Thinking of buying new hdd but am unsure

Shredder · 06 Apr 2019

I'm thinking of buying a new hard drive as I'm really running low on space. I want a 4tb or 6tb.

I need a hard drive for saving music/videos and gaming. I want to store games and play them off the hard drive I choose to buy next.

I already have a seagate desktop 3tb external hard drive and is now full.

Few questions im unsure of are...

1. Internal desktop hdd or external desktop hdd?

2. Should I go with a similar seagate external desktop hard drive? Maybe 4tb or 6tb im thinking of.

3. Or should I go with an internal desktop hard drive... I prefer Seagate brand as I've never had any issues with them. But I'm unsure which colour to go for when storing videos games and music. I also want to run games from this new hard drive too.

Which internal would it be for gaming videos and music? Green? 7200rpm I believe.

And I'm running Windows 7 64bit right now.

I want a 4tb or 6tb hdd.

EdTittel · 06 Apr 2019

These days, when I think about buying a spinner (conventional HD), I look first and foremost to the BackBlaze Drive Report:

Thinking of buying new hdd but am unsure-image.png

Find it at https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-...tats-for-2018/. I buy mostly HGST, Toshiba and Samsung drives myself, but this list will help you make a good choice. Depending on your budget, 4 TB and smaller spinners are, relatively speaking, much cheaper than higher-capacity units.

HTH,
--Ed--

Helmut · 06 Apr 2019

1. Is better as an internal drive as it is permanently connected.
3. Personally I don't like 'Green' drives as their power saving measures are a bit over the top.
7200 rpm is more or less standard.
If you want the most reliable drives buy the Enterprise versions rather than the consumer range, they are of course more expensive.

Yseurk · 06 Apr 2019

Hello,

I agree with recommandations of Helmut. Moreover, the question is : it depends about what you need and the criticality of your data. Does it worth to buy an enterprise version, like Gold Western Digital ?

In my opinion Barracudas are good values.

Shredder · 06 Apr 2019

Welp for me, yes I would need to store my data for long as possible.

I've had my 3tb desktop external for many years and no problems at all.

Im not sure which drives are enterprise versions?

Western Digital gold sounds like an internal desktop hard drive? If you can store music to videos and games and even run games straight from the hard drive then that's what I need.

Shredder · 06 Apr 2019

I like the sound of barracuda drives too.

CountMike · 07 Apr 2019

TechSeven said:

Welp for me, yes I would need to store my data for long as possible.

I've had my 4tb desktop external for many years and no problems at all.

Im not sure which drives are enterprise versions?

Western Digital gold sounds like an internal desktop hard drive? If you can store music to videos and games and even run games straight from the hard drive then that's what I need.

That you can do from any drive but there are specialized drives that do some things better than other, Her's example of some Western Digital drives and their predominant usage:

https://www.wd.com/products/internal-storage.html
Externally they are marked by colors and designation number. Black are highest performance while Purple for instance is slow but meant for continual use. There are also Green drives which are meant for power saving and some even have own sleep mode.

jimbo45 · 07 Apr 2019

Hi there

@TechSeven

You could also use an external enclosure so you could add further drives when needed -- that way you could start say with a cheaper 2 TB one, then add another one at a future time.

With these enclosures you can also have them in RAID 0 mode so the total space of the HDD's is aggregated -- i.e if you add a second 2TB HDD Windows will see that as a faster single 4TB HDD. While failure these days is quite small you do need in any case to always backup important data -- the improvement in HDD speed with RAID 0 is IMO worth the risk - but take backups. These external USB enclosures usually come in 2 or 4 caddy size s-- i.e you can store up to 2 or 4 HDD's.

For Games/ Multi-media etc spinners are still OK -- but what I certainly would do is have your OS moved to an internal SSD -- that will give you really significant performance -- even if you have to move all your DATA to the external devices.

You could keep your current HDD as Disk 1 in the external caddy and start with buying a cheap SSD (say 256GB) for running your OS and apps -- really significant improvement there BTW.

@EdTittel

As one can see HDD failures these days are relatively rare but being Old School I think I could understand those stats a bit better if they were presented as MTBF data (Mean Time before failure) -- Nr of hours before a possible failure is to me at least far more meaningful than nr of reads/writes/accesses etc. !!!!!

Cheers
jimbo

Stitch194 · 07 Apr 2019

I purchased a Barracuda for my Grandson, he's into gaming big time, he loves the performance.I agree with @Yseurk for gaming the barracuda is reliable, good value and great performance.

Shredder · 08 Apr 2019

Thanks for everyone input.

Hi Jimbo45...."but what I certainly would do is have your OS moved to an internal SSD" - I already have an ssd with Windows 7 on it. Everthing else is on my 3tb seagate desktop hard drive. But it is now full. I can buy a hard drive anytime now. Just not sure which to get or if I should buy similar seagate to the one I already have.

One thing that I am really sure about is that I will buy a 4tb or 6tb drive.