4TB HDD - 5400 or 7200?

[ShivP]

Hi all

I have 2 X 2TB drives and looking to just get rid of them and replace with 1x 4TB drive.
The hard drives basically store my holiday pictures & videos, movies, my documents/pictures/downloads etc folders.
Would I see a major performance reduction in choosing a cheaper 5400rpm drive like a Barracuda against a 7200RPM drive like WD Black etc?
The only 'high intensity' workload I can see as such is streaming a movie over plex to a TV over the gigabit LAN
I also value reliability & warranty more than ultimate speed

Thanks

 

[Shante]

I would go with the 7200rpm hdd

The better higher speed will help going through all the files loading up faster, unless you don’t mind the slow performance of a 5400rpm drive

 

[Guest2]

Dont do it. Hdd’s die easily.
My 2tb drive with all photos on from 2000s just gave up. Luckily i have them backed up on an internal hdd too.
Cloud or ssd from now on. I no longer trust crappy spindle disks

 

[theforce]

Do you want to remove the current 2TB drives because you want a single physical drive? If they are 7200rpm drives why don't you combine them into a single volume? You can read more about it at https://www.windowscentral.com/how-create-one-large-volume-using-multiple-hard-drives-windows-10

If you want a single physical drive, l would go for a 7200rpm one for the extra speed.

 

[chaparral]

Dont do it. Hdd’s die easily.
My 2tb drive with all photos on from 2000s just gave up. Luckily i have them backed up on an internal hdd too.
Cloud or ssd from now on. I no longer trust crappy spindle disks

have you seen the prices of 4TB SSD's ?

 

[Guest2]

have you seen the prices of 4TB SSD's ?

£385, isnt too bad. Samsung QVO.
As with all things they will come down in price. Better than losing decades of family/friends photos

 

[something daft already!!]

I'd say 5400 is fine for photos. I also have mine backed up to both Google and Samsung. £15 quid a year from Google and you don't have to worry.

 

[sityeuropa]

You don't want to be storing anything valuable on one drive.

 

[chaparral]

£385, isnt too bad. Samsung QVO.
As with all things they will come down in price. Better than losing decades of family/friends photos

And you would need 2 of them so £770 (One as backup )

Where 4TB HDD start from around £75 https://www.overclockers.co.uk/tosh...rmance-hard-drive-hdwd240uzsva-hd-04l-ts.html

So that be £150 for two 5400rpm HDDs vs £770 for two SSDs
Or £190 for two 7200rpm HDDs https://www.overclockers.co.uk/tosh...rmance-hard-drive-hdwe140uzsva-hd-042-ts.html

 

[megatron]

I paid £170 each for 4 14TB drives shucked from wd elements. Have them in raid 10 with another backing up (+8, +4 TB). The external 14TB can be used as a spare. 28TB usable but defragging happens slot faster on these drives. I was thinking of a Nas, I saved by offloading my old hard drives to a less pcmr steam friend.

 

[JasonM]

I also value reliability & warranty more than ultimate speed

Barracuda and reliability do not go together.

Dont do it. Hdd’s die easily.

Quality HDD's don't die, for over 10 years I've been using WD Blacks and WD Enterprise drives, never had one of these fail. The cheap HDD's however thats a different story they fail more often.

 

[Lord-Jaffa]

Just whatever you do, stay away from Seagate.

 

[deusexlumina]

I don't think you'll notice the difference in reliability between 5400 and 7200 rpm for your use case, so whatever you feel like tbh.

5400 rpms drives are more reliable in NAS units or for applications where they are powered 24/7 and packed closely with other drives.

 

[darael]

My last hard drive was a Hitachi and my current one is Toshiba, both were 7,200rpm. The Hitachi had over 7 years of power on time before I chose to retire it and it's now only used to do monthly backups and is powered down the rest of the time. The current Toshiba has a little over 6 years power on time and I'm hoping that SSD prices will drop down enough before I consider replacing it with a SATA Samsung Pro.

In my eyes the only differences between 5,400 and 7,200rpm are access time and power consumption.

 

[Minstadave]

£385, isnt too bad. Samsung QVO.
As with all things they will come down in price. Better than losing decades of family/friends photos

I bought a dual bay Synology (£240) and shucked two 12TB Enterprise Drives (£180 each) for not a great deal more (£600 total). I'm not sure I'd trust everything to a single QLC SSD.