[POLL] What are your preferred storage solutions for 2022? (HDD and SSD)

[goretsky Supervisor]

Hello,

 

This is a new yearly poll for sharing your preferred storage solutions and covers both hard disk drives and solid-state drives.

Please feel free to describe what you are currently using this year, plus any planned upgrades.

 

Regards,

Aryeh Goretsky

[+virtorio MVC]

I usually go WD for HDDs drives and Samsung for SSDs and Crucial if I need a cheap SATA SSD.

[Mindovermaster Global Moderator]

WD for HDDs, been using them forever, and love em.

 

Either WD or Samsung for SSD's. Both are top notch.

[Skyfrog]

I still use WD though I'm not happy with some of their behavior the last few years. There's not much to choose from anymore with only WD, Seagate and Toshiba left.

 

For SSDs I don't really care, there's not that much difference in any of them that I can see. I just get whatever is the best deal.

[Sir Topham Hatt]

The main PC has a WD HDD and Samsung SSD.

The HTPC now has a Seagate HDD (was WD) and a Crucial NVMe (was Samsung SSD).

[mickeyreg]

I'm using mainly HGST hard drives. I'm nt sure what to buy next. Probably again refurbrished HGST or Hitachi.

 

SSD: initally Samsung after some research, and next Patriot and Gigabyte because of low proce :)

[+E.Worm Jimmy Subscriber¹]

Hdd is done..I bought 2 4tb drives a while back for cheap backup.

But it is the last time I use the drives and using them was not too fun. Waiting for a file to load. My flash drives are so much better and the current new SSD drives are fantastic. Totally worth the cost considering the cost is not too bad now.

 

I still buy WD becuase of habit I guess..

 

 

[hellowalkman Reporter]

Toshiba is pretty underrated as an HDD manufacturer it seems.

[Mindovermaster Global Moderator]

On 18/02/2022 at 10:30, hellowalkman said:

Toshiba is pretty underrated as an HDD manufacturer it seems.

Toshiba doesn't make their own things..

[hellowalkman Reporter]

On 18/02/2022 at 23:10, Mindovermaster said:

Toshiba doesn't make their own things..

You sure about that? I know they aren't doing too well financially but last I heard, they still make their 2.5" HDDs

[Mindovermaster Global Moderator]

On 18/02/2022 at 11:53, hellowalkman said:

You sure about that? I know they aren't doing too well financially but last I heard, they still make their 2.5" HDDs

Oh, that wasn't Toshiba.. That was Transcend. My bad..

[zhangm Supervisor]

These days, I'll go with approximately whomever has what I want in stock for a reasonable price. I have enough redundancy and sync between multiple computers and the cloud that I'm no longer particularly worried if a single TB+ storage device dies suddenly (albeit I'm also not responsible for large volume purchases). Drives are just inexpensive enough and data sync sufficiently mindless that I'm no longer substantially concerned about buying a single drive that I'm hoping will last 5 - 10 years, when I know that the technology will develop so that if it lasts a couple years that there will be another good deal for a cheaper or faster device to replace it.

[tsupersonic]

I've had the best luck with Western Digital HDD's and Samsung SSD's. Still have some HDD's/SSD's from both manufacturers that go back as far as 2009. 

[spaceelf]

Preferred HD Manufacturer: None isn't a functioning option.  I guess I can pick WD though, since that 20TB with OptiNAND looks sweet.

[PGHammer]

Preferred HDD manufacturer - Used to be Western Digital - however, Seagate redeemed themselves with Barracuda Compute.  Not only are they actually MORE reliable than either the original Barracuda, they are even more reliable than the fish they are named after.  My mom has one, and I bought one myself six months later - both in Amazon.com frustration--free packaging - I did the install in separate desktops (HP in her case, and a BYOPC in mine).  Because of the HP partitioning scheme, her new Compute uses multiple partitions - whereas mine in one El Humungo partition - and has been from the jump.  My ONLY complaint - with either one - is with hers requiring multiple partitions - however, that is the fault of HP - not Seagate.  (Both Computes are 4 TB - the second-largest storage size - however, in terms of physical dimensions, they are physically no larger than the original Seagate Barracuda - the 500 GB model that used to be my boot drive once upom a time when NT was in flower.)  Despite the capacity gain, it's also FASTER than the drive it replaced - largely due to the onboard cache. - and that is according to Windiws itself!! (As  the actual neuroscientist would say - "Bigger drive AND faster performance? Yes, please!")  I recommend Barracuda Computes without hesitation.

[vinik1748]

always SSD will be better than HDD if you want a fast working memory always choose SSD... but everything has some benefits and cons also same as SSD has a major con that is it is very expensive... on the other hand HDD is cheap in price. 

[MS Bob 11]

SK Hynix P31 1 TB and 2 TB are pretty AMAZING and beat the equivalent Gen 3 Samsung SSDs. Energy efficiency and temperatures are industry leading. P41 Gen 4 however throttles a lot.

[devHead]

I am using Hitachi Ultrastar Enterprise drives for my HDDs and I have a couple WD and one cheap SanDisk drive for SSDs

[+Jester124 Subscriber²]

I have Seagate's for all of my HDD storage and have had minimal issues. I had bad luck with WD.

