hitachi had this ultrastar but them are only used to get now..so no..
i guess i prefer western or seagate for hdd...ssd , i did buy a second one from kingston..

 

If you want the HD for just back up then, worry about reliability instead ogf performance. As @signalflow told you look into NAS.

 

If anyone is looking into data hoarding and saving money on storage, take a look at this video as it shows how to shuck an external enclosure (WD elements but the easy store should be the same way) without damaging the tabs so it doesn't void the warranty if it needs to be replaced due to doa drives.

 

This is outdated advice as any HD >1TB, 5k4 is fast enough nowdays, & they generally run cooler.

64k over 4k blocks, there are fewer blocks, but the benefits are imo questionable (& I doubt there will be much less fragmentation) cuz:

• If you're low on space, you're still low on space
• larger blocks = more wasted space from small files
  
• Windows automatic defragmentation
• You can't use NTFS compression

 

Since April 2013, Backblaze has recorded and saved daily hard drive statistics from the drives in our data centers. As of March 31, 2018 we had 100,110 spinning hard drives. Of that number, there were 1,922 boot drives and 98,188 data drives. Below is the data thy have compiled. This should serve as a guideline:

 

In 2019 the prices for SSD's will fall by up to 25%.
If you wait a bit, you'll just pay a few coins more in comparison to HDD's, while getting
so much more speed, even if it's just a SATA3 SSD. I only would buy an HDD for downloading and stuff like that.

For production I would never go back to an HDD. Big libraries load in seconds, my DAW immediately
opens after hitting the Icon, plugins like Omnisphere load their instruments instantly and opening big
projects also just takes a few seconds.

Here's a quick comparison between my HDD and SSD by loading a Symphobia Kontakt instrument.
First from an HDD and second from my music production SSD - both on old SATA2 ports (maximum 300MB/s).

Just imagine what happens when you use an m.2 SSD (2-3GB/s) or a cheaper SATA3 SSD (500-600MB/s).
At this time you can get a 1TB SSD (Samsung 860 QVO with 360TB TBW) for 115€ and if you want ab bit more durability,
a 860 EVO 1TB for 135€ with a TBW of 600TB. You only pay more if you want the best you can get - then it's a 860 Pro with
a TBW of 1,2PB.

I'm using my 2 main SSD's now since 2 years (almost everyday) and the one for the OS reached a value of 17TBW
and my production SSD 6TBW. That means I can use both for sure the next 7-10 years without any problems.

 

Last edited: Mar 6, 2019

Where? Looks like still a £1,000 on amazon ? Been saving up for Samsung 4tb.

In terms of spinning drives i haven't gone anywhere near Seagate for 12 years . In the last 20 every single one has failed on me at completely random times regardless of age. I used to back up the backups, but even then i ended up losing 5 years worth of music because of them. I bought one off amazon in 2008ish to back up my failing PC, it backed everything up so i got a technician round to fix the computer, which he couldn't do. And then the SG died the next day, one day after purchase. I moved to WD in the same year and all of them are still running perfectly 10//11 years later.

 

I really don't want to turn this into a piss contest but "outdated advice"? Since you claimed that what I wrote is outdated do you have any data to back it up? This is the first time that I heard that 5.400 rpm was fast enough in the context of a DAW. In fact, if that was the case, do you think they would continue to manufacture anything spinning above 5.400?
Given two identically designed hard drives with the same areal densities, a 7200 RPM drive will deliver data about 33% faster than the 5400 RPM drive. Consequently, this specification is important when evaluating the expected performance of a hard drive or when comparing different HDD models.https://www.seagate.com/tech-insigh...e-storage-is-not-about-rpm-anymore-master-ti/
As to the ASU, the amount of space that you would save by going with the default is irrelevant nowadays. The capacity of hard drives has dramatically increased. Read this: https://www.howtogeek.com/136078/what-should-i-set-the-allocation-unit-size-to-when-formatting/
And who is talking about NTFS compression here? Using windows compression in a DAW context is not a good idea.

 

Last edited: Mar 6, 2019

I recently was looking for a very nice PC case that isn't available anymore (only a small number of pieces was produced)
with a last price of 160-200€ in 2017. On Amazon a seller wanted 840€ for it, on ebay someone 700€ with old hardeware
already installed, that was worth around 150€ (checked every piece) and finally, a couple of weeks ago I got it for 100€
(brand new) from a reliable seller outside of amazon or ebay.

What I want to say:
Don't only watch on amazon for hardware. In most cases the prices are pure scam as alot of money-mad private dogs
are around there to fool you and your bank account

Here's the price history of certain SSD's from Samsung based on the german hardware market (should also apply to GB):







As you can see, the prices really dropped by half and partly more.

The new QVO 860 SSD's from Samsung, which are built for a good price per GB already dropped by 1/4
since their release in December 2018. The 4TB costs 480€, the 2TB 200€ and the 1TB 115€.

 

Last edited: Mar 6, 2019

https://www.seagate.com/www-content/datasheets/pdfs/ironwolf-12tbDS1904-9-1707-GB-en_AU.pdf

Here's a datasheet. For a 2TB drive at 5k9, you'll get a max. of 180MB/s. In practical scenarios, you can halve or third that, since you aren't reading big block files, you're loading DLLs & XMLs all over the place & suddenly it gets a bit more complex & it's not an easy 33% gain.

