Mechanical laborious drives may appear to be historical expertise, however there are nonetheless many locations the place they supply ‘adequate’ efficiency, they usually simply provide essentially the most quantity of storage for the value. You don’t all the time want the quick random entry that one of the best SSDs are designed to supply, and an HDD’s sequential efficiency is a lot for streaming and different duties. There are nonetheless a whole lot of laborious drives to select from, so we’ve examined a number of drives in our labs to assist be sure you choose the proper one to your wants.
Whereas one of the best SSDs offers you one of the best expertise to your working system and boot drive, and in addition provide significantly better software and sport loading instances than HDDs, they’re nonetheless considerably dearer per terabyte of cupboard space. Nonetheless, NVMe SSDs even have a sensible capability restrict per system, and motherboards have restricted M.2 slots. In the meantime, HDDs are already deliberate to hit 30TB and past and work with legacy SATA ports.
Greatest Laborious Drives in 2023 at a look (extra information under):
Why you possibly can belief Tom’s {Hardware} Our skilled reviewers spend hours testing and evaluating services and products so you possibly can select one of the best for you. Discover out extra about how we check.
This is the shortlist of our greatest HDD rankings under, however we now have deeper breakdowns for these drives under, together with extra picks for different classes.
Fast Procuring Suggestions
You will need to pay attention to the drive’s kind issue, with 3.5” being the most typical for one of the best HDDs (that is the one kind we cowl). For those who want 2.5”, your choices are extra restricted, particularly for capability. In any other case, your laptop case’s capability to accommodate a sure variety of 3.5” drives may be your main limitation.
The ever-present SATA interface is used for desktop PCs, and most motherboards have ample accessible ports, which makes enlargement straightforward. For those who’re searching for an HDD, you’re most likely searching for the bottom doable value per TB, however it’s best to think about efficiency and assist for sure functions. There are a number of potential efficiency pitfalls when shopping for a brand new HDD, and the kind of recording expertise is without doubt one of the most essential elements. We solely suggest typical magnetic recording (CMR) drives and never shingled (SMR), because the latter comes with efficiency and operational caveats.
For efficiency, HDDs are additionally typically gauged by rotations per minute (RPM), which is often a direct indicator of efficiency. The RPM worth impacts sequential transfers in addition to random entry latency. Decrease RPM drives are usually quieter and extra environment friendly, whereas larger RPM drives have higher efficiency. There are additionally variable RPM drives that attempt to obtain one of the best of each worlds. Energy draw, warmth, and noise are elements associated to efficiency.
HDDs moreover have an quantity of DRAM to assist quickly cache information. This quantity of cache typically scales with the capability of the drive. Extra cache is, after all, higher, but when it comes as a trade-off — for instance, as a substitute of getting a assist service — then it’s best to think about your priorities rigorously when making a purchase order.
When selecting top-of-the-line HDDs, it’s best to steadiness these elements together with your supposed utilization and, after all, round your finances. You will have specialised drives for NAS, surveillance/DVR/NVR, uncooked storage for media and backups, or for heavier workloads. Sure drives will provide a greater bang for the buck in case you simply need the additional capability, or it’s possible you’ll require a decrease RPM drive to keep away from the noise of quicker drives. See our record under for extra particulars.
Greatest Laborious Drives You Can Purchase As we speak
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The Seagate FireCuda is one of the best laborious drive for each high-end desktop PCs and workstations alike. The FireCuda is Seagate’s analog to WD’s Black and comes with as much as 256MB of cache, a 7200-RPM spindle velocity, CMR expertise, and a powerful five-year guarantee. The drive isn’t fairly as quick because the WD Black, with a most sustained information fee of 260 MB/s. The FireCuda can be solely accessible at 4TB and 8TB, though these are the preferred capacities and are additionally the “candy spots” for one of the best price-to-performance and capability ratios.
The place the FireCuda shines is Seagate’s three-year Rescue Knowledge Restoration Providers. In case your drive fails, Seagate’s lab will try one information restoration try and can ship you any recovered information in an encrypted kind. That is probably a powerful promoting level, though essential information ought to all the time be backed up. This mix of things makes the FireCuda the best choice in order for you a top quality, high-performance HDD for residence PC or skilled workstation use.
Learn: Seagate FireCuda 8TB HDD Overview
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2. WD Black 8TB HDD Greatest Different Excessive-Finish Desktop Laborious Drive Specs Capacities (CMR): 500GB, 1TB, 2TB, 4TB, 6TB, 8TB, 10TB RPM: 7200 Cache: 256MB Type Issue/Interface: 3.5-inch / SATA Max Switch Price: 263 MBps Guarantee: 5 Years As we speak’s Greatest Offers Test Amazon View Amazon Causes to purchase + Excessive efficiency + Good guarantee Causes to keep away from – Costly
The WD Black is and has been an especially common, high-performance laborious drive. It’s a simple option to get assured high efficiency with a 7200-RPM spindle velocity. At 4TB and up, 256MB of DRAM cache is an possibility that may assist elevate it additional over the competing WD Blue HDD. The Black’s efficiency as an entire is larger, and the guarantee is significantly better at 5 years as a substitute of two.
