Hunting for a replacement SSD

[HankB]

... has been in service for more than 6 years now so I'd happily retire it if it needed it.

At 6 years I think you've got your money's worth. If drive diagnostics indicate that it is still healthy I would be inclined to retire it to intermittent duty (e.g put in a sled or external enclosure. Power it up once in a while to back up to.) But if there is any question about drive health, I would be reluctant to rely on it to backup anything important.

 

[-Ice]

Crystal Disk Info is a good tool.

Thanks!

yea if your hearing clicks then its a sign of the drive needs to be replaced.

Yeah, it's a bit too regular for my liking. I know there will be a bit of whirring and buzzing as the head moves, but this is just like click ---- click ---- click. Too regular.

At 6 years I think you've got your money's worth. If drive diagnostics indicate that it is still healthy I would be inclined to retire it to intermittent duty (e.g put in a sled or external enclosure. Power it up once in a while to back up to.) But if there is any question about drive health, I would be reluctant to rely on it to backup anything important.

Indeed, it has served me well! I would like to retire it properly; heck, I think the HDD and the DVD drive are the only ones from my initial PC build 6 years ago! Oh, that, and my keyboard... a Logitech Wave. Sadly, the mouse that came with the Wave died about 2 years ago.


Looking at HDDs now, I wonder what the difference is between normal HDDs, AV/Surveillance ones, NAS ones, and Enterprise ones?

Here's a 1TB WD RE HDD, a 2TB WD Blue HDD, and a 1TB WD Red HDD. The Blue is slow at 5400rpm, the RE is at 7200rpm, and the Red is "intellipower". I once thought the Blacks were 10,000rpm, but apparently not, only 7200rpm.

A hard drive is a hard drive is a hard drive, right? Assuming all are SATA III 6Gb/s, and this case, all 4 drives are 64MB cache, then isn't the RPM the only determining factor on how fast a drive is? (excluding SSHDDs of course)

 

[M@rk]

Thanks!


Yeah, it's a bit too regular for my liking. I know there will be a bit of whirring and buzzing as the head moves, but this is just like click ---- click ---- click. Too regular.


Indeed, it has served me well! I would like to retire it properly; heck, I think the HDD and the DVD drive are the only ones from my initial PC build 6 years ago! Oh, that, and my keyboard... a Logitech Wave. Sadly, the mouse that came with the Wave died about 2 years ago.


Looking at HDDs now, I wonder what the difference is between normal HDDs, AV/Surveillance ones, NAS ones, and Enterprise ones?

Here's a 1TB WD RE HDD, a 2TB WD Blue HDD, and a 1TB WD Red HDD. The Blue is slow at 5400rpm, the RE is at 7200rpm, and the Red is "intellipower". I once thought the Blacks were 10,000rpm, but apparently not, only 7200rpm.

A hard drive is a hard drive is a hard drive, right? Assuming all are SATA III 6Gb/s, and this case, all 4 drives are 64MB cache, then isn't the RPM the only determining factor on how fast a drive is? (excluding SSHDDs of course)

Im not sure but i know that rpm is not the thing that 100% determines speed, I think what determines speed more is how the drives work and how efficient they work (Maybe skip through an entire section of data instead of reading it and realizing its not needed right now)

Note that i dont know almost anything about drives so take it with a graint of salt.

 

[-Ice]

Im not sure but i know that rpm is not the thing that 100% determines speed, I think what determines speed more is how the drives work and how efficient they work (Maybe skip through an entire section of data instead of reading it and realizing its not needed right now)

Note that i dont know almost anything about drives so take it with a graint of salt.

All things being equal (cache, size, SATA, data location in the drive, etc.), won't RPM be the deciding factor? The "how efficient they work" is measured by those specs, I would think. Again, all things being equal, won't a 7200RPM drive "deliver" the data quicker than a 5200RPM drive? Sure, maybe the heads get to the data location at the same time, but one drive "reads" the platter faster at 7200RPM....

 

[Alaric]

Well, since we're speculating (and I certainly don't know enough to do anything but speculate on this) I would think HDD firmware plays its part, too. How efficiently the head carries out the "Find XYZ data" command would have an effect, as well. I think. Maybe

 

[Evilsizer]

RPM's helps reduce seek times to find the data, another thing that helps is platter density. both of those can also help with bw but i think mostly bw increases come from platter density. if you want to save power and dont mind a bit lower 5400/5900 eco drives are ok bw is better then they use to be mainly do to cache size and platter density. 7200 drives if you need more pep for getting to your data and if you can afford them sas 10k drive for when you need it that much faster. WD raptor drives come to around the time ssd's started to get good with trim/garbage collection. 10k in 150-300gb and cost just as much as or more then ssd's at the time.