HDD Overthinking?

[YedZed]

What HDD should I buy? I need at least 1 tb, for a reasonable price. Should I not bother with it and just go for the cheapest 1tb I can trust, the Toshiba 1tb desktop HDD? its like 40 bucks. Would I see significant differences with a better HDD? What might these differences be?

[Kobathor]

I have a 2TB Toshiba drive and it's fine. I can safely recommend Seagate, Toshiba, Western Digital, and Hitachi. Maybe some others but I can't remember em off the top of my head. Make sure you're getting 7200 RPM.

[YedZed]

2 minutes ago, Kobathor said:

I have a 2TB Toshiba drive and it's fine. I can safely recommend Seagate, Toshiba, Western Digital, and Hitachi. Maybe some others but I can't remember em off the top of my head. Make sure you're getting 7200 RPM.

Is there any speed difference to be noted between similar specs of different brands?

[Electronics Wizardy]

Just now, YedZed said:

Is there any speed difference to be noted between similar specs of different brands?

Normally not that much. If you want speed you get 15k hdd's or ssds.

[Kobathor]

5 minutes ago, YedZed said:

Is there any speed difference to be noted between similar specs of different brands?

Not really. As long as it's 7200 RPM there will be a negligible difference between brands.

[YedZed]

10 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Normally not that much. If you want speed you get 15k hdd's or ssds.

15k?

 

[YedZed]

3 minutes ago, huilun02 said:

Barely. Unless of course you compare s 5400rpm drive to 7200.

Else modern consumer drives in the same class perform about the same. HDDs have been perfected for a long time.

If you want more speed out of mechanical drives, you can opt to put two 500GB drives in RAID 0.

But I wouldn't recommend that unless you make regular backups.

 

There are some really fast enterprise drives out there, but they run on SAS and are prohibitively expensive.

so the only thing people really care about when chosing brands is reliability? which i hear is pretty standard throughout?

[theklax]

In terms of failure rates:

I personally wouldn't put a Toshiba in my rig, but then, I'm happy to run Seagate when many people are very against them too.

All comes down to personal experience with brands. If you want concrete numbers, there are graphs that compare different brands and models out there.

[Electronics Wizardy]

1 minute ago, YedZed said:

15k?

 

Drive RPM. Most drives are 7200 or 5400 rpm on the deskop.

 

Before ssds became fast, cheap and reliable , they used used lots of 15k driveas on raid 10 when you need fast hdds and lots of iops. 

 

These days, those drives are rare and quickly being replaced by ssds. 

 

For a dekstop hdds, these factors will determine speed.

 

-Size, the denser the data, the faster the drive.

-Speed. The faster it spins, the quicker you can get the needed data

-Platter count. More platters means more read heads, which mean more data can be read at once.

-generation. Newer drives are faster.

 

For normal use you won't notice a difference. Just buy a 2tb hdd and you will be fine.

[Electronics Wizardy]

2 minutes ago, theklax said:

In terms of failure rates:

I personally wouldn't put a Toshiba in my rig

 

3 minutes ago, YedZed said:

so the only thing people really care about when chosing brands is reliability? which i hear is pretty standard throughout?

Id personally buy what ever drive is cheap, new, and from one of the  big three making drives(toshiba, segate, and WD(owns HGST). Most of these companies have about the same failure rates, but there will always be a bad drive or batch that can screw up the numbers. 

 

I have yet to see a good source of reliablity data for hdds. Backblaze has there numbers, but its consumer drivers ran in a datacenter and the sample size is to small for many models. None of the manufactures relase numbers on rma counts.