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I used to read the TR System Guides to get info on the state of each industry, especially things like hard drives, where knowing the overall picture of reliability, price, size, etc. is important. That info ceased to exist with the new guide format, and there hasn't been a HDD review in quite some time. Even the SDD reviews focus on the review drive and not the industry as a whole.

Where do you all get your broad scope info on storage these days?

SATA HDDs fall into three broad categorizes these days, in decreasing order of performance: 7200 RPM, lower RPM, and drives that use SMR. Sure there are variations in warranty length, and you can get drives that are "NAS optimized" (typically for a moderate price premium), but performance is generally pretty similar within each bucket.

HGST currently seems to have the reliability crown, but all HDD manufacturers seem to have their occasional lemons.

Unfortunately SMR drives can be difficult to identify... a database listing whether each model is SMR or not would be useful.

With maybe one 1TB exception somewhere, I only use hard drives now for backups. Active data, OS, and applications are only on SSDs now.

I do a restore of something here or there about once every 18 months or so. Given this, if a spinning hard drive is going to fail, it's most likely going to do that during a backup, and not during "usage". Failing during backup generally just requires that I replace the drive and start with new full backups. Or just replace the drive and wait for the next scheduled backups to happen. If for some reason I can't copy the existing backups from the failed drive to the new one, then my backup program (Macrium) starts with full backups anyway.

To hold enough generations of each partition, my backup drives can't be any smaller than about 8 TB, so I choose the capacity I need in 7200 RPM only. I compare by price, but that's about it. It's not worth it for me to get all angsty over the selection of and shopping for backup drives.

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product. ... 6822146116

The only HDD I buy (and have been buying for the past four-ish years).

BIF wrote:

With maybe one 1TB exception somewhere, I only use hard drives now for backups. Active data, OS, and applications are only on SSDs now.

All laptops and desktop OS drives are SSDs here, but data drives are generally still spinning rust. E.g., /home on my primary Linux desktop is a 3TB RAID-1 volume (pair of Seagate 7200.14 drives). All else being equal I prefer HGST or Toshiba, but will go with WD or Seagate if there's a meaningful price differential. I typically deploy HDDs in pairs (RAID-1) these days, and shop mostly based on price and avoidance of SMR.

The sweet spot in terms of $/TB starts at 3 TB and goes up to 8 or 10 TB. There's really little point in buying a spinning hard-drive smaller than 3 TB.
$30 / TB Toshiba X300 - I see these on sale for $25/TB pretty frequently.
$31 / TB Hitachi Deskstar NAS - Probably the most reliable option.

I just went with 5 hard disks (2 parity, 3 data), at a pitiful 750 GB per disk (..so a bit more than 2 TB). -this is just for data and game files, and I don't have much of either. The drives are 2.5" and after some discounts, cost about $33 each on Amazon (..at the time I bought them). I guess what's critical about my build in relation to the disks (other than not needing much space), is that my data drives are barely "spinning" and even the parity drives have it easy (with low use). (SnapRAID.)

It's still not a back-up solution. ..I should really do what BIF does with cheap 2 TB (3.5") drive and stick it in my (fire-proof) safe. (..critical data I do backup - to optical, and place it in my safe.)


-anyway, that level of redundancy on the ultra-cheap is one reason for purchasing smaller capacity drives (when you can get a great deal).



As for performance, it doesn't really matter to me - not in this context (use).
So I guess it's mostly a matter of *how* you are going to use your Hard Drive in relation to what you should be looking for.

FireGryphon wrote:

I used to read the TR System Guides to get info on the state of each industry, especially things like hard drives, where knowing the overall picture of reliability, price, size, etc. is important. That info ceased to exist with the new guide format, and there hasn't been a HDD review in quite some time. Even the SDD reviews focus on the review drive and not the industry as a whole.

Where do you all get your broad scope info on storage these days?

Hardware France does a 6 monthly-reliability based on returns,which gives a general idea on failures.
https://www.hardware.fr/articles/962-6/ ... -durs.html
For performance-google is your friend.

For SSD's-well the Samsung 850EVO has owned the last few years as the value/performance drive.
Last year we had "The race to the bottom"with planar TLC and ram-less drives.(avoid at all costs)
Just recently Micron and Toshiba/Sandisk/WD have caught up with Samsung with their 3D.

Outside of TR I find Anandtech to be good on storage,plus-strange as it might seem Chris at Tom's is good as well.

When it comes to HDD, I think shipping/packaging plays a big role. If you're 200 miles away and get it and it's well packaged, vs., 3000 miles away and poor packaging, I would tend to put more faith in the well packaged one with 200 miles of abuse on it vs the other.

Edit - I have gotten a few Seagate Ironwolf 2TB from amazon, which have came in decently packaged. (ST2000VN004) Been happy with them so far, nice and quiet.

anotherengineer wrote:

When it comes to HDD, I think shipping/packaging plays a big role. If you're 200 miles away and get it and it's well packaged, vs., 3000 miles away and poor packaging, I would tend to put more faith in the well packaged one with 200 miles of abuse on it vs the other.

Yes, handling is very important. It doesn't take much to kill a HDD, especially 3.5" ones (which are not designed to take the kind of mechanical abuse that 2.5" laptop models are designed to withstand). A while back I went to the local Microcenter because they were advertising a sale on Toshiba X300 HDDs. When I got there, I noted that these were bare OEM drives, stacked a half dozen drives high on the shelves in unpadded ESD bags. I left empty-handed.

just brew it! wrote:

.. When I got there, I noted that these were bare OEM drives, stacked a half dozen drives high on the shelves in unpadded ESD bags. I left empty-handed.

Kind of like pulling up to the gas station and seeing the tank being filled-up by a gas-rig (stirring-up all that crap at the bottom of the main-tank)..

-instant-pass.