Even though SSDs have been around for years, steadily improving in speed, reliability, and capacity, the good old hard disk drive is still worth considering for your gaming PC. That's because when it comes to outright storage per buck, there's nothing that beats an HDD. And in the current situation where DRAM and flash memory are both prohibitively expensive, it's even better value for money.

Seagate has been serving this market for a good while now, and it has a big range of external HDD models, covering every possible use and budget. Joining them is the newly launched FireCuda X Vault: a big HDD packed into an even bigger enclosure, replete with a touch of RGB lighting, that uses a speedy USB connection to hook up to your PC.

You have two capacities to choose from—eight or 20 TB—and using it is as simple as you could want: plug it in, wait a few seconds, and enjoy the wealth of extra storage space. Well, it should be super-simple, but there are a couple of potential bumps in the road that could stop it from being as smooth as silk. First, the USB port on the host PC must provide at least 15 W to power the X Vault.

Frustratingly, many motherboards and laptops don't actually indicate what power output they support, so you just have to test them out and hope for the best. At least the X Vault sports a little LED by its USB socket, which flashes red if you don't give it enough juice.

The other pothole in the road is the fact that you need to use a 10 Gbps USB 3.2 Gen 2 port to get the best performance out of the drive. While such sockets are hardly rare on the latest motherboards and laptops, if you have an older gaming PC from a few years ago, you could be stuck with Gen 1 only—or worse still, ports that can't supply enough power.

None of this is Seagate's fault, but if you are eyeballing the FireCuda X Vault as a potential buy, you really need to check what your USB ports can do before handing over your cash.

You do get some handy extras with the drive, at least. Seagate's Toolkit app offers incremental backup and real-time folder mirroring, as well as RGB controls (though you can use Windows 11's system, if you prefer), plus you get access to a data recovery service through the warranty period (typically two years).

For the performance benchmarks below, I used a gaming PC with an Intel Core Ultra 7 265K processor, in an ASRock Z890 Taichi Lite motherboard, with 48 GB of Corsair Dominator DDR5-8000 memory and multiple WD_Black SN850X SSDs to shift data back and forth from the external HDD.

To ensure that the X Vault had the best possible chance of reaching its full potential, I used a Thunderbolt 4 port on the motherboard, using USBTreeView to check that it was operating in the correct USB mode (i.e. USB 3.2 Gen 2, 10 Gbps).

It's been so long since we've tested an HDD that the only other model we have results for our current benchmark suite is the Adata HD710 Pro. That external drive isn't aimed at gamers, and it only uses a USB 3.2 Gen 1 (5 Gbps) connection. I've included a couple of external SSDs in the charts, so you have a visual guide to how fast spinning platters are compared to NAND flash chips.

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Seagate FireCuda X Vault benchmarks

3DMark Storage

Index

Bandwidth (MB/s)

Average Access Time (µs)

Seagate FireCuda X Vault (HDD)

180

32.89

1056

Adata HD710 Pro (HDD)

63

11.74

3046

Crucial X9

875

152

208

TeamGroup PD20 Mini

934

161.5

194

01,0002,0003,0004,000

3DMark Storage Data

Product	Value
Seagate FireCuda X Vault (HDD)	180 Index, 32.89 Bandwidth (MB/s), 1056 Average Access Time (µs)
Adata HD710 Pro (HDD)	63 Index, 11.74 Bandwidth (MB/s), 3046 Average Access Time (µs)
Crucial X9	875 Index, 152 Bandwidth (MB/s), 208 Average Access Time (µs)
TeamGroup PD20 Mini	934 Index, 161.5 Bandwidth (MB/s), 194 Average Access Time (µs)

Seagate FireCuda X Vault benchmarks

CrystalDiskMark

SEQ1M Q8T1 Read (MB/s)

SEQ1M Q8T1 Write (MB/s)

RND4k Q1T1 Read (MB/s)

RND4K Q1T1 Write (MB/s)

Seagate FireCuda X Vault (HDD)

222.05

212.53

0.65

1.92

Adata HD710 Pro (HDD)

