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Storage Which hard drive to buy

Discussion in 'Hardware' started by stephen0205, 18 May 2020.

  1. stephen0205

    stephen0205 MrSteve

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    So my 1tb game.drive is finally full (yep I play that little games lol )

    So figured now.is the time tomreolace it with bigger . I had up to £100 ish budget.

    I was thinking ,4tb, however struggling to figure out which to buy, liked the Seagate ones with 5 year warranty, but people saying amount smr (no clue) and shingled ? With low general performance.new were about £90 ish

    Then I started having s look at used drives, whilst I haven't bought used hard drives , ssds I don't mind there usually solid.

    I've seen some used 4tb ones for about £50-60 mark, but there 3-5 years sold. Not sure how long they would last

    Whilst It wouldn't be a massive set back to loose my games and have to reinstall later I'd rather not.

    Sooo any recommendations at all guys, personal expience with what ones to just avoid.

    Really would like a 5 year warranty but as low as 2 would probably do
     
    Last edited: 18 May 2020
  2. GeorgeStorm

    GeorgeStorm Aggressive PC Builder

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    Why not just uninstall a game you aren't playing at the moment and save your money, my entire system is on a 480gb (I think) which includes Windows, bunch of games, other software etc :)
     
  3. fix-the-spade

    fix-the-spade Multimodder

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    SMR = Shingled Magnetic Recording.
    TLDR Version: A normal Hard Drive's data tracks are a pattern of concentric circles and none of those circles can overlap. A Shingled Drive's data tracks do overlap, like roof tiles. This means more data tracks can be on a given space and bigger capacity HDD can be made for a lower price. But, when overwriting data on a shingled drive the sectors that overlap the sector being overwritten must also be overwritten. That makes the drives very slow if they're doing something that needs a lot of write-re-write like a data centre or a NAS.

    There has been a kerfuffle because several brands quietly changed drives they were selling from PMR/CMR to SMR, including drives they were billing specifically as NAS drives. A lot of NAS systems won't work at all with an SMR drive installed, the write speeds are too slow and it will reject them, hence a lot of annoyed customers buying unusable HDDs. SMR drives are best for making archival backups that will be more or less read only, for everything else they will be slow.

    You can get a WD Blue 4TB for about £100 new, according to WD's specs all versions of the blue in 4TB are CMR drives, only 2 years warranty though.

    Seagate don't seem to publish which drives are what on their data sheets, but I'm sure someone somewhere on the internet will know.
     
  4. Fingers66

    Fingers66 Kiwi in London

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    Seagate have also been sneaking SMR drives into their Barracuda and Desktop ranges (source). There is a good summary at the bottom of why SMR drives have much poorer write performance.

    They have also explicitly stated (near the bottom of the above article) that they do not use SMR in their Ironwolf and Ironwolf Pro NAS drives (4TB Ironwolf is available for £107.96 @ cclonline).
     
    Last edited: 18 May 2020
  5. RedFlames

    RedFlames ...is not a Belgian football team

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    For at or around £100 your options are a 1TB SSD or a 2-4TB spinny rust

    If it's for games, esp newer ones I'd lean towards the 1TB SSD option
     
  6. stephen0205

    stephen0205 MrSteve

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    Games tend to be huge these days. Internet is rubbish in my area , rather just have them there ready


    Thanks, the more u know. Nothing cheaper I assume , least these sound like what I'm looking for thank you

    Whilst iron wolf's seem nice. Defo higher price compared to we blues
     
  7. stephen0205

    stephen0205 MrSteve

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    Stated above , internet's rubbish so looking to have full library on it. Steam wise I'm about 650gb, and between origin , ms, uplay and gog about 500-600 ISH , so a 4tb gives what like 3.7tb usable give or take so should last me years
     
  8. Fingers66

    Fingers66 Kiwi in London

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  9. GeorgeStorm

    GeorgeStorm Aggressive PC Builder

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    Fair enough, I only get 1-1.5MBps but I don't tend to play a huge variety of games at any one point, so I can normally plan ahead :)
     
  10. stephen0205

    stephen0205 MrSteve

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    Kk thank you will check that once tiny is down

    Advertised 40meg here lucky if I get 10
     
  11. GeorgeStorm

    GeorgeStorm Aggressive PC Builder

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    Non fibre here so yeah not speedy even when it's working!
     
  12. fix-the-spade

    fix-the-spade Multimodder

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    They're the cheapest that don't have lots of bad reviews for reliability.
     
  13. Osgeld

    Osgeld Minimodder

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    If you are not writing to them constantly is there any other downsides to smr drives?
     
  14. Fingers66

    Fingers66 Kiwi in London

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    Apart from poor random read/write performance, which also causes issues when mixed with CMR drives in NAS arrays, I haven't found anything referring to other issues yet. Some people are also reporting problems with RAID array rebuilds with ALL SMR drives in an array, apparently data parity errors can occur during RAID rebuilds which causes a failure and data loss.

    If you are doing sequential reading/writing then you will be fine (e.g. data backup or archival). Unfortunately most of us use them for random read/write operations.

    Of course, others may chime in here with more information, 'tis the internet after all.
     
    Last edited: 18 May 2020
  15. RedFlames

    RedFlames ...is not a Belgian football team

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    SMR are fine for 'WORM' [Written Once, Read Many] workloads like archival and backups... they fall over if data needs to be rewritten/updated often or accessed near-constantly. As they need a certain amount of idle time to do the whole 'Drive Managed Shingling' stuff.
     
  16. stephen0205

    stephen0205 MrSteve

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    Welp just decided I would get the wd blue so that's ordered , happy days

    Picked up a new cooler as well. Had a small cryorig cooler which just wasn't enough for my 2700x, maxing about 85 degrees. Picked up a dark rock ,4 cooler for £40 so happy days

    Once the drive arrives I'll set all the games to download and install. Let that take a week and then never think about them again lol
     
  17. Fingers66

    Fingers66 Kiwi in London

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    Just install the new HD in the PC with the old one still in there, then use something like Macrium Reflect to image the old to the new and expand the size along the way, much quicker.
     
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  18. stephen0205

    stephen0205 MrSteve

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    I am sorry, I meant all the games that aren't installed
     

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