The WD Black’s greatest disadvantage, apart from probably being noisier, is its worth. The 8TB Black is considerably dearer than the 8TB Blue. It’s price leaping up in order for you the perfect efficiency, and it’s additionally most likely price paying extra for the longer guarantee interval. To avoid wasting cash, you possibly can go together with the 128MB cache model.
(We’ve got this drive at present within the ultimate phases of writing, however we now have examined it to determine efficiency.)
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3. WD Blue 8TB HDD Greatest Price range Desktop Laborious Drive Our skilled evaluate: Specs Capacities (CMR): 500GB, 1TB, 3TB (possibility), 4TB (possibility), 6TB (possibility) RPM: 5640 Cache: 128MB Type Issue/Interface: 3.5-inch / SATA Max Switch Price: 185 MBps Guarantee: 2 Years As we speak’s Greatest Offers View at Amazon Causes to purchase + Inexpensive Causes to keep away from – Decrease RPM and efficiency vs higher-end – 128MB cache – Weak guarantee in comparison with higher-end
The WD Blue is one of the best finances laborious drive yow will discover in the marketplace. This drive is the perennial finances HDD favourite and is extensively accessible, has a good vary of capability choices, and doesn’t break the financial institution. The 8TB mannequin is at present one of the best and gives one of the best bang to your buck with out many compromises. This explicit capability makes use of CMR expertise with a barely quicker 5640-RPM able to serving as much as 185 MB/s of throughput. This is sufficient to get the job accomplished with out including extra undesirable noise or warmth into your construct.
This drive does include some trade-offs, although. The 8TB mannequin has solely 128MB of cache, down from 256GB for the 2TB-6TB fashions, and like the remainder of the lineup, it solely comes with a two-year guarantee. For those who’re simply trying so as to add house inexpensively, although, that is the way in which to go; simply remember that some capacities are available each an SMR and CMR variant. We suggest that you just follow the CMR variations of the drive.
Learn: WD Blue 8TB HDD Overview
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4. Seagate IronWolf Professional 20TB HDD Greatest NAS Laborious Drive Our skilled evaluate: Specs Capacities (CMR): 2TB, 4TB, 6TB, 8TB, 10TB, 12TB, 14TB, 16TB, 18TB, 20TB, 22TB RPM: 7200 Cache: 256MB Type Issue/Interface: 3.5-inch / SATA Workload Price (WRL): 300 TB/yr Guarantee: 5 Years As we speak’s Greatest Offers View Amazon Causes to purchase + Good efficiency + Sufficiently quick for the totally different use-cases + Clear-cut guarantee with good reliability and assist choices Causes to keep away from – 256MB of cache
The Seagate IronWolf Professional is a powerful performer posting quicker speeds than the competing WD Crimson Professional in a lot of our assessments. We like Seagate’s three-year information restoration providers as they report a excessive document of success, and information restoration is historically very costly.
The IronWolf Professional has bigger caches for a lot of of its fashions with the identical storage capability, together with 20TB, and in addition a corresponding workload score enhance, from 300 to 550 TB/yr.
Learn: Seagate IronWolf Professional 20TB Overview
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5. WD Crimson Professional 20TB HDD Different — Greatest NAS Laborious Drive Our skilled evaluate: Specs Capacities (CMR): 2TB, 4TB, 6TB, 8TB, 10TB, 12TB, 14TB, 16TB, 18TB, 20TB, 22TB RPM: 7200 Cache: 512MB Type Issue/Interface: 3.5-inch / SATA Workload Price (WRL): 300 TB/yr Guarantee: 5 Years As we speak’s Greatest Offers View Amazon Causes to purchase + Good efficiency + 512MB of cache Causes to keep away from – Mediocre workload fee
The 20TB Crimson Professional NAS HDD is a worthy various drive for NAS utilization. It has sturdy efficiency in random workloads because of the 7200 RPM spindle velocity, and it additionally comes with 512MB of DRAM cache for the 14TB and bigger fashions. That is backed by a five-year guarantee, though the 300 TB/yr workload score is merely common.
This difficult drive has very comparable specs and pricing because the Seagate IronWolf Professional, which has the benefit of a barely larger most sustained write velocity and Seagate’s three-year rescue plan. The Crimson Professional has a bigger DRAM cache, although, and its OptiNAND expertise gave higher 4KB outcomes, so its higher for workloads which have small I/O.