120

117

0.54

0.57

Crucial X9

1028

970

35.56

73.92

TeamGroup PD20 Mini

1999.22

1699.45

26.1

69.94

05001,0001,5002,000

CrystalDiskMark Data

Product	Value
Seagate FireCuda X Vault (HDD)	222.05 SEQ1M Q8T1 Read (MB/s), 212.53 SEQ1M Q8T1 Write (MB/s), 0.65 RND4k Q1T1 Read (MB/s), 1.92 RND4K Q1T1 Write (MB/s)
Adata HD710 Pro (HDD)	120 SEQ1M Q8T1 Read (MB/s), 117 SEQ1M Q8T1 Write (MB/s), 0.54 RND4k Q1T1 Read (MB/s), 0.57 RND4K Q1T1 Write (MB/s)
Crucial X9	1028 SEQ1M Q8T1 Read (MB/s), 970 SEQ1M Q8T1 Write (MB/s), 35.56 RND4k Q1T1 Read (MB/s), 73.92 RND4K Q1T1 Write (MB/s)
TeamGroup PD20 Mini	1999.22 SEQ1M Q8T1 Read (MB/s), 1699.45 SEQ1M Q8T1 Write (MB/s), 26.1 RND4k Q1T1 Read (MB/s), 69.94 RND4K Q1T1 Write (MB/s)

Seagate FireCuda X Vault benchmarks

Final Fantasy XIV: Dawntrail

Total Loading Time (seconds)

Scene #1

Scene #2

Scene #3

Scene #4

Scene #5

Seagate FireCuda X Vault (HDD)

17.638

0.78

3.673

4.905

4.639

3.641

Adata HD710 Pro (HDD)

28.1

1.149

7.05

7.626

7.036

5.239

Crucial X9

14.291

0.478

3.244

3.91

3.799

2.86

TeamGroup PD20 Mini

12.759

0.447

3.005

3.684

3.4

2.223

07.51522.530

Final Fantasy XIV: Dawntrail Data

Product	Value
Seagate FireCuda X Vault (HDD)	17.638 Total Loading Time (seconds), 0.78 Scene #1, 3.673 Scene #2, 4.905 Scene #3, 4.639 Scene #4, 3.641 Scene #5
Adata HD710 Pro (HDD)	28.1 Total Loading Time (seconds), 1.149 Scene #1, 7.05 Scene #2, 7.626 Scene #3, 7.036 Scene #4, 5.239 Scene #5
Crucial X9	14.291 Total Loading Time (seconds), 0.478 Scene #1, 3.244 Scene #2, 3.91 Scene #3, 3.799 Scene #4, 2.86 Scene #5
TeamGroup PD20 Mini	12.759 Total Loading Time (seconds), 0.447 Scene #1, 3.005 Scene #2, 3.684 Scene #3, 3.4 Scene #4, 2.223 Scene #5

Seagate FireCuda X Vault benchmarks

Temperature

Peak (°C)

Idle (°C)

Seagate FireCuda X Vault (HDD)

55

47

Crucial X9

60

25

TeamGroup PD20 Mini

83

38

0255075100

Temperature Data

Product	Value
Seagate FireCuda X Vault (HDD)	55 Peak (°C), 47 Idle (°C)
Crucial X9	60 Peak (°C), 25 Idle (°C)
TeamGroup PD20 Mini	83 Peak (°C), 38 Idle (°C)

Suffice it to say, the FireCuda X Vault performs exactly how you'd expect an HDD to, especially compared to an SSD. But while it's slower than a tortoise, Seagate's gaming drive is quite a lot snappier than Adata's rugged model, in part because it uses a faster USB interface.

In addition to the above benchmarks, I also added the drive as additional storage in Steam, and measured how long it took to move The Last of Us Part 2 Remastered from a WD_Black SN850X installed in a PCIe 4.0 M.2 slot, directly connected to the CPU, onto the X Vault's disks.

