Looking to replace HDDs in gaming PC

[Kitsune Aoi]

I currently have 1.5TB Seagate Barracuda 7200 RPM ST31500341AS for my general games drive and a 1TB Wester Digital Red 5400 RPM WD10EFRX drive for my steam collection. I am looking at consolidating them to a single 6TB drive. The 2 drives I was debating between are the Seagate IronWolf ST6000VN0033 6TB 7200 RPM 256MB Cache or the Seagate BarraCuda ST6000DM003 6TB 5400 RPM 256MB Cache. The 6 TB Barracuda Pro is out of my budget range, The 2 I am debating between are around the $220-$240 CAD range currently for new drives.

 

My drives it is to replace are almost full and beginning to show signs of dieing after 8 years of operational hours on them. Also as I have slower internet I only uninstall games if I absolutely will not be playing them anytime soon. My computer is almost always on so was leaning towards the Ironwolf drive, but looking for opinions on if that drive would hinder the games I play at all over the specific 5400 Barracuda at a $20 price difference.

 

Some of the larger capacity games I play regularly on my pc are: Fallout 4, Elder Scrolls Online, Skyrim Special Edition, Warframe, The Old Republic, Mechwarrior Online, World of Tanks, World of Warships, Age of Conan, Conan Exiles, Secret World Legends, Lord of the Rings Online, Dungeons and Dragons Online, Everquest 2, Black Desert online, Monster Hunter World, Ghost Recon Wildlands, The Division, Star Trek Online, Defiance, Battletech, DC Universe Online, Destiny 2, Diablo 3, Neverwinter (MMO), Shadow of Mordor, Saints Row IV, Saints Row the Third, Mass Effect 3, Eve Online, Guild Wars 2, Aion, Blade and Sword, and Life is Feudal.

 

I pretty much use my pc as a whole home entertainment system. I use it for gaming, watching DVDs, Listening to music, streaming my gameplay, chatting with friends in the city that I can't see anymore. It is my primary way of keeping my sanity being stuck in the house due to health issues being unable to get out of the house for anything other than medical appointments while living in a real small town in the middle of Alberta.

 

Very limited income so have to wait for replacing the 500GB system 7200rpm HDD with a 500GB SSD for my machine as the failing games drives replacement is of a higher priority.

 

Current system is a Ryzen 5 1600X, 16GB of 2666 HyperX Fury DDR4, with an ASUS RX-480-O4G. My Main thing is that the HDD is New, gives me the Capacity I need to last me a few years, and is around the $250 CAD or less after taxes without hindering my load times on my games which have been getting drastically worse over the last year on the 2 current drives.

 

So Am I better off with the 7200 RPM Ironwolf or a 5400 RPM Barracuda drive if both have the same cache size of 256MB and 6TB capacity when if comes to the games I play? 

[Electronics Wizardy]

Id get the ironwolf. The barracuda is smr and will be a good amount slower and since prices are simmilar, the ironwolf is the better bet.-

[Gdog]

Can I ask, why do you want a 6TB drive? You could get a smaller drive and an SSD with your budget.

[seagate_surfer]

The IronWolf is more designed for NAS usage and the BarraCuda for what you describe. The BarraCuda 3TB drive is a 7200 drive in case you are interested. Thanks for considering Seagate! Please feel free to ask if you run into any questions on the hard drive.

[Kitsune Aoi]

Reason for the 6TB size is that with the 1TB and 1.5TB drives that I am replacing are being consolidated to a single games drive and with my very slow internet speed downloading a game every few months when I want to play it again isn't worth eating up all my internet speed for a day an not being able to do anything else on the net. 

