Which hard drive should you buy?

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I get this question all the time. Of course, the answer is never definitive, and depends on all sorts of things, but there’s a new analysis from data
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My suggestion would be to buy only SSDs and put several in RAID for construction of big volumes. Once you’ve used SSD – even better a RAID 0 of multiple SSDs – and experienced the sheer responsiveness and speed, you’ll never, ever be able to stand using a system based on an old tech electromechanical HDD again. Having used systems exclusively running from RAID arrays of SSDs since 2012, I’m here to tell you it works fine! Back then, the price to build a 2 TB array was truly impressive – way more than most folks spent on entire computer systems – yet I feel it’s the best money I’ve ever spent on computing, bar none. And of course now they’re much cheaper – though admittedly a good bit more than HDDs still.

That’s not to say a good, modern HDD doesn’t have a place. For internal backup (and you should have lots of backups) it’s hard to beat multi-terabyte HDDs. Do everything interactive on the SSDs and keep backups or low-access data on the HDDs, and voila, they stay spun down virtually all the time and use almost no power.

And of course external HDDs are essential for facilitating more backup possibilities. Nightly system image backups become entirely feasible with things like the Western Digital MyBook USB drive, and unplugging and taking backups offsite means you’re safe from real catastrophes (and you needn’t trust anyone hosting cloud storage). I can’t say enough good things about the WD MyBook drives in particular. I just picked up my 5th one last week – 4 TB for a whole $120. On USB3 it offers amazing throughput – I clocked it gulping down backup data at over 140 megabytes / second, and of course it works great on USB2 as well.

-Noel

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Wow. Where did you get a MyBook 4 TB for $120? That’s a helluva deal.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA4P02RS6736&cm_re=mybook-_-22-236-728-_-Product

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Heh, yeah, it probably wouldn’t be a good idea to build a RAID system around HDDs with a failure rate of one in three, *Seagate-3TB- cough*.

Last time I built a [non-RAID] system from scratch, one strategy considered good was: put the OS and software programs on a fast, compact C: drive and store all the data on D: etc. There are drawbacks to this, chief among them that even Win 7 really tries to force a lot of data on C:, and you had to jump through some hoops and make compromises in convenience and clarity to get it to do otherwise.

Maybe the smarter way to go now, for Windows, is to build a RAID system of multiple SDD drives combining OS, programs and data and just be sure to do rotating system image backups daily. What do you think?

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A little information is a dangerous thing… Saying the new 4TB Seagate’s are good compared to the horrible Seagate’s while true doesn’t say much… I’ve been burned by Seagate too many times… Examine the numbers further and what is described as the “good Seagate” has a failure rate of 3.2 – 4% That’s terrible. Also consider that figure is only within the testing period, warranty period for instance. Seagates are all but guaranteed to die shortly after the warranty expires… HGST has a failure rate of .7 – 1% So essentially the Seagate’s have anywhere between 300% to 500% higher failure rate than the HGST’s. How much time and frustration are you willing to put up with to replace failed drives and how much is your data worth to save a couple of bucks? There’s an old saying, Penny wise, pound foolish… the HGST 4TB NAS is commonly on sale for $129 I’ve switched to them exclusivly and have been using them now for 5+ years.

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I am a bit of a privacy nut and don’t really find the forensic science on SSD technology to be at a point where I would risk it..

At least on a HDD I can apply the gutmann method with a few custom tweaks and be relatively assured of the majority data destruction/obscurification.

However not so with a SSD, even the fancy so called secure ones.

But yea, I guess each to their own. Eitherway this is extremely relevant info for me, thank you.

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SSDs are fine for normal use these days, although they don’t seem to be the best option for backup and long term storage yet. There are known reports about the cells losing charge if not used regularly and it is not clear if those kind of issues are resolved completely with the newer SSDs.
Old good mechanical drives are still the most trusted for safeguarding data.

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Last time I looked SSDs were a wasting asset; as they are used they fill up–nothing is overwritten,and each time something changes the drive searches for empty space to fill.

All of which suggested to me, when I installed an SSD in a new desktop computer a few years ago, that the best plan would be to put the OS (Windows 7) on the SSD and the working files on the other drive.

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WDBFJK0040HBK-NESN from Amazon.com, which is not the internal RAID version but has a single 4 TB drive inside. Today it’s gone up a bit, but only $6 more at $125.99:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00E3RH61W

-Noel

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Exactly what I’ve done and have been running since 2012. In my case 4 x 480 GB OCZ Vertex 3 drives (which are old tech now but were current back then).

My near 2 TB C: volume has everything except backups and low-access data (e.g., downloaded software that’s usually only ever installed once), for which I use some internal HDDs.

Running OS, swap, scratch, applications, data all on the hyperfast RAID partition means that everything benefits from the speed. I wait for nothing, and the system doesn’t “load up” if I have a lot of things running.

The SSDs I have are 2 million hour MTBF, and though I keep excellent backup discipline, I haven’t had one fail, nor even had a single data error.

This is computing of the future. HDDs may be good for long-term storage, but SSDs are what you want to run off of – trust me.

-Noel

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Risk what? That someone would spend literally tens of thousands of dollars in money and time to dissect the SSDs taken out of your presumably seized or stolen computer? You’d have to be a pretty big fish in the underworld to attract that kind of attention, and only a government-budgeted task force would be willing to put that much work into it.

Seems like it would be a helluva lot more likely that they could get at your information in other ways much less expensively.

In any case, I don’t think fear of having the government dissect their computers is on most folks’ minds when they’re choosing how to do their computing most effectively.

-Noel

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Thanks Noel. Very helpful advice.

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At the moment, if I had to recommend a Seagate would be this: Seagate Desktop SSHD 3.5” 2TB [ST2000DX001]

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