With the game tipping the scales at 116 GB, it took 11 minutes and 31 seconds to transfer all the files, so it's not something you'd want to be doing repeatedly. During the move, I recorded the write speed of the Seagate drive, and it hovered between 200 and 205 MB/s for the entire duration. So while it's not especially quick, it is very consistent (again, as expected for an HDD).

That transfer speed is about 10% as quick as you'd get with a fairly rubbish SSD, but since even those are now outrageously pricey, the X Vault's tortoise-like performance is completely forgivable. In fact, if all you care about is cold storage (i.e. you don't need to constantly access the files, you just need them close by), then the FireCuda could well be ideal.

However, there are a couple of things, other than the performance and USB fussiness, that are worth noting before deciding on the X Vault. For the sheer size and mass of the drive's enclosure, you'd be forgiven for expecting lower temperatures, but at least they don't vary much between idle and heavy loads. The meaty enclosure also does a great job of absorbing vibrations.

The provided USB cable is also somewhat on the short side. Used with a laptop, it's not that much of an issue, but I tried it on several desktop PCs, and for many of them, the cable wasn't long enough to allow the unit to rest flat on the desk next to the PC case. Worse still, the lack of slack in the cable means that the connector pulls down quite firmly on the USB port itself, which isn't great for its long-term health.

At $270 for the 8 TB model, you're not paying over the odds, though, and the 20 TB version is especially good value for money, coming in at around 2.4 cents per GB. That said, Seagate has fitted the X Vault with a similar type of HDD as it uses for its SkyHawk and Barracuda Compute product ranges, and you can buy one of those bare drives for $230 at Amazon (at the time of writing).

You won't get any more performance, but you will save a bit of money and won't tie up one of your motherboard's USB ports if you install it inside your desktop gaming PC.

Where things really make sense for Seagate's external drive is when your PC is a gaming laptop, especially so if it has a solitary M.2 slot for SSDs. Using the FireCuda X Vault to really boost the amount of storage you've got now makes a lot of sense, because you're avoiding having to pay vast amounts for a bigger SSD, nor enduring the hassle of reinstalling Windows.

The only thing you need to worry about is whether or not your laptop's USB ports can actually power the drive.

Due to the AI industry's seemingly bottomless appetite for all things memory, SSD prices have soared. You would be forgiven for thinking that relying on Hard Disk Drives instead would be more cost-effective while we all wait for SSD prices to become slightly more sensible again. However, as one Redditor found out, the grass is not always greener.

The Redditor explained their company had bought a number of high-capacity HDDs from Toshiba mere months ago for its storage array. However, when one of the 20+ TB drives died, Toshiba would only offer "a refund of the original purchase price [and] not a refund of the current (significantly higher) replacement price," nor a replacement drive either.

Tom's Hardware says the documents it examined reveal that part of this refusal was on the grounds that Toshiba did not have the stock to replace the enterprise HDD in question. Apparently, if Toshiba had committed to replacing the enterprise drive, the customer would have had at least a year-long wait for a 24 TB HDD.

Some may consider HDDs outmoded, but if you don't need the data in a hurry, HDDs make sense for many corporate archive efforts. WD also just announced new HDD tech that promises 'flash-like' performance—though, even with improvements to the tech, none of that means HDDs are the forgotten hero we need right now.

The memory supply crisis hasn't just had the knock-on effect of raising SSD prices, but HDD costs as well, so a failure after only a few months is especially disappointing. As you may already be aware, HDDs do generally have more potential points of failure than SSDs due to the former's moving internal parts.

Still, a lifespan of a few months is far from the norm, with many modern HDDs lasting upwards of five years depending on use (comparatively, SSDs can last anywhere between five to 10 years or more, according to SanDisk). Microsoft's Project Silica proffers laser-etched glass that can store data for a purported 10,000 years, though that's not exactly a consumer-ready technology just yet.

Even though this particular situation involves hardware intended for a business, I am definitely now worrying about what would happen if either my own internal SSD or my two backup HDDs were to pick this moment in time to fail. On the one hand, this is exactly why I bought multiple drives back in the day. On the other, 'back in the day' is a few years ago now—easily more than five.

