HDD Alternatives

[Guest]

I currently have the WD Black 1TB drive for my storage, but I'm wandering if there were any cheaper alternative that can provide the same or similar performance as the WD Drive.

[socks&sandals]

If you want a WD CAVIAR BLUE and SEAGATE BARRACUDA are nice options, not as fast but £15 cheaper

[Oshino Shinobu]

WD Blue and Seagate Barracuda are the best options in terms of price to performance. 

[jools]

hgst enterprise

 

[mariushm]

WD black is at 7200 rpm and in theory is more reliable and has a longer warranty.

WD blues are 5400 rpm and if i'm not mistaken they have older generation platters, with less density of data per inch.

So less throughput and higher latency for wd blue compared to wd blue. Also in theory the firmware in wd blacks is more optimized for low access times and to work better in raid configurations, wd blues are aimed for standalone.

 

Yeah, for plain storage WD blue would be enough, you don't need super fast access to bits of data to watch a movie or play some songs. Even for loading games, a WD Black won't make much difference.

Some Seagate drives would also work, but I personally wouldn't use them. They had series of drives with high failure rates in the past, 

 

I'm probably a special case, since I keep my computers running 24/7 .. my oldest drive in the computer is a 1TB WD Black with 52784 hours of operation or over 6 years of running almost 24/7 ... had only one WD Green which developed bad sectors during its warranty and was replaced with new one, and a 2TB Seagate still in my system has a bunch of bad sectors but it's not degrading so it works fine.

If I had a choice, I'd buy WD over Seagate. I'd be comfortable buying Blue or Black over Seagate drives.

 

These days, I prefer HGST NAS models, as they seem to run a bit cooler and handle vibrations better and just work, it's more expensive but they last a long time in my computer.

 

[Guest]

21 hours ago, wrathoftheturkey said:

The Black is a really bad value seeing as it's only a bit faster than a WD Blue and for the same price you could usually get a WD Blue AND an SSD

I have and SSD for my boot drive, but my initial impressions were the wd black a pretty good performance boost compared to the blue. 

[Guest]

2 hours ago, wrathoftheturkey said:

Not really, no. The disk spins faster but it doesn't translate to that much of a performance increase

Ok. Thanks, you just saved me some money