For SSD's, I have a mix of XPG and Samsung and would go back to either

[theefool]

None of the above.  I'm current running sabrent.

[skinnyJM]

HDD = Western Digital (since the mid 90s)

SSD = Samsung, Western Digital and the occasional Crucial/Micron.

[+Raze Subscriber²]

Western Digital (external) for backups, WD Reds for Synology NAS and Samsung 970 and 980 Pro for PC.

[ThaCrip]

Preferred...

 

-HDD = HGST

 

based on blackblaze data from years ago this brand is generally a bit more reliable than the others, but usually costs a little more. but I bought a 'renewed' 6TB HGST not long ago for $59.99+tax, which new is probably 'at least' double that price, and the SMART data on it showed 4 years 4 months and 2 days of power-on time and supposedly comes with a 5 year warranty to (I ran a 'secure erase' on it for good measure to make sure whatever may have previously been on it is gone). but at $60 for 6TB it's difficult for me to complain especially given I am more of the mindset I prefer not to pay more than around $120 tops for a HDD as a general rule (I have exceeded that about twice in my life though). but in terms of total hard drives I have owned of 1TB or larger, all of which still work, I have 1TB_Samsung/2TB_Samsung/2TB_Hitachi/4TB_Seagate/5TB_HGST/6TB_HGST. so my two largest hard drives are HGST brand and the three largest I got (4TB/5TB/6TB) are all internally in use on my primary PC which I leave running all of the time where as the three smallest (1TB/2TB/2TB) I use occasionally in a USB3.0 docking station for external data backup as I just slide the standard 3.5" hard drives in and out of that as needed.

 

anyways, my HGST drives are a bit more noisy then my other drives but they (I think both is but I know the 6TB is listed that way) are 'enterprise' drives. but ultimately I want reliability as I tend to expect hard drives in general to last a 'easy' 5+ years, but more towards 10+ years to really feel they are of good quality. but so far, even my oldest hard drives of 1TB or larger are probably 10+ years at this point as I would guesstimate those are probably from around 2009-2010 or so.

 

-SSD = Samsung

 

Samsung is probably the safest bet in general for SSD's even though I am sure there are good enough alternatives (Intel/Crucial etc) 'if' the price is noticeably better. but if price is about the same as other brands, stick with Samsung and don't look back as if I can't save say $20+ by going with another brand, ill just default to Samsung since they seem to have a solid rep with SSD's.

 

in fact, I am still using my Samsung 850 EVO 250GB SATA SSD in my primary PC since I bought the SSD in May 2015 and currently have 25.71TBW to it as it's officially rated for 75TBW, but will likely at least double that before any real chance of trouble occurs from writing data to it, which basically means at my current write rate ill get decades of use out of it as even assuming it fails at about 75TBW, at my current rate (about 3.5TBW per year average over 7 and 1/3rd years), ill probably get at least another 14 years out of it. but the only other SSD I ever owned besides that is a Intel 545s 128GB SATA which has much less use on it and is a backup. if my Samsung dies in my main PC ill likely just remove that Intel 128GB SSD from my backup laptop and put it in the main PC. but I am hoping by the time I need to buy another SSD type of device, that one can get 1TB models for much less than they have been for a while now otherwise ill probably just get a 500GB model since, at least from a recent check there is about a $40 difference between the 500GB and 1TB models with Samsung (i.e. $60 vs $100), which is enough of a gap to push me towards the smaller 500GB model since i would rather put the $40 saved towards a regular hard drive. but if there was only a $20 difference or so I would be a lot more likely to buy the larger model. come to think of it... since I don't usually store much on my main boot SSD anyways, as 250GB is already more than good enough for me, even if I wanted to load say games from the SSD, I could just get another SSD to load them from in the future. but honestly, I suspect most games there won't be much of a improvement over a decent sized regular hard drive, which makes doing this that much less appealing. so basically, short of a limited amount of situations, SSD's are mainly good just for general boot up and program loading benefits, basically the general OS and general programs, but besides that, probably not that much benefit.

 

p.s. as a alternative to hard drive storage for long term data backup I still prefer burning DVD's (Verbatim or Taiyo Yuden). but this is mostly good for higher importance data backup, like say family pictures or videos and the like.

[goretsky Supervisor]

Hello,

Oh, yes, I have used the older (TLC) model of their 4TB NVMe SSD and it works quite well.  Will definitely have to add them for the 2023 poll!

 

Regards,

Aryeh Goretsky
 

  

On 25/09/2022 at 12:33, theefool said:

None of the above.  I'm current running sabrent.

 

[+InsaneNutter MVC]

My current usage pretty much reflects the most popular choices on the poll.

 

SSD / NVMe: Samsung

HDD: Western Digital

 

Currently I have a 2TB Samsung NVMe as the only drive in my gaming PC.

In addition I have 8x 4TB drives in my home server / NAS, which is where most of my data is stored. Ideally at some point I plan to re build this with much larger drives as its getting pretty full now.

 

I've been holding off as I'm undecided if I want to use TrueNAS Scale or Unraid. Both have pros and cons and i realise you'd only use one of these in the enterprise, however as a home user its not a totally straightforward choice. Ideally I'd like to add drives for more space as required, not buy them all up front, which is not possible with TrueNAS & ZFS (yet).