 

As an example when I downloaded Fallout 4 I had to set the speed at 256 kb/s just so that I could watch netflix and it took me almost 2 full days to download the game even with removing the limit when I went to bed. So I do not uninstall games that I am likely to play again in a few months. The current 2 drives are both failing on me. (Lots of clicking coming from both when I play my games) Both of the drives they are both at 10% free space currently and I have a few other games I have been wanting to play but no space and all the installed games I still play frequently as I am unable to get out of the house due to respiratory complications so lots of time to play games and watch videos. Since I have a very limited income ($145 CAD every 3 months for spending money currently) I am wanting to be sure I have a large enough HDD to last me a couple years.

 

Since last year sping/summer I managed to get enough saved from the quarterly spending money to get the Deepcool Ice Blade 200M cooler to replace the old Stock Phenom II 965 Black edition cooler last October plus bought the Ryzen 5 1600X for less than the 1600 was at that time from saving the money for 6 months and ordering them when the 3rd quarter came in, Then got the ASUS B350 Plus and 8GB of ddr4 2666 memory in January to build the Ryzen machine, Got another 8GB DDR4 2666 stick in April and replaced the 10 year old PSU with the EVGA 650w in the summer here saving the extra towards the HDD for when I get the next bit of spending money in to replace the failing drives. I have been replacing my old 10 year old machine little by little over the last 2 years trying to bring it back to par upgrading parts as they start failing or just need replacing to do what I want to on the pc. 2 years ago in November I replaced the Old HD6870 1GB with the RX-480 4GB so that I could play Fallout 4 smoothly without having parts of the game that dropped to less than 1 fps on the old Phenom II.

 

As for going NAS my machine is almost always on and I have read some where that the Barracuda drives are build for roughly 8 hours a day usage while the NAS is for 24x7 usage. With about 12-16 roughly hours spent daily at the computer and only really shutting down the computer one or twice a week NAS seemed a logical choice. That is apart from the price of the 7200 rpm 6TB Ironwolf NAS drive price being about $20-$30 more than the 5400 rpm 6TB Barracuda and about $100 less than 7200 rpm Barracuda Pro.

 

As for the 3TB 7200 rpm Barracuda that would barely contain what I have on the 2 drives being combined. I would need to get 2 of the drives to have room for the growth of my game collection to be able to reinstall some of the games I have wanted t play again but don't have the room and don't really have the internet to manage a reinstall of what ever I uninstall to in a couple months or weeks to play again. When I want to play a game I don't want to have to wait 12+ hours to reinstall and play. If I have downloaded and played it before in the last say 6 months I want to be able to just update and go. Even updates on some games delay me by 3 to 6 hours with my internet speed. (ie: Mechwarrior online monthly update of approx 1.5gb every month takes about 3 hours to finish the update on steam for me with the speed set to unlimited).

 

On old copper phone lines for adsl where I tend to get a max of 3-5 mbps down and .5-2 mbps up speeds on speed tests. Steam seems to run a max of 965 kbps when downloading with unlimited settings and then no other devices in the house can bring up webpages any faster than dial up could. It is sadly the fastest connection available in the town here last winter we were told that we should be getting Telus Optix ran out here in September... Now that September is here there has been no word on that coming true. As we just got ADSL to the town 2-3 years ago now after fighting for 8 years to get something other than Dial up and Satellite I don't see them getting onto the Optix system any time soon. Even Cell service here is almost non existent, we don't even have an option for cable TV anymore and when we did have the option for it 5 years ago it was just basic cable for the same price as a digital full bundle deal the next town over 20 mins away where they could also get cable internet which wasn't even available here at all. The joke is that this is the Town Time forgot.

[seagate_surfer]

I see... This is a website where you can check sounds of failing hard drives, if the sounds coming from yours are similar to this, do a back up and get a replacement because the chances are that the drive will fail at any moment.

 

It is incredible how in 2018 there are still places with no faster internet speeds! Hopefully it will become better.

 

Also, we released a 14TB version of our drives, you may want to take a look at it: https://blog.seagate.com/pccomputing/14tb-high-capacity-areal-density-technology-leader-seagate-guardian-hdd-pc-nas-video-all-applications/