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
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
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.
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).
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
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
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
Just make sure any WD Blue you buy has an EZRZ suffix (CMR drives) as the EZAZ Blue's are also SMR (source). Ebuyer have a great deal on a 4TB WD Blue EZRZ for £87.70 right now: https://www.ebuyer.com/719750-wd-blue-4tb-3-5-sata-desktop-hard-drive-wd40ezrz
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
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.
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.
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
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.