Unlike the aforementioned Redditor's enterprise HDDs, none of my kit would likely even be covered by a warranty anymore, ruling out any hopes of a refund for me personally. As I update our best SSD deals guide every Friday, I know exactly how rough it is out there right now—here's hoping hardware failure isn't in my immediate future.

So much of data management feels floaty and ephemeral, with just one misplaced click wrecking untold devastation. 'Click, click, wait…no, no, no! I didn't mean to delete the entire folder of fanfic!' So when it comes to intentional data destruction, there's something compelling about a dedicated device that acts like it really means it.

Enter The Destroyinator from 45Drives. This beefy boy billed as an 'industrial-grade' solution to data destruction is capable of wiping up to 60 drives all at once. If you happen to want to blitz an honestly impressive amount of ill-advised, teenaged prose in a hurry, the Destroyinator's wipe speed can apparently reach up to 64 GB/sec. That means I can rest easy in the knowledge that my first few odes to hardware won't turn up in a museum some day in the far future.

This data sanitation device supports a wide range of storage devices, including but not limited to NVMe SSDs, 2.5-inch SATA drives, and HDDs with SAS interfaces as well. Once wiped, the drives are even hot-swappable, meaning you don't need to power the Destroyinator all the way down before loading up another batch of files that will never again see the light of day.

Cutting an imposing silhouette in a 16-gauge industrial steel chassis, it's a suitable coffin for my very worst writing. Joking aside, the device was designed with more straightforward business purposes in mind and is compatible with both Windows and Linux IT environments.

In a post on X, 45Drives shared, "[It's] built for e-recyclers, IT pros, and anyone who needs fast, compliant, and profitable drive erasure with zero cost-per-wipe fees. No subscriptions, no tokens, no surprises."

45Drives makes the case that though physical destruction of NVMe drives is arguably quicker, making the data inaccessible due to damage rather than deleting the files just creates a heap more e-waste. While e-waste processing has improved over the last few years, sucking gold out of old PC hardware, for instance, is still a fairly labour-intensive process and using what you already have remains the most eco-friendly option. Take the not-so-humble disposable vape—some enterprising creators have repurposed this e-waste scourge to do everything from host a website to powering a home.

Each drive loaded up into the Destroyinator and successfully blitzed is bestowed with an official wipe certificate, indicating the still-intact drive is then ready to enter data storage recirculation. This keeps operational costs down and lessens the overall impact on the environment. Despite the super villain name, The Destroyinator is all about reduce, reuse, recycle.

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1. Razer Blade 16 (2025)

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When folks talk about transparent hardware, I'm sure I'm not the only one whose frame of reference is still stuck somewhere between the mid-90s and the early oughts. Besides sleuthing with Barbie on the family desktop, my earliest gaming memories involved affixing my tiny mitts to my semi-transparent Game Boy Color.

For a hot second back then, that purple-y plastic was very in vogue and though I still have a soft spot for those hard shells, I'm a little thankful transparent tech is ever so slightly more elegant these days.

Case in point, Buffalo Japan's commemorative 'skeleton' hard drive disc (via Techspot). To celebrate the company's 50th anniversary, Buffalo has released a modern take on its original see-through HDD, which made its debut all the way back in 1998. The 2025 rendition is called the Buffalo HD-SKL, and comes with an interesting mount that offers a front row seat as the actuator arm dances across the platter.

Though primarily a decorative, desk-side conversation starter, this transparent HDD is still very much functional thanks to a standard USB 3.2 (Gen 1) interface. The catch? Well, there are a few. For one, as you may have already guessed, the Buffalo HD-SKL is Japan-exclusive. For another, it costs 100,000 yen (which is about $696) and only offers 4 TB of space—that's hardly the best deal for the space.

Furthermore, Mac fiends are potentially out of luck as Buffalo's own dedicated software, SeekWizard, is Windows-only. This application allows you to run the Buffalo HD-SKL in a number of 'demo' modes, meaning you don't actually have to write anything to the drive to see the read/write heads fly. The demo modes available include 'second hand step,' 'random seek,' and 'sequential seek. '

Though not exactly useful with regards to any of my own storage needs, I still kinda want one. However, limited to just 50 units, it doesn't look like my still tiny mitts will get to leave finger smears anywhere near the see-through surface of this exceptionally pretty hard drive.

