Are Hard Drives Still Worth It?

[James]

 

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We tested modern software running on older storage to see if it can still keep up with ever-increasing file sizes and demand

 

 

 

[Jalal Uddin Taj]

I think yes

[Rhebucks]

for OS and latency dependent and need to haves no, for nice to have programs, yes because more GB/$

[Arrogath]

1 minute ago, Rhebucks said:

for OS and latency dependent and need to haves no, for nice to have programs, yes because more GB/$

it almost feels like the optimal setup is 1 nvme for boot drive and standard programs, 1 nvme + 1 HDD joined/accelerated with StorageMI or similar technology for everything else. I guess you could have a lone HDD for longer term backups but I prefer externals for that personally

[Rameares]

Hard drives still serve a few purposes.

 

They are more economical, better suited to constant writing when speed is not a consideration and more reliable apart from shock/impact damage.

[SFFDesigns]

Depends on use case imo. For me, a single M.2 SSD is the way to go considering I just game (Valorant + MSFS), I'm into small form factor and don't want to have to deal with hard drives.

[GDRRiley]

yes they are, no way I'm paying 100$ a TB to store my video and photos.  I'm much happier with the 6$ a TB for used 3tb drives.

[aisle9]

Without even watching the video yet, yes. Absolutely yes. As a boot drive, no way in hell. Get yourself a decent SATA III or NVMe SSD instead, largest size you can afford. Unless you're doing things like editing huge video files or constantly transferring large files across drives (most of the users of this forum are not), a good 4TB SATA III HDD is going to be far more valuable than a 1TB low-end NVMe drive will for the same price.

 

Just boot off of the best SSD you can afford. If it has room for games and programs, cool. If not, you're going to get more mileage out of a big HDD than you will a 1TB SSD.

[Murasaki]

I've dropped a HDD before, slipped off the mount bay when I was installing it on a new case and fell on the floor. Case was on the floor itself so the drop was at max... 20cm? 

Dead. Not detected in BIOS, Windows, nada. I had it backed up so all I did was laugh it off, its crazy how fragile they can be.

[Helpful Tech Witch]

1 minute ago, Murasaki said:

I've dropped a HDD before, slipped off the mount bay when I was installing it on a new case and fell on the floor. Case was on the floor itself so the drop was at max... 20cm? 

Dead. Not detected in BIOS, Windows, nada. I had it backed up so all I did was laugh it off, its crazy how fragile they can be.

really? I've Dropped one onto carpet from about 2-3ft and it was fine. 

[Nystemy]

I personally have a couple of hard drives in my rig. Mainly for bulk storage.
I rarely find myself needing to transfer all that many files at once. So the performance drop there isn't something I mind.

 

The thing I find important is generally price per GB, and SSDs are frankly just more expensive.

Have been thinking of moving my bulk storage to a NAS, but then my network connection would be the main bottleneck making HDDs plenty fast enough.

 

In the end, my OS disk is an SSD that houses the OS and anything that insists on living on the C drive. A few things have though been moved to it that really do benefit from the higher speed it offers, other than that, everything is on HDDs.

 

So from me, yes, HDDs are worth it.
Unless it is a laptop, then SSD every day of the week.... Drive failures due to bumps is a hell I am happy to never have again.

[Murasaki]

1 minute ago, HelpfulTechWizard said:

really? I've Dropped one onto carpet from about 2-3ft and it was fine. 

Yeah, it was also still under warranty so got a new one.

[GDRRiley]

2 hours ago, Murasaki said:

Yeah, it was also still under warranty so got a new one.

I'd put that more on a DOA drive then one that died

[Luscious]

Hard drives still have two big things going for it - price and capacity. If you have more than 8TB to store you know how painful SSD pricing is. Even a few short years ago a 2TB SSD was still a thousand dollar affair. And while prices have come down, capacity demands for people continue to grow, so larger SSD's still remain expensive.

 

I remember when I built my rig I went with 7200RPM notebook drives. I have three 750GB drives in RAID0 to host my steam library. Performance is great, came out far cheaper than a 2TB SSD would have cost in 2016 and I was easy to set up since I had the spare sata ports on my mobo. Of course when I outgrow those 2TB I will most definitely get a single 4TB SSD as a replacement.

 

Media storage is a completely different type of animal. I have roughly 700 combined Blu rays and DVD's spread across four 8TB SMR drives. But instead of using RAID I use StableBit DrivePool to combine the four drives in software as one big 30TB drive with redundancy in case of a single drive disconnect/failure. It works as well as a RAID5 or RAID0 but without any of the problems those can have, especially Intel's chipset RAID.that has a nasty habit of just dropping the array whenever it pleases (the drives and ports were fine). Streaming media becomes effortless and it's actually my favorite way to watch movies with my laptop over wifi.

 

The other reason why I like StableBit DrivePool is because it's all done in software, there is no hardware to fail other than the drive itself. And since you can set up redundancy for more than one drive that becomes pretty much eliminated too. CPU usage barely takes a hit, there's no expensive raid controller to spend on, a problem sata port can be dealt with by just switching the drive to another port, and you don't need a separate battery back up module either. You also get to save a precious PCIe slot which on many systems is a big deal. When I had enough of my Intel chipset raid dropping my array all the time I created a second software array using StableBit DrivePool and just copied back my files from my daily backup to the new array. Bye bye Intel!!!

[dogwitch]

i have a mix of m.2,ssd,hdd and nas,s

[MadAnt250]

Maybe in a few years if the prices get better I will upgrade to an SSD on my setup, but for now the 7200 rpm HDD gets the job done.

[brandishwar]

Are hard drives still worth it? I don't even need to watch the video to say this: YES! Price per TB for HDDs is still unbeatable and will remain such for the foreseeable future. And combining them into a RAID setup (whether in your case or via an external enclosure) will still net pretty decent performance as well as capacity, making them a great choice for a large game or media library or on-site backups.

[whm1974]

I only use HDD for external backup drive, USB.

[Loki0111]

Obviously they are worth it for bulk storage. Anyone running a media server (Plex) is not going to run an all SSD array unless they like burning money.

 

I have 124TB worth of spinning drive space between my two servers, I don't even want to imagine what that would cost to replace with SSD's.