What is the best consumer HDD for a game drive?

[theRatty]

Looking for a 5tb+ drive that I can also use for long term video storage

[emosun]

Are you just storing games on it or playing games off of it? Also what kind of games old or new?

Most hard drives including the most expensive drives will be slower than the cheapest ssd's so there's not many options if you're hoping for it to be fast. Quite literally not what the hard drive is designed to be good at.

[LIGISTX]

20 minutes ago, phatrattyy said:

Looking for a 5tb+ drive that I can also use for long term video storage

All harddirves are basically the same... any issues these days is just down to bad luck.

[YoungBlade]

For consumer grade drives? Probably either the Western Digital (WD) Blue or the Seagate Barracuda. These are your options for consumer desktop drives right now. It's not quite a duopoly, because you still have Toshiba (last I knew, anyway) but their drives are harder to find.

 

If you're getting drives for archival usage, and you don't care about going with something like WD Red or Seagate IronWolf drives meant for NAS use, then just get whichever drive offers you the most GB per unit of currency. I think right now 6TB and 8TB drives are the cheapest per GB of the sizes above 5GB, although 4GB drives are generally a bit cheaper per GB if you want to just get two of them.

[wseaton]

HGST.

 

I've had significantly better luck with this brand than others even though they are now owned by WD.

 

Backblaze stats also concur.

[Ham the Terrible]

The older WD Black drives I've had great luck with. All the old ones I've been using 6+ years with no issues.  Lately I've went with the WD Gold series. I've had great luck so far.  They are a bit higher priced than some consumer HDDs, but I feel a bit more secure about them not dying when they hit the halfway mark.  Sometimes it's worth paying a little bit more when you can.

[Mark Kaine]

On 5/20/2022 at 11:43 PM, LIGISTX said:

All harddirves are basically the same... any issues these days is just down to bad luck.

wild theory, but tested long enough to actually think its true:

 

small drives are the way to go... 2.5" 1tb/2tb is perfect. 

 

3.5" 5tb drive is just way too sluggish,  the disk is heavy,  so slow to spin up, lots of data so lots of "opportunities" to seek stuff.

 

used a 1tb toshiba SSHD for 10+ years and it was great for games specifically. (i still use it as ext backup drive)

 

however i have win 10 installed on a 2tb toshiba hdd on my laptop and there aren't any issues either,  it boots quite fast, is snappy, it even wakes up faster than an otherwise similar laptop with a Samsung nvme by 1 second.

On 5/22/2022 at 12:19 AM, Ham the Terrible said:

Sometimes it's worth paying a little bit more when you can.

definitely agree a high quality hdd is totally worth it,  doesn't even need to be "high end" though. 

 

That all said , Im super happy that my PC has only SSDs installed now, man is it overall more snappy, especially "copying..."!

 

 

ps: i have 2 "big" external hdds,  one seagate,  one toshiba... they're both sluggish as hell, i much prefer using my 2.5 drives over USB>SATA cable.