Review WD Blue 8TB HDD Review: A Balanced, Entry-Level Hard Drive

[Admin]

The WD Blue HDD is an easy and affordable way to bring additional storage to your system. It’s not the fastest drive, and the warranty is lackluster, but it’s inexpensive and the performance is sufficient for an HDD.

WD Blue 8TB HDD Review: A Balanced, Entry-Level Hard Drive : Read more

 

[YouFilthyHippo]

I'm amazed hard drives still exist, with how fast SSD prices are falling. For 99.999999999999% of consumers, there is no incentive to choose a hard drive over an SSD. I guess... for mass-storage: backups of large files, I guess they can be useful for that. But other than that, I dont see the point

 

[dimar]

What I really need is a 10-100TB M-Disc storage, so for my yearly backups.

 

[rluker5]

I have one of these. Picked it up a year ago when SSDs cost about twice what they do now, and my 3TB Barracuda was failing. Certainly faster than any of my older HDDs were. Also much slower than an SSD.

But it is fast enough for it's purpose as an infrequently accessed backup stuff drive. Phone pictures, music, movies, captures, OS backups, whatever. It's fast enough to be convenient and big enough to be careless with what you save on it. It won't last as long as an M-disc, but is so much faster. I only put very important stuff on M-discs because it takes so long.

Not the greatest, but reliable, cheap for the space, and fast enough for media and storage. Still plays most games ok, but I certainly wouldn't use it for an OS drive.

 

[Thunder64]

I got one as a backup drive not too long ago. I've had better luck with WD but couldn't justify double the price for a Gold variant this time around. Now I have my WD 4TB Gold as a backup and this 8TB serves as another backup, as well as other mass storage needs.

I certainly would not get it if speed is what matters. Also, I was a bit surprised that two year warranties are the new normal. I thought it used to be three years, with five for Black and Gold drives? I have a 1TB drive that's been running for over 10 years. I certainly don't trust it, neither does SMART, but it still works. I doubt these new drives will last that long.

 

[bit_user]

I'm amazed hard drives still exist, with how fast SSD prices are falling.

This product line is particularly endangered, since it's not a NAS or server-oriented model, nor is it too much bigger than the size of SATA SSDs currently on the market.

For 99.999999999999% of consumers, there is no incentive to choose a hard drive over an SSD. I guess... for mass-storage: backups of large files,

Sure, there is. Backups - not just of large files, but any files you might want to recover a long time hence. Try the following:

1. Copy some files onto a SSD and a hard disk.
2. Disconnect them and place them in a drawer or on a shelf.
3. Wait 5 years.
4. Reconnect them and see which one is still readable.

If you're using a modern SSD (TLC or QLC), I'll bet you it's not going to be the SSD.

I accidentally conducted this experiment at work, when I connected a TLC SSD from a PC that had been unplugged for several years. The parts of the drive that hadn't been written since it was manufactured produced errors, when I tried to read them (I did the equivalent of a "surface scan"), and it was manufactured less than 5 years prior.

 

[YouFilthyHippo]

This particular product line is particularly endangered, since it's not a NAS or server-oriented model, nor is it too much bigger than the size of SATA SSDs currently on the market.


Sure, there is. Backups - not just of large files, but any files you might want to recover a long time hence. Try the following:

1. Copy some files onto a SSD and a hard disk.
2. Disconnect them and place them in a drawer or on a shelf.
3. Wait 5 years.
4. Reconnect them and see which one is still readable.

If you're using a modern SSD (TLC or QLC), I'll bet you it's not going to be the SSD.

I accidentally conducted this experiment at work, when I connected a TLC SSD from a PC that had been unplugged for several years. The parts of the drive that hadn't been written since it was manufactured produced errors, when I tried to read them (I did the equivalent of a "surface scan"), and it was manufactured less than 5 years prior.

Its a known fact that HDD are far more reliable than SSDs. So there is that. I think that we are at a point where the only logical use case for hard drives are mass-storage or long term backup, or disk images. Hold all your music, movies, documents, photos, that sort of stuff. That stuff wont be bottlenecked by HDD speeds. I have a 14TB HDD myself. Its just a data storage piece. All it does is store data for access at any time. Just media and stuff. But I wouldn't dare run games, an OS, big applications on it

 

[kyzarvs]

I'm amazed hard drives still exist, with how fast SSD prices are falling. For 99.999999999999% of consumers, there is no incentive to choose a hard drive over an SSD. I guess... for mass-storage: backups of large files, I guess they can be useful for that. But other than that, I dont see the point

All that data has to go somewhere. My Steam folder is 3TB+ then there's GoG, Epic etc etc. I access it from multiple machines, so makes sense to have it in one place. It's only a couple of games recently that utilise directstorage (Diablo IV and Forspoken - neither of which I'm overly interested in) where SSDs make any appreciable difference - I did a bunch of tests with GTA-V on local spinner, networked NAS and local nvme a while ago - there was like 10s of initial loading time between them and zero difference once in-game.