There are a lot of factors. https://www.google.com/search?q=random+read+5400+7200

"DAW context" is a misnomer since that covers a wide range of cases. There are people who use ONLY 100GB kontakt libraries, and people who use ONLY softsynths. They are wildly different performance profiles, but they both use "DAWs"

It's for people with fat wallets & want potentially the best performance in some cases, irrelevant of cost. Also, the " article" is presented in a context of trying to sell you SSHDs & SSDs, so don't take it too seriously. Some 5kx HDs last longer, which I'd rather have.

https://www.citusdata.com/blog/2013/04/30/zfs-compression/

Again, "DAW context" is meaningless because it covering a lot of use cases.

"We know that enabling compression forces the CPU to do additional work on top of every read and write operation, so how is it possible for Query 1 to run nearly four times faster when the underlying data is compressed with gzip? The explanation for this counterintuitive result hinges on the fact that these queries are IO bound."

While you won't get 4x performance from compression, you may get 1-1.5x in practice for compressed WAV samples.

 

Last edited: Mar 6, 2019

@junh1024 The only thing that data shows is that a 7,200 rpm drive is faster than a much smaller 5,200 rpm one. All things being equal a 7,200 rpm drive will outperform a 5,400 rpm one. To me, any significant increase in performance is a plus. We are talking about a 15% difference. That would have been bigger if both drives were the same size. Whether you agree or disagree the performance increase is there.

 

Here is my user experience with all this drives. I have 5 external WD elements drives, 3 and 5 TB. 4 (2 mirrors) of them for backup (I work with video also) and 1 still used for some samples/libs that I rarely use. It's a bit of a mess, but it came together with years like this and in fact works like supposed - it shows me what I don't (or rarely) use, so I can (will) get rid of it.. someday :P

Tower has 2 SSDs (system and main sample/lib/video data) and 2 4TB WD REDs. Just wanted to say these 2 disks are golden.. I mean they are red..;) but boy, they are fast. I'm working with SSDs now, so a bit spoiled, but I could do quite some work with those red devils. External WD elements are probably green (the old ones) and blue. Those would be totally useless for any serious sample/lib/vid based work..

It isn't much of a surprise, as the reds are made for totally different task. Not talking so much about sheer data transfer, but behavior. Because made for NAS, they are always ready (otherwise NAS would see it as faulty disk), quiet (vibration protection for multi bay) and cool-er.. If I'm ever buying another HDD it will be one of these. (changing 30TB to flash is still a bit pricey)

This is just a "user experience", and the much smarter guys than I am will tell you if I'm talking BS.

Now, a bit off-topic (wasgedn will probably forgive me ;). I have a Q, if someone can help me: what would be the best way to keep the external WD elements awake. They are having siesta all the time and it takes ages to wake the farm up. I'm on W10 64. I know there is s SW that writes empty files to drives, but I'm wondering if there is some neat (system?) trick.. thanks in advance.

 

Try CrystalDiskInfo https://crystalmark.info/en/software/crystaldiskinfo/

• Go to Function>Advance Feature>AAM/APM Control

• Select the disk and d isable both AAM and APM

• Or set the APM to FEh and click Enable

Note that these changes will increase the drive's temperature.


There was a Windows 8 hack that was being used with mix results by W 10 users to disable suspend. https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/usbcoreblog/2013/10/31/help-after-installing-windows-8-1-my-usb-drive-disappears-or-file-transfers-stop-unexpectedly/

 

It depends on what kind of data you're going to keep on it. For audio recording and videos, 64KB clusters work best [a bit faster sequential read/write speed, faster defrag], but if you're going to keep a couple of million of small files on it, the data loss can get huge with 64KB clusters, because having 64KB clusters means every file on the HD will use 64KB of space. Like, 100 4KB files will use 6.4MB of space whereas with 4096KB clusters these files will use just 409.6KB of space. It's good to know this.

 

Here is an excellent explanation:

In terms of space efficiency, smaller allocation unit sizes perform better. The average space wasted per file will be half the chosen AUS. So 4K wastes 2K per file and 64K wastes 32K. However, as Jonathon points out, modern drives are massive and a little wasted space is not worth fussing over and this shouldn’t be a determining factor (unless you are on a small SSD).

Compare 4K vs 64K average case waste (32K-2K = 30K), for 10,000 files that only comes out to 300,000KB or around 300MB.

Instead think about how the OS uses space. Let’s say you have a 3K file which needs to grow 2K. With a 4K AUS the data needs to be split over two blocks – and they may not be together so you get fragmentation. With a 64K AUS there are a lot fewer blocks to keep track of and less fragmentation. 16x the block size means 1/16th the number of blocks to keep track of.

For a media disk where you photos, music and videos are stored, every file is at least 1MB I use the biggest AUS. For a windows boot partition I use the Windows default (which is 4K for any NTFS drive smaller than 16TB).

https://www.howtogeek.com/136078/what-should-i-set-the-allocation-unit-size-to-when-formatting/

 

I would go with Seagate Barracuda or Firecuda that fits in your budget. Minimum rpm is 5400, just get a normal 7200rpm one.
I use SSD for boot and 2TB Barracuda for storage.

 

you mean space loss or ?

 

the wd red and red pro have no good review's....wd black seems good from reading on amazon ..
but i want full 5 star rating ...

i have feeling at moment i should go for one posted in the pirates list...


could it be that newer drives have not the common quality as before 2-3 years? i mean every shit from house to garden to tools to contsruction stuff to kitchen to bla to bla...i rather go for previous build then new batch

 

fck man a good one from that list has even less stars on amazon then wd red....
do someone kno a 5 star 4 tb hdd on amazon...
from rating on amazon it seems 50/50 gamble if buy hdd there...many five stars reviews but always 0 star reviews between