other Toshiba for 104 is any good though? 

 

54 minutes ago, dgsddfgdfhgs said:

4tb range , no deals

8tb range >> WD HGST goldstar, roughly 2x 4tb wd blue

I see yeah, I noticed this, just sadly over my budget. 

 

44 minutes ago, GDRRiley said:

X300s are some great drives.

Yeah so I hear (well I hope not to hear it lol)  

 

[GDRRiley]

52 minutes ago, Mark Kaine said:

Yeah so I hear (well I hope not to hear it lol)

They aren't the quietest drives but my 5TB does about 200mbs consistent over long writes.

[Krovikan]

- Drive RPM is not a performance measurement anymore. With larger capacity drives, the data is more dense meaning more can be read at a given RPM. 

 

-For reasons beyond me, external drives are significantly cheaper than internal and you can remove the drive for internal use. Google the external drive to try find out what is inside. I recently purchased a WD Elements 8TB for $249 (AUD) and the internal drive is actually a HSGT that retails here for about twice that. Its now been shucked and is my main media storage drive

[Mark Kaine]

5 hours ago, Krovikan said:

Drive RPM is not a performance measurement anymore. With larger capacity drives, the data is more dense meaning more can be read at a given RPM. 

Is it really? I got the recommendation to get 7200 when I'm planning to do a lot of recordings,  which I do... But I'm totally not sure either as I'm currently using my Toshiba SSHD with 5400rpm for that and it's working fine, except a very short pause while saving which only affects Shadow Play and not the game itself though... 

 

It would be more ideal currently to save the recorded files on my Seagate Barracuda, but that is for some reason causing me issues (slowdowns), hence I'm looking for a new drive and I'm running out of space anyhow... 

 

 

Btw Shadow Play setup is currently:

 

> temp file on Samsung Evo 860 OS drive 

> save recordings on Toshiba SSHD 

 

No issues,  but when I use the Seagate to save, as mentioned,  I'll get slowdowns 

 

Game is installed on a completely different drive,  a Kingston A400 (which after some tinkering doesn't give me any issues currently) 

 

 

So, tldr,  5400rpm really enough to record,  and eventually also play games on at the same time? 

[mariushm]

A modern mechanical drive can sustain more than 100 MB/s throughout its whole surface.

At one end of the platters you may get up to 260-280 MB/s and as the disk heads move towards the other end, the speed gradually goes down towards the 100 MB/s.

 

When you save a stream with Shadowplay you're most likely recording at 10-40 mbps, which is 1-5 MB/s ... really, all mechanical drives can handle that. Even if it records at 100-200 mbps, that's around 10-25 MB/s... no big deal.

 

You really only need 7200 rpm drives if you want to capture RAW HD or 4K at 50-100 MB/s sustained

 

Your problem may be that the hard drive is fragmented, meaning the files on your mechanical drive are in lots of small chunks spread all over the surface of the drive. So, when you're trying to save to the mechanical drive, from time to time the disk heads have to jump to other areas with free space and resume writing.

You can use a defragmenting tool like O&O Defrag which has the option to defragment free disk space.

Basically, instead of defragmenting files making them a single segment for each file, in that mode the defragmenting tool can squeeze all fragments together, making a big huge area of free disk space, where the software can continuously write data without disk heads having to move in random places.