Can anyone advise on a Good SSD driven Desktop Hard-Drive

snadge · Sunday at 18:06

Hi,

I'm after a good fast desktop hard drive (preferably SSD driven - unless you have reasons why not) - as my 2 x 2TB HDD's (2TB WD PMR & 2TB SG SMR) in my system, they are 75% full and as you know its not best practice to fill them.

I am looking for "long term storage" of photos, movies, documents and applications... the ability to use a NAS for my movies would be great, my router has a USB3.0 port I could use as a networked drive, or maybe I should get one for 'storage' and one for 'movies'?

I was looking at something like 8TB as the size,

Any and all advice is greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance

hornetstinger · Sunday at 18:09

Long term? Use a spinning HDD. Or if not too much data, for important things like photos- burn onto DVD-R

SSD and Movies? Are you rich lol.

I have a four bay slot NAS, two of the four are regular spinning HDD..8TB and 16TB, good luck finding affordable storage SSD lol

snadge · Sunday at 18:43

that's why i say all and any advice much appreciated, if SSD is expensive, then a "good" adviser would say something like "your probably best buying a HDD solution due to price of SSD at large volume"!

Tetras · Sunday at 18:48

snadge said:
that's why i say all and any advice much appreciated, if SSD is expensive, then a "good" adviser would say something like "your probably best buying a HDD solution due to price of SSD at large volume"!

I'd agree with the above. 8TB of storage with SSDs is pretty expensive and if used for long-term archival, SSDs aren't the best choice for that either.

hornetstinger · Sunday at 18:49

Buy spinning HDD then.

8TB aren't too bad, the problem is the bare WD RED are very expensive, it's cheaper to buy a WD Elements drive to "shuck"

I paid about £170 for a 16GB...compared to £400 ish for a WD red bare drive?

Snapshot · 2025-03-10T07:57:53+0000

If you're thinking of a NAS then put something in the Wanted section of the MM and see what pops up (hint).

snadge · 2025-03-10T10:28:09+0000

thanks a lot guys,
@ Hornetstinger - a WD 16TB for £170 is great, is it PMR or SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording) - that would do me, so its cheaper to get a desktop drive and pull em? I was wanting it to be external lol
@ Snapshot - what is MM? - I cant find a 'wanted' section?

thanks again for the advice, much appreciated.

Snapshot · 2025-03-10T11:43:30+0000

The MM is the Members Market which is almost at the bottom of the list of sub-forums. You've been here more than long enough and I think have enough posts to have access. If you can't see it you should use the Contact us button right at the bottom of the screen to ask for access.

I think Hornetstingers's £170 for a 16TB WD Elements is a bit optimistic. The current price is more like £310. The white label drives inside the Elements case almost certainly have the same drive hardware as the bare drives but won't have the NASware firmware for whatever that's worth.