2021 3.5" HDD Buying Advice

Grumbledook

Grumbledook

Grumbledook

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11 Nov 2002
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358
This evening my just over 10 year old Samsung 2TB drive just started clicking and is no longer showing up on my PC. I've not lost anything valuable on it and was shocked how long I have had it.

I'm looking at replacing it with a new drive somewhere in the region of 4-8TB capacity.

There are a hell of a lot of options since I last bought a HDD with lots of NAS rated ones etc. Before I only really paid attention to RPM, price and capacity. I've had so many different HDD failures over the years from most of the main brands.

My research is turning up all sorts of conflicting information. Plenty of people saying NAS drives are fine in a desktop machine, others saying not to use them (but unhelpfully not saying why). The consumer HDD at this capacity appear to be SMR drives which don't look ideal to use. Are there consumer drives that are CMR?

Are NAS drives louder? A 7200 RPM drive is likely louder than a 5400 RPM drive, but that's always been the case right?

I think I've narrowed it down to either a WD Red Pro which are 7200 RPM and CMR. Or the Seagate Ironwolf Pro which are also the same? Any reason I shouldn't get either of these and any feedback on why one would be preferable over the other please?

It will mostly be used for storage of RAW photos and 4k video footage. I might do some video editing using it so a faster drive would probably be better? Though I might offload whatever I'm working on to one of my SSDs and then just put the output onto this new HDD.

Power consumption and noise are somewhat of a consideration but not deal breakers.

Cheers!
 
Grumbledook said:
I might do some video editing using it so a faster drive would probably be better?


Power consumption and noise are somewhat of a consideration but not deal breakers.!
Click to expand...
If you need performance all HDDs are dog slow/their speed differences insignificant compared to SSDs.
And it's really random accesses where "high end" HDDs do better than standard drives, while sequential transfers are easy for any drive.
(SMR is really bad at small random writes, but sequential writes don't really differ from normal)

Also "high performance" 7200 RPM drives are always more power hungry/hotter running than similar tech level 5400 RPM drives.
And higher rotational energy means higher noise.
Same for agressive R/W head movements.


As for reliability there's no guarantee even with expensive drive when it comes to individual samples.
You might buy the most expensive model and have it fail in short time.
While some cheap model might keep going until being obsolete/old.
Luck is the far highest affecting factor untill having more significant number of samples.

So for actual higher guarantee for availability of data, without recovery from backups, you need to go for that redundancy in acronym RAID.
 
Thanks for the responses. Might just hang on till black friday weekend at the end of the month and see what offers come up. Got any empty m.2 slot on the motherboard that I could fill up too...
 
As EsaT says you might just get unlucky but there's still a difference in reliability that statistically will mean you're more or less likely to get a good / bad drive. The chances are that your new drive will be fine though. Certainly if reliability is an issue then backups and raid are the way forward. At the very least you should be taking backups of your important data. :)

From what I understand there is some difference in the firmware for different drive types to optimise them for the purpose that they are designed. I think the major one between NAS and standard desktop drives is that desktop drives will continue to retry reading a bad sector when a NAS drive will have given up and marked it as bad. Since your NAS drive is going to tend to be in an array of disks with redundancy they shouldn't care if they can't read a section unlike a desktop drive. On the whole that's kind of an edge case but something you might run into.
 
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