Hard drive selection

[United_Chi]

I recently build my new pc for blackfriday/cybermonday and it's up and running. 3800x, aorus elite, 2080 super, 16gb 3600, etc.

The only thing I kept from my old rig was my hard drives.

 

I have

2tb - mechanical hard drive 7200rpm

1tb - mechanical hard drive 7200rpm

500gb - ssd

 

I figure it's time to look into what I should consider upgrading to. I would like a m.2 drive just for my operating system. Cheap, fast and small.

I'm looking into the various hard drives 8-10gb 7200rpm, and 256 cache.

Any specific brand ya'll would recommend or are they all pretty much the same?

 

Barracuda https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07H24QRS4/ref=twister_B082N7LKKK?_encoding=UTF8&th=1 8tb 256$

Ironwolf https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07D962J5R/ref=twister_B082N7RMDC?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1 8tb 224$

WD Gold https://www.amazon.com/Gold-Enterprise-Class-Internal-Drive/dp/B07XGDNZXT/ref=sr_1_27?keywords=8tb+hard+drive&qid=1578075473&s=electronics&sr=1-27 8tb 256$ (Identical to wd black just larger size?)

etc.

 

Thoughts?

[United_Chi]

P.S. 

I currently have windows on the first 1tb hard drive (That originally came with the computer). I've placed my favorite games on the 500gb SSD.

Basically is it worth it? Should I just move windows to the ssd and deal with it? 

[Viper9]

It doesn't make sense to put your games on your SSD and Windows on your HDD... 

 

You can use the SSD you already have or buy a new one but at the end of the day just make sure you install Windows on the SSD. 

[minibois]

I would go for a Barracuda (Compute) or WD Black. The WD drives are often significantly overpriced for similar performance though. It's probably best to just get a Seagate and run a backup (which you should always do).

 

The reason I don't recommend server/NAS drives for a desktop PC is because the protection of the drive and desktop don't line up. From talking to a colleague of mine I heard some really interesting info. Long story short, if a NAS drive encounters an issue, it will try to fix it itself. The PC doesn't expect a drive to do it and might - falsely - 'accuse' it of being broken and that could corrupt the data.

That is why I recommend a WD Black or Seagate Barracuda.

 

The WD Blue drives are quieter, but slower.

 

It is also definitely worth it to load Windows from an SSD and certain games do have advantages from running from an SSD too. I would never recommend running Windows (or larger programs) from a HDD at this day and age.

[ToastyBear]

Read/Write speed of HDDs these days are pretty much all the same. It all depends on their data density. Something like a 10TB would read at something like 250MB/s sustained with a seek time of 4.17s. I think they have that stat across the board. 

 

The only notable difference is price and failure rate. BlackBlaze publishes failure rates of their hard drives each year and they have tens of thousands of hard drives so you get an accurate statistic. They of course don't run every single hard drive but you do get some insights since many hard drives are just consumer variants of their enterprise hard drives.

 

The Seagate Ironwolf Pro for example is just the consumer variant of the Seagate Exos enterprise drive and the WD black is the consumer variant of the WD Gold.  Those are pretty good but I think the best hard drives in terms of reliability is the Toshiba MG and the Hitachi Ultrastar, both are enterprise lines. 

 

Since Hitachi got bought out by WD they have since discontinued their Deskstar line which is their consumer variant of the Ultrastar. But Toshiba does sell the N300 which is just the consumer variant of their MG enterprise line. 

 

Before, enterprise drives have exclusive features like vibration sensors and RAID friendly firmware. Now these days these NAS variants have the exact same features. The main difference is warranty coverage. Because they are so similar, price is often similar as well. Sometimes I see the Ironwolf Pro being sold for MORE than the Exos line. 

 

I personally bought 6 of the Toshiba N300 recently because it was CHEAP. It was that or the Seagate Enterprise line which I have used for many years. I put my drives in RAID anyway.