Add to that my work data, media storage (we run Nextcloud for all automatic media storage from mobile devices) - yeah, it's pretty easy in a busy family with a lot of data needs (my daughter is 22 and has her own gaming storage requirements for example) to justify a FreeNAS box with a decent 5-drive RAID of 'spinners. I think we have just over half of our 23TB available in use. At $100 roughly for 8TB, the cost is still a significant factor and a RAID can still saturate almost any network connection at home, so no point in spending more on something with potentially a lower MTBF and performance you can't access. I freely admit that as I own an IT company, I'm not in the normal percentage of users, but there is still more than a valid case for spinners as soon as longevity and networks are involved.

Obviously for boot drives nvme is fantastic and Windows has bloated to the point where it's not really viable on a spinner any more and I wouldn't have them in any box I am in earshot of. Still not as fast to boot as XP was back in the day on a 2x WD Raptor 10k rpm striped array, but such is the price of progress!

 

[newtechldtech]

This product line is particularly endangered, since it's not a NAS or server-oriented model, nor is it too much bigger than the size of SATA SSDs currently on the market.


Sure, there is. Backups - not just of large files, but any files you might want to recover a long time hence. Try the following:

1. Copy some files onto a SSD and a hard disk.
2. Disconnect them and place them in a drawer or on a shelf.
3. Wait 5 years.
4. Reconnect them and see which one is still readable.

If you're using a modern SSD (TLC or QLC), I'll bet you it's not going to be the SSD.

I accidentally conducted this experiment at work, when I connected a TLC SSD from a PC that had been unplugged for several years. The parts of the drive that hadn't been written since it was manufactured produced errors, when I tried to read them (I did the equivalent of a "surface scan"), and it was manufactured less than 5 years prior.

Your experiment with your old SSD is flawed . because you dont know the reason behind the errors , could be environmental. it depends on the SSD as well , "cheap" ones can retain data unplugged for 2 years only , and "good ones" 5 years. some manufacturer even claim 15-20 years but for sure not the "consumer" grades.

NOW !! having said that !

it is time to make a kit for storing SSDs , connected to power all the time . preventing electron leakage from SSDs that corrupts DATA ..cheap and easy ..

 

[YouFilthyHippo]

All that data has to go somewhere. My Steam folder is 3TB+ then there's GoG, Epic etc etc. I access it from multiple machines, so makes sense to have it in one place. It's only a couple of games recently that utilise directstorage (Diablo IV and Forspoken - neither of which I'm overly interested in) where SSDs make any appreciable difference - I did a bunch of tests with GTA-V on local spinner, networked NAS and local nvme a while ago - there was like 10s of initial loading time between them and zero difference once in-game.

Add to that my work data, media storage (we run Nextcloud for all automatic media storage from mobile devices) - yeah, it's pretty easy in a busy family with a lot of data needs (my daughter is 22 and has her own gaming storage requirements for example) to justify a FreeNAS box with a decent 5-drive RAID of 'spinners. I think we have just over half of our 23TB available in use. At $100 roughly for 8TB, the cost is still a significant factor and a RAID can still saturate almost any network connection at home, so no point in spending more on something with potentially a lower MTBF and performance you can't access. I freely admit that as I own an IT company, I'm not in the normal percentage of users, but there is still more than a valid case for spinners as soon as longevity and networks are involved.

Obviously for boot drives nvme is fantastic and Windows has bloated to the point where it's not really viable on a spinner any more and I wouldn't have them in any box I am in earshot of. Still not as fast to boot as XP was back in the day on a 2x WD Raptor 10k rpm striped array, but such is the price of progress!

Thats another thing I can't get my head around, is why SSDs make loading times only 2x faster than a spinner even though they are 15x faster or more. I think I need an ELI5 on this one. Anything?

 

[bit_user]

Your experiment with your old SSD is flawed . because you dont know the reason behind the errors , could be environmental.

Huh? This was stored in a normal office environment. No extreme temperatures or anything like that. Exactly the kind of conditions where you'd normally have your data at rest.

it depends on the SSD as well , "cheap" ones can retain data unplugged for 2 years only , and "good ones" 5 years. some manufacturer even claim 15-20 years but for sure not the "consumer" grades.

