WD Blue vs Seagate Barracuda, trying to choose a 2TB HDD

[ochadd]

Some people here seriously don't seem to understand that a SSD over a HDD in some situations is a waste of money. A SSD literally has zero benefit over a HDD in a desktop for just using it for storage of files that do not in any way need fast access.

Reliability is the 800 lb gorilla in the room. Useful life span is a 750 lb gorilla. Then performance. I'll die on this hill. You are wrong.

 

[ND40oz]

The SSD is for games so I can leave that 250GB SSD just for my OS and Apps, the HDD is for mass storage and to replace a 300GB HDD that is rapidly running out of space.

And if you bought a 2TB SSD in the first place it easily would have replaced the 250GB boot drive and 300GB HDD that is running out of space. Then when you actually filled the 2TB SSD up you could have either purchased a larger drive for more storage or mapped a drive to the 5 disk array you have on another server you already have sitting in your house to offload the lesser used media.

 

[Cyber Akuma]

And if you bought a 2TB SSD in the first place it easily would have replaced the 250GB boot drive and 300GB HDD that is running out of space.

Not only did I not have the money back then, but I don't WANT them to be a single drive. Makes backups and reinstalls much easier and faster when my OS is isolated from everything else.

I also prefer to have a separate game drive since I have no reason to back that up and I can just re-download all of my games easily from whatever clients I purchased them on. The OS and Storage drives are the only ones I care to backup.

 

[ochadd]

Not only did I not have the money back then, but I don't WANT them to be a single drive. Makes backups and reinstalls much easier and faster when my OS is isolated from everything else.

I also prefer to have a separate game drive since I have no reason to back that up and I can just re-download all of my games easily from whatever clients I purchased them on. The OS and Storage drives are the only ones I care to backup.

I'd suggest separate partitions to accomplish your isolation. Having multiple drives is nice. I still keep an 850 pro in my personal machine for this reason. I wouldn't give up the opportunity to rid yourself of spinning rust to get there though.

 

[Cyber Akuma]

There is nothing wrong with "spinning rust" for mass storage. Sorry, but if "Everything MUST be SSD" is the hill you die on, then "HDDs make more sense for mass storage" is the hill I will die on. It's absurd to want to remove all mechanical drives just for the sake of removing all mechanical drives when SSDs offer no benefits over HDDs for mass storage of files and media that in no way benefits from their access speeds. Maybe once SSDs and HDDs are the same price-per-gig, but that is still a long ways away. It makes zero sense to buy a significantly smaller SSD over a HDD just to have a SSD for files that even a 5400 RPM HDD can easily handle.

 

[ND40oz]

Not only did I not have the money back then, but I don't WANT them to be a single drive. Makes backups and reinstalls much easier and faster when my OS is isolated from everything else.

I also prefer to have a separate game drive since I have no reason to back that up and I can just re-download all of my games easily from whatever clients I purchased them on. The OS and Storage drives are the only ones I care to backup.

You can easily exclude files or folders in a backup or like ochadd said, use a different volume and exclude the volume. But there's no reason to physically partition everything by physical drive.

There is nothing wrong with "spinning rust" for mass storage. Sorry, but if "Everything MUST be SSD" is the hill you die on, then "HDDs make more sense for mass storage" is the hill I will die on. It's absurd to want to remove all mechanical drives just for the sake of removing all mechanical drives when SSDs offer no benefits over HDDs for mass storage of files and media that in no way benefits from their access speeds. Maybe once SSDs and HDDs are the same price-per-gig, but that is still a long ways away. It makes zero sense to buy a significantly smaller SSD over a HDD just to have a SSD for files that even a 5400 RPM HDD can easily handle.

HDD's do make more sense for mass storage, but the replacement of a 300GB HD is not mass storage unless you're stuck in 2002.

 

[Deadjasper]

Me thinks the OP is either a girl, a teenager, horribly inexperienced or any combination of these 3.

 

[Denpepe]

I think there is nothing wrong with using spinning rust for mass storage, but in this day and age I would go bigger then a 2Tb drive for mass storage. I myself used a 2Tb WD black for a long time for music and file storage that does not need fast acces even when I ihad 4 500Gb SSD's in my system for games and stuff.

Only replaced it with a 2Tb QVO drive couple years ago after my last upgrade spree.