A Japan-exclusive lottery will ultimately determine who has a chance to splash their cash on this commemorative centrepiece, with shipments expected to go out in June.

Ah well, guess there's nothing for it but to risk hitting ebay for an old WD Raptor X, or pine after Jsaux's frosted backplate and Dbrand's teardown skin for Valve's Steam Deck handheld instead. Mind you, I don't rightly remember how old my own HDDs are now, so perhaps it wouldn't hurt to also sneak a peek at our best external hard drives guide; perhaps I should put some of the yen I would've spent towards averting my own small-scale data storage apocalypse.

As a human being of a certain age, I'm starting to feel the urge to buy power tools I don't really need purely because they might come in useful at some point in the future. I'll always be a PC hardware obsessive, though, so this hard drive converted into a variable disc sander is right up my street. Come to me, my pretty. I have many things to sharpen.

File this one under "ideas so straightforward, I'm surprised I haven't seen them before" (via Hackaday). Essentially, take an old HDD, remove the actuator assembly and circuit board, wire in a battery and potentiometer, cover the platter in sandpaper, and voilà—the nerdy sander of my dreams.

YouTube channel ProShorts 101 demonstrates the full build in the video above, and I'm pleased to see they take the same approach to glue that I do: using far too much of it. Still, given the 7,200 RPM rating of the Western Digital 160 GB HDD cannibalised for the attempt, perhaps going ham with the squeezy tube isn't the worst idea.

Which makes me wonder. Surely a great candidate for this sort of thing would be the legendary WD Raptor X at 10,000 RPM or the Seagate Cheetah 15K.3 (PDF warning), an enterprise-grade 15,000 RPM monster of an HDD. That last one was available in 73, 26, and 16 GB configurations, I'd imagine there isn't much use for them these days other than as shrieking curiosities.

Do higher RPMs make for better sanding tools? Look, I said I wanted to buy power tools, not that I know a lot about them.

Regardless, ProShorts 101 shows off the variable speed sander in action, sharpening scalpel blades, a flathead screwdriver, and what looks like a rusty old chisel—which now I think about it is a good name for my next musical project. Each is demonstrated to have a remarkably fine edge after being submitted to the wheel of the hard-drive-cum-power-tool, although it does cover the chassis in delicious swarf.

I can't be the only one with a few disused HDDs hanging around, gradually falling victim to the ravages of time. Perhaps I'll make one of these as my next project, but that would mean buying a drill, and some sandpaper, and some… it really is a fractal of expense, DIY, isn't it? I'll see you at the hardware store, I guess.

Data centers around the world produce a combined total of 50 million metric tons of e-waste every year and defunct hard drives contribute no small portion to that amount. Typically, these are all shredded and ground up to prevent sensitive data from being accessed. Microsoft reckons it has a better solution: Use robots to fully disassemble every drive and recycle almost all of the materials.

Data and AI servers work storage drives hard so they're replaced on a regular basis to ensure services aren't disrupted. However, that results in 20 to 70 million hard drives being shredded every year, according to Microsoft (via Sweclockers), and relatively little of that material ever gets recycled.

Ranganathan Srikanth, a principal data scientist at Microsoft, was somewhat dismayed by this so set up a project for the 2022 Microsoft Global Hackathon, titled Secure and Sustainable Disposal of Hard Disks. The goal was to develop a solution that would ensure a "90% reuse and recycle rate of all hard disks by 2025."

It's pretty easy to do this by hand but it's just not appropriate for the sheer scale of drives that get binned every year. So Microsoft turned to robots and machine learning to handle the repetitive and tedious tasks of taking apart a hard drive, separating all of the components, and recycling all the parts that can be (especially the valuable neodymium magnets). The only parts that do get shredded are the platters.

