Best Consumer Hard Drives: August 2020

https://www.anandtech.com/show/12075/best-consumer-hdds

by rbanffy • 6 years ago

39 38 6 years ago

waheoo• 6 years ago

*only

gruez3• 6 years ago

This is a really poor article. It's basically looking at spec sheets and current prices to determine the "best" drive. There doesn't seem to be any empirical testing whatsoever. They also seem to recommend product lines that are significantly pricier. eg. their "High-Capacity Desktop" recommendation is "14TB Seagate BarraCuda Pro" for $515. Is that really better than getting a 12TB easystore for $190 and then shucking it? The cost per terabyte of the easystore is less than half, and I really doubt that the recommended drive would last twice as long. Also, despite the article being less than 2 days old, most of the recommended drives are either not available, or available at significantly higher prices that listed.

mentos• 6 years ago

Whats the deal with the 12TB Easystore?

gruez3• 6 years ago

They regularly go on sale for $180-$190[1]. Inside are whitelabel WD drives. Sometimes they're even helium and/or enterprise/NAS drives.

[1] https://slickdeals.net/newsearch.php?src=SearchBarV2&q=easys...

vondur• 6 years ago

They do specifically discuss "shucking" the drives from USB enclosures and recommend against it. I do wonder how well this list compares against the reports from Backblaze.

gruez3• 6 years ago

Replying to the quotes from the article:

While this is easy enough to do, the user experience might not be optimal - obtaining warranty services is pretty much ruled out

AFAIK easystores are relatively easy to shuck non-destructively. If you do it right and don't destroy the enclosure, and your drive breaks, you might still be able to submit it for warranty. Regardless, I'm skeptical about the actual value of the warranty is worth the premium (double the price).

the default TLER settings might need alteration (which is not always possible with commercial off-the-shelf NAS units)

True, although it's likely not useful unless in business-critical workloads. You're probably fine without TLER if you're just using it to store movies/games.

the drive is going to be used in non-critical scenarios.

What's meant by "critical scenarios" here? Either you care about the data or not. If you care about it, you will keep backups and/or use parity to ensure that one drive failure won't wipe out your data. If you're only storing on one drive, you're one unexpected disk crash from losing it. This applies regardless of whether you're using the cheapest consumer drive, or the most expensive "enterprise" drive.

Voliokis• 6 years ago

I agree it's not a great article. I wonder though - is there sufficient data out there to make a good article with the same title?

JadeNB• 6 years ago

I wonder though - is there sufficient data out there to make a good article with the same title?

Isn't that almost exactly the purpose of Backblaze's HD stats?

https://www.backblaze.com/b2/hard-drive-test-data.html

wtallis5• 6 years ago

Also, despite the article being less than 2 days old, most of the recommended drives are either not available, or available at significantly higher prices that listed.

In my experience with checking prices for the SSD Buyer's Guide, it is impossible to get to the end of the list before something earlier in the list has already changed in price or availability. Amazon is the worst in this respect; I'm pretty sure the act of checking prices causes price changes, and less-popular models are constantly going in and out of stock.

jeffbee7• 6 years ago

This is a bit like having the "best" bag full of vomit. Who can make the case for hard drives in consumer applications?

mlyle4• 6 years ago

For people who want to store lots of stuff.

Not everyone has a photo library or media library or game collection that fits onto a reasonably priced SSD.

jeffbee7• 6 years ago

It seems like people who need moderate tens of terabytes of storage would be _more_ interested in the performance and reliability of an SSD, not less. If you have demanding storage needs aren't you then more likely to be willing to pay $100/TB for storage?

revivedblaze• 6 years ago

Backblaze does it the best way IMHO, they review the drives based on the time they have them in production running and based on the effective failures to write operations & consider the $/Tb as well and they do this every quarterly and publish the result.

Check those out once and see if you can get the data you need

rbanffy3• 6 years ago

True, but they focus on higher capacity drives as density is inversely proportional to cost.

larrywright• 6 years ago

I read somewhere recently (might have been here, I don’t recall for sure), that one of the problems with the recommendations from Backblaze is that the drives change constantly and there can be variations over time in manufacturing. You could buy something today that has the same model number as what Backblaze bought 6-12 months ago, and it’s not really the same drive.

They’re still my preferred resource for this, but it’s not without its caveats.

spiffytech• 6 years ago

That is a very valid criticism, but at the same time, could anyone really do any better? If the manufacturer is going to change the build for the same SKU within the time it takes to collect meaningful failure rate data, then I don't know that you can construct a more useful measurement technique than Backblaze has. The data on specific drive models may be of limited reliability, but you do at least get enough data to rank brands based on typical long-term reliability by brand and product line.

Animats• 6 years ago

Those are prospective MTBF numbers from the manufacturer. More useful would be observed MTBFs from a big data center operator.

rbanffy3• 6 years ago

But then you need the datacenter operator to use the same generic drives you would. Backblaze is the only one who publishes results for the drives they have, which are more or less close to what a prosumer would pursue.

jeffbee7• 6 years ago

DC operators never turn their drives off, which is one of the key wear-out factors.

popotamonga• 6 years ago

I find it very hard to browse all these comparison sites. For example i need a very simple question: whats the very best SSD i can buy 1TB for under or near $500. So much confusion, especially Samsung with all the EVO and PRO and numbers and whatever models sheesh.

tacon• 6 years ago

A recent discussion on WebHostingTalk[0] gives you a simple answer:

For Sata: DC S3610 1.6tb Intel SSD -- under $200 right now on ebay
For NVMe DC P3605 1.6tb Intel SSD -- usually around $200 on ebay (addin card) or a little more as U.2 drive.

[0] https://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1818777&NL=W...

wingerlang• 6 years ago

Have you tried something like https://www.productchart.com/ssd_drives/

wtallis5• 6 years ago

whats the very best SSD i can buy 1TB for under or near $500

The problem is that you have already made some kind of decision that $500 is a reasonable threshold for getting 1TB of SSD, and some assumption that you stand to gain anything at all by paying extra for the same capacity. That's kinda backwards; you should start by figuring out how much performance and endurance you need out of your 1TB of storage, just like you've apparently already figured out that 1TB is the capacity you need.

You might be fine with a $99 1TB SSD, or maybe you need a $320 1TB SSD. But it's pretty odd to expect a purchasing guide to be a useful tool to figure out how best to overpay for your storage.

Best Consumer Hard Drives: August 2020

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