New HDD Seagate skyhawk 4Tb

[chegalhavara]

Hi all

So my old Wd External Hdd 2Tb is making some weird noises. It has served me well for the past 6 years and that is where I have most of my things and games.. It is working seemingly perfect but the noises are worrying me.
So I started browsing some Hdds to buy. I found this Seagate Skyhawk 4Tb 7200rpm at a really good price.

https://www.caseking.de/seagate-skyhawk-hdd-sata-6g-7200rpm-3-5-zoll-4-tb-hdsg-073.html

After looking up some reviews it seems like a very good Hdd but its main purpose seems to be to record surveillance material. They actually call it a Surveilance Hdd.

So my question is: Does this drive serve also the normal purpose? Storing stuff, games and gaming from it?
I got an SSD for the games I play the most but all my other ones are stored on my Hdd.

 

[chegalhavara]

Ok. No one answered but if anyone has the same doubt, here's a small explanation.
I did a little digging and found out that Surveillance Hdds have usually higher write speeds and relativelly slower readspeeds than an all-round Hdd. They are also built for 24/7 high workload. They are made to be able to store High Def video from multiple sources (hence the higher write speeds) while only on punctual occasions reading from it for playback.
I found that, for normal usage, one is better of with a "normal" Hdd.
I bought a 3TB Seagate Barracuda 7200rpm instead and I am quite happy with it.

 

[seagate_surfer]

Hi, looks like we are a bit late to the party here. It's entirely possible you've already purchased your new drive but we wanted to share some info in case it may still be relevant to you, and for anyone else with similar questions that may find themselves on this thread.

The short answer: Yes, all of these specific use-case drives like surveillance drives, NAS (red-label) drives, etc. Can technically be plugged in the same way any other drive would and used the same way.

Now for the long answer. Different drives work better for different purposes. In your case, we would actually not recommend a SkyHawk drive for storage and gaming.

SkyHawk surveillance drives are engineered with very write-heavy, low-read uses in mind. Their ideal situation looks something like: Writing 90% of the time, and reading the other 10%. Like if you had a surveillance DVR with multiple cameras, and this system spent most of the time just managing all of that recording to the disk, with rare instances of reading and playing back so that the video stays as clear and well-managed as possible. The firmware on surveillance drives is designed to prioritize write operations wherever possible to preserve video quality and integrity.

One of the reasons people are sometimes drawn to surveillance drives is the 24/7 workload rating. If what you need is something with the 24/7 rating, but want the firmware more balanced between read-write operations, then you'd be more in-line with a NAS drive like Seagate's IronWolf drives. They have the same 24/7 rating, the standard IronWolf drives are rated for 180TB per year, with the IronWolf Pro rated for 300TB per year. These drives also come with some of the best warranties in the business.

If you just want a solid performing gaming/storage drive but don't need the 24/7 rating, your best bet is probably going to be more in the lines of the BarraCuda HDD or FireCuda SSHD drive range. These drives are optimized for traditional PC storage and gaming usage, and the FireCuda has a small SSD cache on which it places the most frequently used files, along with a larger, spinning-disk storage capacity so that you get some of the benefits you'd see in an SSD drive, along with the larger storage capacity of the spinning HDD.