Source? I've looked into this, a fair amount. The only NAND which is going to retain data for anything remotely close to those periods of time are the slow, low-capacity chips used to embed firmware in devices, which is completely irrelevant to this discussion.

Manufacturers tend not to be very forthcoming with offline data retention figures. If you have anything remotely recent, please share. Enterprise storage product tend to specify 90 days, only. However, that's a minimum requirement and does not reflect testing of what they actually achieve.

NOW !! having said that !

it is time to make a kit for storing SSDs , connected to power all the time . preventing electron leakage from SSDs that corrupts DATA ..cheap and easy ..

LOL, like a trickle charger for a car battery?
🙄

A better option might be to keep them in the refrigerator or freezer, sealed in moisture-proof bags with desiccant.

 

[bit_user]

Thats another thing I can't get my head around, is why SSDs make loading times only 2x faster than a spinner even though they are 15x faster or more. I think I need an ELI5 on this one. Anything?

A couple ideas:

1. Anti-virus? Often, you can exclude certain folders from "on-access scanning" protections, which might be worth doing for game data.
2. While a game is loading stuff, the I/O is going to be interspersed with some computation. It could be just that only 50% of that time was spent on I/O, which means that even if you had infinitely fast storage, the maximum speedup you'd get is 2x. To get any further speedup, a CPU with faster single-thread performance.
3. Maybe the game is doing its I/O in lots of small, synchronous reads and you're just getting killed by the overhead. Still, the IOPS of a fast SSD is so much better than a HDD that this explanation would only apply to SSDs of varying speeds and not SSD vs. HDD.

When I installed a SSD in my PS3, loading times improved by like 8x. And I'm pretty sure the PS3 had just a SATA-1 interface.

 

[lmcnabney]

Still grossly overpriced and don't pretend we didn't see that warranty shrink some more.

Spinning rust has been sitting in the $14-15 per TB range for about three years now. In the three years before that (2017-2020) the price of HDD was cut in half, but prices have been suspiciously flat ever since. In the same time the price of SSDs has dropped about 80%.

 

[USAFRet]

Still grossly overpriced and don't pretend we didn't see that warranty shrink some more.

Spinning rust has been sitting in the $14-15 per TB range for about three years now. In the three years before that (2017-2020) the price of HDD was cut in half, but prices have been suspiciously flat ever since. In the same time the price of SSDs has dropped about 80%.

There is a bottom floor on retail device prices.
And does not automagically scale with drive capacity.

If a 10TB drive costs $100, that doesn't mean you can sell a 1TB drive for $10.

 

[bit_user]

Still grossly overpriced and don't pretend we didn't see that warranty shrink some more.

You think their margins are too high, or what? Is that because you analyzed the BoM + manufacturing costs and think they're a lot lower than what these drives are selling for?

Spinning rust has been sitting in the $14-15 per TB range for about three years now. In the three years before that (2017-2020) the price of HDD was cut in half, but prices have been suspiciously flat ever since.

Platter density increases have slowed. That's why the industry is playing around with techniques like SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording) and HAMR (Heat-Assisted).

In the same time the price of SSDs has dropped about 80%.

Because 3D NAND has been rapidly adding layers, the industry has transitioned to QLC in that time, and NAND benefits from process node increases.

Compared to that, a HDD has metal that has to be mined and mechanical components that have to be machined, as well as a more complex assembly process. The minimum price for a HDD is a lot higher than a SSD, as a result. That's also why higher-capacity drives are a disproportionately better value (at least, until you cross over into dual-actuator or HAMR drives).

Also, we can't ignore the effect of market volatility and inflation on NAND and HDD pricing.

Basically, just because price/GB doesn't drop at a consistent rate doesn't mean something is "grossly overpriced".

 

[cryoburner]

The Blue also has a smaller cache for its capacity, even compared to the BarraCuda, so this drive is meant to be a budget offering.

The SMR drives need a larger cache to prevent performance from bottoming out more than it already does, since they require a big block of data to be written all at once. So the extra cache on the Barracuda is a necessity to enable the cheaper and slower SMR tech, not an advantage.

Thats another thing I can't get my head around, is why SSDs make loading times only 2x faster than a spinner even though they are 15x faster or more. I think I need an ELI5 on this one. Anything?

