Why I Will Never Buy a Hard Drive Again

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MarkD_1205

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With the price of ssd's falling it's a tempting idea to use a large ssd for everything. I wouldn't do it because when an update or some other failure paralyzes MSWindows and you have to re-load it, there goes all your saved data (music, video, photos, etc.) with it.
 
Jul 11, 2018
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I use 250gb 970 EVO as boot and games like star citizen that benefit greatly for SSD, and FireCuda SSHD 2TB for everything else, games that I play often load fast from SSHD, cheaper than any SSD with that amount of storage, In fact I got it for virtually the same price as any other 2TB HDD.
 

tonyhall

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Well, being Infinity Day (8-8-18) when i read this, it's about time SSDs become the norm for local OS drives.
 

Goku Kakkarot

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It's funny how he called $300 just $300 for 2TB. Hard drives are still affordable and i prefer them over SSDs. SSDs are insanely pricey! Price range in which I can get a 4TB HDD, i will only get a 256-512 MB SSD. I just cant afford them so for me HDDs are way to go
 

LAMINI

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Few 2TB drives from 10yrs ago in their 15yr old case are still chugging along and get daily use from 5 users (home). Few things I will never do: rental software and storing my data on someone else’s hard drives.
 

johncap523

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SSDs don't make sense for some applications, like media servers, where the performance gain isn't needed and the cost is still prohibitive.

The assertion that your data is safe because you use Office 365 is kinda like saying your movie that you "purchased" from Verizon is safe because it's there, on their server...until you decide to just stream, or switch cable solutions. Paying Microsoft ad infinitum to access your personal data seems silly to me. But I'm sure Microsoft appreciates the sentiment.
 


Totatly disagree. Not even to mention the benefits it has for gaming. While most of the time you'd be fine with a standard HHD. For gaming, SSDs dramatically increase game loading times. That includes zoning times and game start up etc...

It also helps with computations and offloading. Often processes that are onto the disk are far increased by using an SSD. Even pagefiles are dramatically increased.

So... no not just as a boot drive. It has so many more benefits.
 

bit_user

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Yeah, when I put a SSD in my PS3, years ago, it was like night-and-day. And that thing had just SATA 1 connectivity and the games were supposedly designed for HDD-based loading times.
 

Dark knight56

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I dropped y dual-core Celeron laptop. Toshiba c55 eith 2Gb ram and 600 GB HDD. Killed the Hdd. 4 mins to bootup. Sandisk SSD & 4gb sodimm. Laptop became better than new.
 

Nintendork

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6TB office 365 is the cheapest storage you can get if you got decent internet speeds.

At the low end just for physical components you can't get an HDD below $40-60 (500-1TB) meanwhile at around that price bracket you find the BX300 MLC 120-240GB
 


ATM (as I write this) you can find a 3TB HDD(5400 RPM, SATA3) just under $60 USD...
https://pcpartpicker.com/products/internal-hard-drive/#X=0,6000&sort=-capacity&page=1

Most of the time its a 2TB HDD (7200RPM, SATA3) that can be found.
https://pcpartpicker.com/products/internal-hard-drive/#X=0,6000&sort=-capacity&t=7200&i=25
 

2TB for around $60 is fairly normal, but I'm not sure I'd have much faith in that 3TB $60 drive.

It may be at Newegg, but it's a Marketplace item "Sold and Shipped by goHardDrive". The drive is also only rated 2/5 there based on 21 reviews, nearly all of which are from 2011-2013, with ownership dates indicating that Newegg themselves hasn't likely sold this model in around 6 years. The most recent review, from early 2017, said that their drive came heavily scuffed, and probably wasn't new, so these may very well be 7-year old refurbished drives that weren't even all that positively received back when they were new, and if they are refurbished, $60 isn't even a particularly good price for them. Or at best, they're old stock that's been sitting around somewhere for over half a decade. Due to it being an early 3TB drive, this model also apparently uses five platters, resulting in somewhat lower performance and a higher chance of failure compared to newer drives offering the same capacity on fewer platters.


Not really. Office 365 costs $80-$100 per year. That means, after just 5 years, you'll have spent $400-$500 on that 6TB of storage, assuming Microsoft doesn't raise prices. Hard drives, on the other hand, mostly involve just an initial investment and will usually run for many years. Even if you pick up double the capacity to allow for backups of everything, you will still likely have paid less after just several years or so.
 

nobspls

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You must be loaded. Make it rain.

I sure would like SSDs everywhere, but 10TB 20TB file servers.... I think my budget would be totally blown out of the water. HDDs are still needed for that. That is why outfits like Backblaze are running massive amounts of HDDS, and all those data centers too. If you are doing any sort of long term storage, online or offline archival and backups, you will need HDDs. The evolution process is slow, but in time the HDDs will end up being like the tape backups, and then long after that they may finally become obsolete and no longer in use.

But if I were to be making a bet on this, that reality would probably take more than 20 years to happen, because even now there are still places that run tape backups along with optical media robots for long term backups.

 
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