Learn: WD Crimson Professional 20TB HDD Overview
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6. Seagate Exos X20 20TB HDD Greatest Enterprise Laborious Drive (Capability) Our skilled evaluate: Specs Capacities (CMR): 18TB, 20TB RPM: 7200 Cache: 265MB Type Issue/Interface: 3.5-inch / SATA Workload Price (WRL): 550 TB/yr Guarantee: 5 Years As we speak’s Greatest Offers View Amazon Causes to purchase + Good efficiency + Good guarantee Causes to keep away from – 256MB of cache
Seagate’s Exos X20 drive is similar to its IronWolf Professional line. Its larger workloadrate and MTBF specification counsel it’s extra for enterprise use, nonetheless. It doesn’t attain 22TB just like the WD Gold, and in addition has much less cache. That apart, the efficiency and guarantee are each good, so it is a selection that comes all the way down to pricing.
The Exos X20 doesn’t have the three-year restoration plan that different Seagate drives on this record have, which additional hints that it is a more sensible choice for information and cloud facilities. This doesn’t preclude its use in NAS methods or for different functions, but it surely gained’t be as cost-effective in these eventualities.
Learn: Seagate Exos X20 20TB HDD Overview
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7. Seagate SkyHawk AI 20TB HDD Greatest Surveillance and NVR Laborious Drive Our skilled evaluate: Specs Capacities (CMR): 8TB, 10TB, 12TB, 16TB, 18TB, 20TB RPM: 7200 Cache: 285MB Type Issue/Interface: 3.5-inch / SATA Max Switch Price: N/A Guarantee: 5 Years As we speak’s Greatest Offers View Amazon Causes to purchase + Good efficiency, workload-optimized + Good guarantee Causes to keep away from – Solely 256MB of DRAM cache – Costly
The Seagate Skyhawk AI HDD is designed with “AI” firmware to enhance the drive’s capability to deal with recording, video evaluation, and GPU analytics workloads. This contains as much as 64 HD video streams and 32 AI streams with zero dropped frames. That is mixed with a sturdy guarantee, together with a excessive workload fee and Seagate’s three-year information restoration service.
This makes it a terrific choose for surveillance and NVR work, however WD’s Purple Professional is sort of comparable with twice the cache at this capability. Whereas these drives are comparable in any other case, we give the nod to the SkyHawk AI due to Seagate’s Rescue Providers plan. This appears to be a very worthwhile function for the anticipated use instances.
Learn: Seagate SkyHawk AI 20TB HDD Overview
Benchmarks / How We Examined
We make the most of quite a lot of benchmarks to totally check an HDD and characterize its efficiency and consistency. HDDs are nonetheless comparatively common for holding sport libraries, significantly as video games proceed to get bigger. Whereas this implies longer loading instances than you get with SSDs, it may be helpful to forestall having to redownload massive video games, and HDDs are additionally nice for quickly placing video games “on ice” as you cycle by way of different titles. Our 3DMark benchmarks give us an concept of gaming efficiency, though it’s greatest to go together with an SSD for multiplayer and regularly-accessed video games.
PCMark 10, which is said to 3DMark, focuses on measuring efficiency in productiveness and normal desktop PC functions. Whilst you don’t need to run massive functions off of laborious drives, there are lots of instances the place HDDs should be used, significantly with content material creation. HDDs additionally make for good “chilly” storage as an archival backup, particularly for bigger supply recordsdata that will have much less or no compression. HDDs are additionally common for recording gameplay as they’ve sufficient velocity to maintain up with even first rate bitrates.
The commonest use for laborious drives, although, is straightforward file transfers. Our DiskBench check estimates switch efficiency with a real-world workload that’s helpful for calculating how lengthy a switch may take. Laborious drives have constant efficiency and can hit their most sustained velocity at QD1 with massive sufficient I/O, which is illustrated in our ATTO benchmark outcomes. That is significantly helpful for exhibiting variations in expertise and capability as drives get larger and quicker.
Crystal Disk Mark additionally demonstrates this with its sequential efficiency outcomes but in addition at a better queue depth in case you’re doing a number of transfers without delay. For max sustained write efficiency, we present write saturation traits as effectively. Crystal Disk Mark additional reveals 4KB efficiency which is latency-intensive, a consequence impacted by RPM and different drive traits, though HDDs are typically fairly gradual with such small I/O.
We additionally check energy consumption and temperature. Energy consumption will range with drive efficiency, RPM, and extra, and it’s essential to take a look at 4 totally different instances: most energy draw, common energy draw, idle energy draw, and workload effectivity. Energy utilization can add up with a number of drives. Temperature can be an essential metric for laborious drives, as overheating is a typical reason behind failure, significantly throughout sustained workloads.
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