I think this mostly tends to come down to limitations of how fast the computer can process the data that's being loaded. A game isn't just loading big chunks of data without looking at them and immediately starting, it's often doing things like decompressing the data, sorting and assembling the parts of a level, initializing various game systems, and so on. If half the "loading" time is spent doing those other tasks, then you can't really improve it through faster storage past a certain point. And that's why slower SATA SSDs tend to perform nearly as fast as the fastest SSDs on the market when it comes to loading most games, and even many non-gaming tasks. Games designed specifically with SSD storage in mind can potentially streamline those things though, having many of the tasks and more of the data loaded in the background after the game is already running. Most games still try to be functional on hard drives at the expense of longer initial load times, but I could see that shifting soon now that larger capacity SSDs are available at lower price points, and the consoles are using fast SSDs as well.

When I installed a SSD in my PS3, loading times improved by like 8x. And I'm pretty sure the PS3 had just a SATA-1 interface.

The original PS3 used low capacity 5400RPM 2.5" laptop drives though, that had sequential read speeds of around 30MB/s, roughly comparable to accessing a drive over a USB 2.0 connection. Even SATA-I could support around 5 times that speed.

 

[USAFRet]

Thats another thing I can't get my head around, is why SSDs make loading times only 2x faster than a spinner even though they are 15x faster or more. I think I need an ELI5 on this one. Anything?

The ELI5 is because you're looking at the wrong benchmark number.

The big number that is always published is for a single large block sequential data.

That is NOT what happens in game loading. That is loading hundreds or thousands of tiny files.


Like comparing 2 cars, and only looking at the published Top Speed number.
Irrelevant in 99% of use.

 

[lmcnabney]

You think their margins are too high, or what? Is that because you analyzed the BoM + manufacturing costs and think they're a lot lower than what these drives are selling for?


Platter density increases have slowed. That's why the industry is playing around with techniques like SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording) and HAMR (Heat-Assisted).


Because 3D NAND has been rapidly adding layers, the industry has transitioned to QLC in that time, and NAND benefits from process node increases.

Compared to that, a HDD has metal that has to be mined and mechanical components that have to be machined, as well as a more complex assembly process. The minimum price for a HDD is a lot higher than a SSD, as a result. That's also why higher-capacity drives are a disproportionately better value (at least, until you cross over into dual-actuator or HAMR drives).

Also, we can't ignore the effect of market volatility and inflation on NAND and HDD pricing.

Basically, just because price/GB doesn't drop at a consistent rate doesn't mean something is "grossly overpriced".

I went ahead and pulled Seagate's numbers and they had been holding a nice fat 25-30% gross margin going back over a decade. Until the last year. See that's when they stopped competing in the market and consumers pretty much forgot about spinning rust. Their margin is sitting around 20% and continuing to fall. WD has had a similar experience. See, there are only three manufacturers of spinning rust on earth and they have apparently decided to not compete with each other any more. Their prices are pretty much all the same now. Compare that to the NAND market in which there are dozens of manufacturers and hundreds of reseller / brands. See how competition works?

I will also reference a recent article here in regards to HDD sales cratering. A 35% sales drop for the entire industry this year. You would think that terrible sales would encourage price slashing to drive up numbers, but that didn't happen. They are choosing NOT to compete and they will be totally surprised when their sales are zero in five years.

 

[bit_user]

The ELI5 is because you're looking at the wrong benchmark number.

The big number that is always published is for a single large block sequential data.

That is NOT what happens in game loading. That is loading hundreds or thousands of tiny files.

If the point of comparison is vs. a mechanical disk, then the disparity should be even larger because of that! With a mechanical disk, lots of random I/O means seeking and you take a few ms of latency each time you seek.

SSDs are actually awesome at random IOPS. They get their highest IOPS numbers with lots of little reads and a decent queue depth. The hit that you'd take with reading lots of little files is going to be from on-access scanning that many antivirus programs do.

Back when I last did software development on Windows, it was a deal-breaker for our build times. We had to tell the antivirus program to ignore the folders where we did builds, in order to get performance anything like what we saw on Linux (using the same hardware spec).

 

[USAFRet]

If the point of comparison is vs. a mechanical disk, then the disparity should be even larger because of that! With a mechanical disk, lots of random I/O means seeking and you take a few ms of latency each time you seek.

SSDs are actually awesome at random IOPS. They get their highest IOPS numbers with lots of little reads and a decent queue depth. The hit that you'd take with reading lots of little files is going to be from on-access scanning that many antivirus programs do.

Back when I last did software development on Windows, it was a deal-breaker for our build times. We had to tell the antivirus program to ignore the folders where we did builds, in order to get performance anything like what we saw on Linux (using the same hardware spec).

My comment was regarding the "15x faster" concept.