 

[Cyber Akuma]

Me thinks the OP is either a girl, a teenager, horribly inexperienced or any combination of these 3.

Me thinks you're a child for such an immature reply.

I think there is nothing wrong with using spinning rust for mass storage, but in this day and age I would go bigger then a 2Tb drive for mass storage.

I would have loved to go bigger, but I can't really do that for $50 without risking used/refurbished drives. It's still a massive upgrade from the 300GB drive it will be replacing anyway.

 

[ND40oz]

I would have loved to go bigger, but I can't really do that for $50 without risking used/refurbished drives. It's still a massive upgrade from the 300GB drive it will be replacing anyway.

Why don't you just map a drive from your 5 disk array of WD Red Plus's until you can save up for a HDD with a capacity worth buying?

 

[Red Falcon]

I am rapidly running out of space on this old 300GB 15000RPM SAS drive that came with this workstation I am using as a backup PC. This drive is NOT the OS drive (That's running off of a SSD) , it's just used for storage.

I have an unused Best Buy gift card, and I saw that there are several 2TB drives around $50 right now, so I figured I could just replace said SAS drive with a SATA one (and as a bonus I can remove this annoying RAID card used to interface with it that slows everything down). I looked things up and saw two models, a WD Blue and a Seagate Barracuda. Yes I know there are better drives that cost more, no I can't afford them.

I was looking at these two:

https://www.bestbuy.com/site/wd-blu...rd-drive-for-desktops/9312076.p?skuId=9312076

https://www.bestbuy.com/site/seagat...rd-drive-for-desktops/6344172.p?skuId=6344172

They seem 100% identical.... except for the fact that the WD Blue is 5400 RPM instead of 7200. The drive I am going to replacing is already 15000RPM so I am already going to switching to a slower drive, but I am worried that 5400 will be a little TOO slow.

That being said, I saw some sites mention that the WD Blue seems to be far more reliable than the Seagate drive, and easier to recover data (somehow?) if it dies than the Seagate. Is any of that true? Which one would you recommend out of these two?

I noticed that Amazon seems to have a 7200RPM version of that WD Blue for the same price:

https://www.amazon.com/Western-Digital-Blue-Hard-Drive/dp/B08VH8R94B/

... but I am pretty sure I can't use my Best Buy gift card on Amazon and Best Buy doesn't seem to have that model... so that pretty much sucks for me, assuming that WD Blue are indeed better.

Any opinions on this? Is the WD Better for reliability? Or would I be better off with the Seagate? Is the difference between 5400RPM and 7200RPM that noticeable? Especially coming off of a 15000RPM drive?

The real issue with all of these listed HDDs that you linked are that they are SMR instead of the far more reliable CMR.
The reliability, as mentioned earlier in the thread, of these consumer-grade HDDs is far less than that of the 300GB SAS enterprise-grade HDD that you have been using all this time.

The WD Blue 2TB you linked does get up to 215MB/s for sequential transfers (data sheet), so it is indeed faster for sequential transfers than the 300GB SAS HDD, but it will get destroyed for random reads/writes.
If the drive will just be used for occasional storage I would at least recommend a WD Red Plus 2TB for ~$69.99 that is CMR if only for the reliability and longevity.

If you absolutely can't go over the $50 budget then the WD Blue linked would probably be the best choice out of those.

EDIT: You're welcome.

 

[E4g1e]

The problem with current consumer desktop HDDs, including the ones that you listed, is that they are far slower than even 20-year-old HDDs in terms of write speed. And they are much more prone to failure than older or more expensive HDDs.

That said, I will disagree with the advice to get an SSD for what you’re planning to use it for, knowing that SSDs are not really meant for long-term backups or archives. Instead, I would recommend spending a few more dollars for a “gaming” HDD such as the WD Black at the very least.

I forgot to mention that it’s the random access performance that suffers greatly here. The real-world (as opposed to benchmarked) random access write speeds of those drives are much, much slower than even a 30-year-old drive that spins at only 3600 RPM. As a result, transfers of multiple files (especially multiple smaller files) will be excruciating sluggish compared to even a 15-year-old platter drive, saved only by the sequential write performance. Moving from one file to the next will take many seconds or even minutes with these SMR drives compare to the under-one-second time a CMR HDD will take.

By the way, the OP failed to mention how many files that he needed to transfer to the new drive.