In our series of Hard Disk Drive guides, here’s the latest update to our list of recommended HDDs. All numbers in the text are updated to reflect pricing at the time of writing. Best Internal Hard Drives: Holiday 2023 Hard disk drives are cheap and offer plenty of capacity but they are bound to disappear in a not-so-distant future. Right now, the biggest portable hard disk drive has a capacity of 5TB; it uses a special drive that is slightly bigger than a standard laptop HDD which has a width of 2.5-inch and a height of 7mm. Finance is only available to permanent UK residents aged >18, subject to status, terms and conditions apply. The Seagate 60TB SSD that was launched in 2016. It was a prototype but we don't know whether it was sold. I approached Seagate in May 2023 to find out what happened to it. If you want to have a PCIe drive instead, expect to pay a significant premium although the difference in speed will be one magnitude higher thanks to the use of PCIe Gen 4 protocol. Other 8TB SSDs include

The drive is made up of nine 2TB platters (with 18 heads) offering the highest areal density across the industry, 256MB cache and has a spindle speed of up to 7200RPM. There’s a dual-attached motor and RV sensors to guarantee steady performance, which means 1.2 million hours MTBF. You can also consider a drive that supports RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks) that can offer data redundancy by writing data to multiple hard drives in parallel. This is referred to a RAID Level 1, and is supported on popular models such as the Western Digital G-RAID 2 or LaCie 2big RAID 16TB drives. Note that due to the drives being mirrored the available disk capacity will be half that of the total, so a 24TB drive will be 12TB, 16TB will be 8TB, etc. Not sure how but Exos is less than half the price here with MG being almost the the same as Ultrastar. For higher-intensity use, there's the Seagate FireCuda 2TB which is a Solid State Hybrid Drive---a drive that mixes parts of both HDDs and SSDs. Unfortunately, better performance also means you'll be spending nearly three times the price, which isn't ideal if you're on a budget.

12 Comments

There are three active vendors in the consumer hard drive space - Seagate, Toshiba, and Western Digital. Their retail offerings currently top out at 24TB, 20TB, and 24TB respectively. Operational Data - represents data that is used to support your daily workflows, such as documents, images or videos. For such a large drive this would typically be needed for larger files such as with video or virtual machine files.

Available with a SATA or SAS interface, it offers an unlimited drive write per day for five years (the length of the warranty) thanks partly to the use of SLC technology (which explains the price as well). A cheaper version of the Exadrive, the EDNLT064, is also available and is the second largest solid state drive on the market with a capacity of 64TB but swaps TLC for QLC.The drive comes with a five-year warranty with a three-year subscription to Seagate’s Rescue Data Recovery Plan. Once registered, you will be able to benefit from what Seagate calls “a global team of world-class data recovery experts in case of unexpected data loss” with a claimed successful data recovery rate of 90%. Note that the service is not available in all countries. Looking at the state of the hard drive market this fall, Synology has been selling 4TB - 18TB enterprise hard drives (rebranded Toshiba Enterprise HDDs with custom firmware), though they are meant specifically for Synology NAS units (no warranties if used in other systems). Elsewhere, as the distinction between data center / enterprise drives and consumer NAS drives start to blur amid the contracting market, Toshiba's MG09 HDDs based on FC-MAMR and Western Digital's Ultrastar DC series of data center drives have now been added to our charts. In terms of price/TB the 10TB and 12TB models are largely pointless because you can get 14TB for roughly the same price.

Based on these metrics, it is clear that the enterprise drives (Seagate Exos Enterprise, Toshiba MG Series, WD Gold, and WD Ultrastar DC Series) are rated to be more reliable in the long run over a big sample set. However, most consumer use-cases do not need a 550 TB/yr workload rating. 180 - 300 TB/yr workload rating is plenty reasonable for most users when the drives are going to be used as part of RAID arrays. Pricing Matrix and Concluding Remarks Beyond sheer size, other factors such as the fastest hard drive and fastest SSD speed, as well as overall performance, play a critical role in our evaluation. Our guide also touches upon the best external hard drive and best portable SSD options available, ensuring that you find a balance between capacity, speed, and portability.Hard disk drives still make up the most of the storage market both in the enterprise and in the consumer markets in terms of capacity. However, they’re stalling with CMR reaching a plateau and SMR, proving to be a poisoned chalice and not a technology that will get NAS owners enthused. Once you know what speeds you want, you then need to think about reliability and how much you're going to use the hard drive. For example, if you want a hard drive to store surveillance footage, then you need a hard drive rated for 24/7 uptime usage, usually either Network Attached Storage (NAS) or enterprise-grade hard drives. Both the Western Digital G-Drive 18TB and LaCie d2 Professional 18TB are perfect for storing massive quantities of data whilst offering very fast data access. They both feature 7200 RPM drives for fast data transfers. The LaCie includes a Thunderbolt 3 interface where the Western Digital only USB 3.0. You need to move up to the Western Digital G-Drive Pro 18TB to get the faster Thunderbolt 3 interface. They feature aluminium cases for improved heat distribution. Hard drives can get quite hot under continuous load, therefore having adequate ventilation will help extend the longevity of the drive.