Besides the obvious, price, capacity, technology (HDD, SSD) or form factor (2.5", 3.5" etc), what else do you look for?
What Do You Look for When Choosing a Hard Drive?
djc on 04/02/2024 - 18:28
Last edited 04/02/2024 - 18:39 by 1 other user
Last edited 04/02/2024 - 18:39 by 1 other user
Comments
I was expecting a lot more people to mention Warranty.
How do you find details about noise, and known issues? I assume reading a lot of reviews?
Reliability is almost totally luck of the draw. There will be a zillion anecdotal stories about how X or Y or Z are more or less reliable, and close to no meaningful data.
The best real info out there is probably the reports released by BackBlaze where they will go over the reliability of their fleets of thousands of hard drives- they find some brands/model combinations better than others, but there will still be a huge element of luck when buying a handful of drives yourself.
What Do You Look for When Choosing a Hard Drive?
Big elevation changes, hairpins and off camber corners preferably with a manual gearbox.
What else are you expecting?
Color. Gold is best in the OZ sun.
I look for a SSD.
Price per TB and some kind of brand name, any brand name that isn't some Chinese nonsense. For SSD I tend to get upper mid range and for C drive I get the biggest capacity lower high end I can find because all my games and apps will go on it and I want at least 1TB spare for Adobe to use as scratch and swap. I use a cheap but still fast SSD just for OneDrive. My PC is a bit of a Frankenstein monster, though I almost always use my MacBook for work anyway these days.
I avoid generic china made brands, it's money wasted. The last one I bought from Ebay I thought I saved half by not buying branded ones, I used it once, turned out to be a dud.
It has to be HARD
Once you've got a big handful of data, transfer speeds become much more critical. My HC520's will happily chirp along at 200-250mb/s where my old 2.5" portable drives struggled with 80mb/s.
I look for "not Western Digital" 'cause they've got a long and storied history of being absolute cnts trying to pull swifties over in consumerspace. They're the guys that tried to sneak SMR into NAS drives.
That really leaves Seagate.
And not SMR for anything non-archival.
WD above 12TB is the best drives for NAS.
Colour.
Red ones are faster.
What Do You Look for When Choosing a Hard Drive?
I don't look. SSD, only
Reliability and Price/GB
Thanks for the feedback, including the jokes!
This is for a personal web project, trying to cater for my own needs and others at the same time.
My last few HDDs have been for a NAS so - Warranty, noise, known issues, SMR/CMR, seller reliability, delivery time, transport risk.
Loss of warranty vs price would also be a consideration with some of the cheaper refurb/oem drives.