Replacing 2tb games drive

The current drive is a caviar black 2tb, it's been clicking and taking longer and longer to load things. I have been nursing it along but finally think I need to go ahead and clone it and just wait for it to die.


Speed of loading and games is really the only concern for the drive, I thought perhaps a 2tb SSD would be an option, but that is cost prohibitive. Or is there an option I didn't see?

Are the Black drives still the drives to get? I don't benchmark, and a second or two isn't a priority I won't really notice that. I have owned red, blue, green,(was there a purple I really think I had a purple one) drives, never noticed any different really, honestly only the green drives are noticeably slower to the point I won't run them.


thanks for all input!

Personally i never have 2tb worth of games installed on my PC, as i dont game that many different games at the same time, so i keep my games on my SSDs, but if you really need to keep all the games, then i would go again with the Black, still is great option for a mechanical.

it's been clicking and taking longer and longer to load things.

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Time to check its health with CrystalDiskInfo.

I thought perhaps a 2tb SSD would be an option

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A few 1TB drives have been on sale for around $300 US in the last month. Wait for a sale! 2TB does not exist as a single drive in consumer price levels.

Abula said:

Personally i never have 2tb worth of games installed on my PC, as i dont game that many different games at the same time, so i keep my games on my SSDs, but if you really need to keep all the games, then i would go again with the Black, still is great option for a mechanical.

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I like to have my entire steam library available for guests and old school lan gaming.

My internet is too slow to DL games as needed unfortunately.

stealthy123 said:

I like to have my entire steam library available for guests and old school lan gaming.

My internet is too slow to DL games as needed unfortunately.

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The go with the WD Black, either way, there are very few games that benefit from having them on an SSD, so get the WD Black.

stealthy123 said:

I like to have my entire steam library available for guests and old school lan gaming.

My internet is too slow to DL games as needed unfortunately.

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You know, there is an option in Steam to backup your games, either one at a time, or multiple/all of them at once.
This way, you don't have to keep all of them installed, but if you want to play one, you can reinstall it quickly from a local drive or network storage location.

Just throwing that out there since you were looking for speed on a SSD.

Meh, when the desire hits me I want to game then not reinstall and wait for the game to update.

The steam backup only seems to backup the core game data and they still have to update, sometimes those are gigs worth of data.

Only games with massive loadtimes will benefit from an SSD, so probably just replacing with a newer black is the way to go. I use both a 512gig SSD and a 1TB black for games, the ones I play a lot or are full of large textures go on the SSD, rest on the black.

One possible option.

SSHD.

While I normally don't recommend Seagate to people (have had bad luck with their consumer grade drives, both Seagate native AND the various companies they've absorbed), I've actually had good luck with their SSHD drives.

This way, you have a small bit of flash for the most commonly accessed stuff to get cached to.
Yet you still get the capaciousness of spinning rust platters.

You can get a 2TB drive for about $100 or a 4TB unit for about $170.

I'd rather have an SSD and only have a few games installed at once.