It's a noble goal but not quite as easy to achieve as one might think. While hard drives are all roughly the same in terms of general dimensions, identifying screws and other parts, and being able to sort them based on appearance alone requires a lot of AI training.

The above video (ignore the first minute or so, it does get better) shows what the small group has achieved so far and although it's far from being ready to be rolled out on an industrial scale, I'm sure the robotics industry will be interested in taking on the challenge.

I've always taken the disassembly approach when getting rid of my old hard drives; recycling all the steel parts, sending the platters off to be shredded, and then having lots of fun with the magnets. Mind you, it is a pretty tiresome process, so it makes sense that robots and machine learning would be used to do it on a massive scale.

It's a lot harder to do it for an entire computer, though, but with continued research, the approach could be developed to include entire laptops and desktop PCs. These are considerably more complex than a humble hard drive, in terms of disassembly and identifying parts, but they're packed full of useful materials that can and should be recycled.

AI might be an over-used buzzword word right now and I'm already very tired of seeing it plastered everywhere, but this kind of use gets my vote every time.

People are murdering innocent old hard drives. Millions of them, lost to the unfounded credence that churning them up actually protects data left on them from being recovered and stolen. Spoiler alert: It doesn't. So why are 90% of all retired datacenter HDDs still being shredded every year?

According to BBC News, this is the question members of the Circular Drive Initiative (CDI) have been asking for some time. The CDI is essentially a collective of tech companies that have all come together to fight for the dying HDD, fuelled by a passion for reuse and keeping e-waste to a minimum, despite the general consensus that hard drives are predicted to be history after 2028.

Companies involved in the CDI include Seagate, Western Digital, and Micron, as well as the blockchain-centric Chia Network, for whom my new hard drive hero Jonmichael Hands works. 

As secretary and treasurer of the CDI, he spoke to IT Asset Disposition (ITAD) firms about how his company might nab and reuse some old datacenter drives, so they don't go to waste. Hands was waved off with an apology. "Sorry, we have to shred old drives."

"One ITAD provider said they were shredding five million drives for a single customer", says Hands. A travesty if you ask me. More importantly this rather extreme, so-called "zero-risk" solution for retired HDDs isn't without fault. 

As it turns out, there are more dangers lurking in those piles of mashed-up metal.

If you were to simply throw out your old hard drive, the left over data could still be recovered by someone with the knowhow. That's why you're still harbouring that stack of spinning-platter babies in your kit cupboard, isn't it?

What you may not be aware of is that someone smart, a verified hooded hacker, could take a piece of that platter as small as 3mm and get some semblance of data from it. Not dangerous in small quantities, but with enough time and dedication they could put together enough of a picture to hold it to some kind of ransom, for sure.

So what's ITAD's excuse for mulching up all those hard drives?

When the IEEE Standards Association recently approved a long list of secure ways to wipe the leftover data permanently rather than mulching them into tiny scraps, there should be no excuse.

The safe method is called purging. There are a few ways to do it, but one simple way involves overwriting the data with new data patterns. It takes a while, but sounds like it would be relatively easy. A cryptographic erase would do the trick too, and it sounds much more mysterious. The latter is a faster method, and simply involves deleting the encryption key so the data is left incomprehensible even to the most advanced hacker.

"The days of the 'take-make-waste' linear economy need to be over," says sustainability and transformation director at Seagate, Amy Zuckerman. Seagate is one of those companies that makes a point of extracting parts and recycling what can't be used of old, broken (and therefore unpurgeable) hard drives.

Let's hope the CDI can bring more companies on board, then. Because e-waste really is an untapped source of rare Earth materials.

So long, hard drives, and thanks for all the storage. The very last mechanical hard drive will be sold in 2028, bringing an end to the magnetic storage era.

At least, that's what Shawn Rosemarin of Pure Storage reckons, a company that—you guessed it—specializes in solid-state storage. And his reasoning is not quite what you might think.

"3% of the world’s power is in datacenters. Roughly a third of that is storage. Almost all of that is spinning disk. So if I can eliminate the spinning disk, and I can move to flash, and I can in essence reduce the power consumption by 80 or 90 percent while moving density by orders of magnitude in an environment where NAND pricing continues to fall, it’s all becoming evident that hard drives go away,” Rosemarin explained to Blocksandfiles.

