Reliable HDD?


Recommended Posts

All HDDs are slow regardless of RPM, because they need to move a physical head across the platter to access data. Once the head is there, better RPM will help it read more data per second, but that's pretty insignificant compared to the ridiculous latency you've just suffered getting the head in place. A 20000RPM drive would be faster in sequential throughput but still about as terrible in random access, and that's the real killer. SSD's have orders of magnitude better random access and that's why you want one as your main drive.

 

For your storage drive, it doesn't really matter. I use a 5400RPM WD Red drive because it was the quietest and supposedly most reliable on the market (for what that's worth, all HDDs should be considered unreliable), and it's still plenty fast for loading games and other documents from it.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I noticed that WDs have all moved to 7200RPM now, the VelociRaptors are 10k RPM but they appear to be older than the new Colour Models. Seagate's modern drives also are mostly 7200 RPM. Is there a reason for the faster drives not catching on and does it really matter?

The 10,000 RPM drives were more expensive, and offered marginal increase in performance.  SSD have made those obsolete as they still carry the premium price.

 

HGST and WD are the best; avoid Seagate like the plague.

Agreed.

 

HGST is the old IBM disk-drives group (which was acquired by Hitachi - and became Hitachi Global Storage Technologies - and was later acquired by WD).

 

WD's Caviar Green (EcoGreen) drives weren't knocked for reliability - but performance (especially compared to their Caviar Black relatives (with the larger on-drive cache)) - I have two of them.  What's amusing is that neither was sold as a retail drive for PCs; the smaller drive is from the AV series (typically used in STBs and for archived video, such as sourced from security cameras and other such uses) while the larger one is from a MyBook that suffered a PEBKAC goof that fried the external electronics but left the drive itself intact.  I have no issue at all recommending the EcoGreen drives for typical desktop use - even as boot drives.

The Caviar Green were knocked for reliability too - they were junky.  Basically drives start out as a blue or black, and the ones that were still OK, but maybe not quite as good as the normal blue or black were toned down and made a green.  This wasnt the only way greens were made, but at first it was an attempt to get rid of shrinkage and make revenue on their stuff that didnt muster QC 100%.

IMO most of the low-power, or energy-minded HDD are just fancy marketing - they slow it down to 5400 RPM and lower the price and say "its an eco-drive !"  (Like a single HDD really makes a damned bit of difference in power consumption... what does it actually save in terms of power costs per year ?  $5.00 ?

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Going to echo getting the best Gb/$ based on your needs

 

Been using PCs since 96, most with whatever generic HDD they come with and so far none have died, what little important stuff is backed to the cloud and I'm good 

The really important stuff I have still resides on paper with copies, where they belong and scanned if ever needed digitally 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

This topic is now closed to further replies.
  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.