 

[bit_user]

I went ahead and pulled Seagate's numbers and they had been holding a nice fat 25-30% gross margin going back over a decade. Until the last year. See that's when they stopped competing in the market and consumers pretty much forgot about spinning rust. Their margin is sitting around 20% and continuing to fall. WD has had a similar experience. See, there are only three manufacturers of spinning rust on earth and they have apparently decided to not compete with each other any more. Their prices are pretty much all the same now.

Your logic is completely backwards. Falling margins are a sign of increased competition, if anything!

And it certainly doesn't support the idea that their products are "grossly overpriced", in which case the margins would be larger - not smaller.

Compare that to the NAND market in which there are dozens of manufacturers and hundreds of reseller / brands. See how competition works?

You're comparing the wrong thing. With NAND, you ought to compare the manufacturers of the chips, rather than the SSD makers. Virtually anyone can buy some NAND chips and slap them on a PCB with a controller and sell it as a M.2 drive. However, with Intel and Chinese fabs out of the market, there are now just 3 big NAND makers.

I will also reference a recent article here in regards to HDD sales cratering. A 35% sales drop for the entire industry this year. You would think that terrible sales would encourage price slashing to drive up numbers, but that didn't happen.

There's only so much margin they can afford to give up. The way the math works is that you make a certain % of margin on each product sold. If you drop prices, you can increase volume by some amount, but it's only a win if the volume goes up by enough to more than compensate for the reduction in margin.

If the market isn't very responsive to price-cuts (i.e. people aren't going to rush out and buy more drives if they're cheaper), then it's not a good move to slash prices. Right now, the PC market is in slow period, and it's not primarily due to prices.

In some cases, like SSDs and GPUs, there's a very rapid obsolescence curve for any builtup inventory, which can stimulate discounts to move that inventory at little or no profit. With hard drives, because platter densities are increasing so slowly, it's not as if there's another generation of way denser hard drives just waiting to be launched. Therefore, there's not the same incentive to take a loss by clearing out inventory as you have with SSDs and GPUs.

 

[hotaru.hino]

Thats another thing I can't get my head around, is why SSDs make loading times only 2x faster than a spinner even though they are 15x faster or more. I think I need an ELI5 on this one. Anything?

Because the process of loading a program isn't just "move data from storage to RAM." The computer still has to process it before the program is usable to the user.

As an example, say you want to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Moving data from storage to RAM is like getting the peanut butter, jelly, and bread out onto the counter. You don't have a sandwich until you process the ingredients to make it one.

Though with program loading, there may be other things it needs to load, but it doesn't know that it has to load it until the last second. For instance, Windows comes with hundreds, if not thousands of drivers. Obviously it'd be very inefficient to start them all up. So Windows only loads up the ones it needs. Except it can't know this until it knows what hardware it's working with.

 

[Mr5oh]

I'm amazed hard drives still exist, with how fast SSD prices are falling. For 99.999999999999% of consumers, there is no incentive to choose a hard drive over an SSD. I guess... for mass-storage: backups of large files, I guess they can be useful for that. But other than that, I dont see the point

I'm still that 0.000000001% I guess, as SSDs are still too small. So my Steam Library still sits on a WD Gold drive.

 

[cryoburner]

I'm still that 0.000000001% I guess, as SSDs are still too small. So my Steam Library still sits on a WD Gold drive.

Unless one has a particularly slow or data-capped Internet connection, the benefits of having an entire multi-terabyte Steam library installed at once seem questionable. Most of the installed games will likely sit around unplayed for years, or might never be played, in which case that's just wasted space. And while there might be the benefit of having everything ready to go should you ever decide to play a game, that's countered by noticeably slower load times on a hard drive, and the potential inconvenience of having Steam autoupdate loads of games in the background that you are not even actively playing.

At current pricing, it's possible to get some 2TB SSDs for a little over $60 in the US, not much more than what a 2TB HDD costs, and that should likely be sufficient for holding dozens of modern games. It's also currently possible to find a 4TB SSD for as little as $150. And while the pricing doesn't scale nearly as well as hard drives for larger capacities, an 8TB SSD can be had for $400. Or if one's connectivity options allow for it, they could get the same capacity out of four 2TB SSDs for around $250. Those might not be the fastest models, but the performance should tend to be mostly indistinguishable from faster SSDs for loading games, and much faster than platter-based drives. And you also don't generally need to bother with backing up a game library if you can easily redownload it.

Things like backups and video storage are where hard drives can still make sense in a home environment, as the cost-per-GB tends to be more relevant than anything else. Though even there, there's only around a 2 to 1 price difference between the best-value SSDs and the best-value hard drives now. A year ago I might have agreed that hard drives could still make some sense for an extended game library, but over the last year SSD prices have plummeted to around half of what they were then.