Internal HDD Tier List?

[kb5zue]

Subject says it all, is there a tier list for internal HDD's and if so, how can I find it, and can I print it for future reference?  Many Thanks.

[STRMfrmXMN]

It's not that complicated really. Price per GB is usually quite poor on faster drives like the Velociraptor and WD Black.

 

For 99% of people something like a Toshiba P300 or Seagate Barracuda is fine. Just check Userbenchmark if you want exact performance stats.

[Vantage9]

Do you mean a list that shows the "tiers" for each manufacturer and what they offer?  That'd be a hell of a list.  

 

It would probably help if you clarified a little bit to narrow it down by industry/focus.  Are we talking home-use storage for an active PC, or maybe a home-based NAS?  Or are you looking for more commercial/enterprise solutions like a company server or a data center?

 

My point is, you can spend a ton of money or very little, but that doesn't mean you're getting the HDD that's best for your use.

[minibois]

It kinda depends on what you are gonna do with the hard drive and what capacity you're ever. 

In terms of WD:

Blues are the simple drives, which you can get in 7200rpm and 5400rpm (7200rpm only in 1TB), Black are more high performance at higher capacities, but also more cache in some of the capacities (fast memory of the hard drive). Gold is a similar story.

Than there is Red and Purple, which are relevant for NAS and camera systems respectively.

 

The other brands have less variants, Seagate has Desktop and Barracuda which are their good performance PC drive. Than they have IronWolf and Archive which the first is for NAS and I think the latter's name speaks for itself.

 

I don't know Toshiba's and HGST's product stacks for the top off my head, but I am sure they have similar products.

 

Top put it bluntly:

Check the capacity you need

Check the speed of the drive and it's cache

Check the price per GB you're paying

Check your use (less important for basic desktop use)

And decide from that what drives make the most sense.

[PianoPlayer88Key]

I'm not seeing any mention of reliability or failure rates / likelihood.  This would be a pretty important criteria for me on a tier list.

 

Drives that consistently last a long time past the warranty would rank higher than ones that fail a lot early in life.  In fairly extreme examples, I might put an NVMe SSD that has 30% of them fail in 6 months lower on a tier list, than a 5400rpm HDD that has 80% of them still good after 10 years.