I'm upgrading a PC at work from 500GB HDD to 250GB SSD + 2TB HDD. I haven't bought drives for a while and wondered if there were any drives to prefer or avoid. I'd look for 7200RPM, so something like the Seagate Barracuda say. Thanks
All much of a muchness - buy on cost/gb and warranty. There will no doubt be a backblaze report that lands shortly in this thread that calls out one vendor or another as a maker of flaky drives. As a general stick to measure the industry in general against the results are deeply flawed and of no significance in reality, so feel free to ignore it.
There used to be a time when there were brands to go for and brands to miss but I will be honest modern HD reliability doesn't seem as good as days of olde. As above much of muchness these days. Buy by warranty would be my advice.
I just bought a 4TB drive and I decided on Toshiba for several reasons. Firstly, I've used them before and they've never had any issues over the years. Also, there wasn't a huge selection like there used to be since everyone is now in the SSD market and mechanical drives are largely an afterthought for manufacturers. I've seen manyyy issues with Seagate drives over the years, so I stayed away this time simply because I don't know if they've improved the drives or not. Finally, the Toshiba had the highest performance rating out of the bunch (except one Seagate Barracuda I think it was) with 128MB cache instead of the 64MB found on every other drive. Not really sure how much difference that will make. Perhaps I'd have been better off with a Hybrid, who knows. As for the SSD, there are now so many to choose from with some ridiculous performance options - gone are the days of 500/450Mb/s being fast, we're now at over 3200/3000. Regardless, I settled on a Corsair 250GB SSD since it was priced well and I've always used Corsair SSD's. That said, a Crucial drive was right below it with about 30GB extra space for the same price and again, Crucial have never caused me any issues when using their SSD's at work. I don't think you can really go wrong with whatever you choose, ultimately performance between similar drives is much of a muchness and you'll only see a huge difference by spending £100+ extra on a "next level" drive in whichever category you choose. Longevity isn't the end of the world as long as you're backing up regularly.
Thanks guys; as far as I could see, there's not much to go on between them too. I understand that there are fewer makers but with more brands on offer after mergers & acquisitions. Great, I can go and order now. Are Scan OK for HHDs? I recall they used to be a bit tricksy on sourcing them...
There's basically only 3 HDD makers now anyway... WD [which includes HGST], Seagate and Toshiba iirc. Basically pick whichever one comes with the longest warranty in your chosen price/capacity bracket.
IIRC, you're looking at the NAS drives or stuff like the WD black if you want a longer warranty... Then you're looking at 3-5 years depending on drive.
With Seagate, you must check for shingled recording; drives with it are unsuitable for RAID and for any use which requires lots of rewriting of files. That means Seagate Archive drives, the 5TB 2.5" drive etc.