If he's right, by 2028 it will bring to an end roughly 75 years of proud hard disk history. The very first commercially available computer running a hard drive with a magnetic disk was probably the IBM 305 RAMDAC of 1956, a valve- rather than transistor-powered machine.

It sported no fewer than 50 24-inch magnetic platters for a total storage capacity equivalent to roughly 5MB in conventional binary storage. It also filled a decent sized room, as the image at the top of the page shows.

Just over 50 years later in 2007, the first 1TB HDDs were introduced. Today, the largest available HDD is Western Digital's 26TB drive, though that's a data center model. The largest drive you can slap into a PC is Western Digital's Red Pro 22TB SATA III, model, yours for a piffling $500.

But here's the thing. The biggest SSD, the ExaDrive EDDCT100, clocks in at full 100TB. Of course, it also costs $40,000. So, the dollars-to-storage space ratio doesn't look too clever. But it does demonstrate that SSDs have already won the data density war. There's just, ahem, a little work to do on the cost efficiency side.

Anyway, whether or not the very last HDD is sold in 2028 or the technology survives a little longer, it's already very nearly toast in desktop PCs. While GPUs remain annoyingly pricey, SSD prices have tumbled dramatically in the last few years.

As you can see on our best SSD deals page, you can now grab a decent 2TB SSD for just over $100. Flash memory prices are expected to fall yet further this year and it's not at all hard to imagine that, by 2028, there really will be almost no argument for one of those peculiar contraptions with spinning magnetic platters.

Seagate has agreed to pay the US Department of Commerce $300 million in total over the next five years for selling Huawei some hard drives. 

The US government's Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) alleged that Seagate broke rules on exporting to the China-headquartered company when it sold some hard drives to it over the course of 13 months from August 2020 to September 2021. 

Some hard drives being "more than 7.4 million", valued at approximately $1,104,732,205, according to the BIS press release [PDF]. The Bureau claims Seagate became the sole source supplier of HDDs to Huawei during this time.

In terms of the timeline here, these sales occurred after the US government updated its rules for companies trading with Huawei to include fresh sanctions on what can or can't be sold to the company. These changes happened in May 2020, and prior to this BIS had already added Huawei to its 'Entity List' which limited the company's access to US-made tech. 

These measures started as a response to the US belief that Huawei "engaged in activities contrary to U.S. national security or foreign policy interests and its non-U.S. affiliates pose a significant risk of involvement in activities contrary to the national security of the United States," as noted in a BIS FAQ on the sanctions. Huawei has previously denied the claims.

All of which has seen Huawei ramp up internal R&D efforts to counteract the sanctions, and more recently report a major profit loss from 2022 to 2023. Meanwhile US companies that may have previously supplied Huawei have seen that business dry up.

Seagate, however, holds that it didn't break any sanctions when selling heaps of hard drives to Huawei.

"While we believed we complied with all relevant export control laws at the time we made the hard disk drive sales at issue, we determined that engaging with BIS and settling this matter was the best course of action," says Seagate CEO Dave Mosley.

Rather than fight the case, Seagate has chosen instead to pay up, mentioning that it didn't want to deal with the "risks and cost of protracted litigation involving the US government, as well as the size of the potential penalty, and the Company’s desire to focus on current business challenges and long-term business strategy."

Essentially, Seagate felt it could've been much worse.

Yet $300m is still a mighty fee to pay and a sum that will likely hurt Seagate financially for the next five years. How much it'll sting will depend on whether a wider slump in tech sales continues to hurt the company. Seagate recently announced it was down 39% for revenue over the last few months of 2022 versus 2021, during which Seagate ran at a net loss of $33m.

Close your eyes and cast your mind back. Back to the sounds of your first gaming PC, and the noises emanating from its beautiful, beige (was it once white?) case. The gentle whirr of the fans, the bell-chime boot sound that welcomes you into a vast, digital world, and falling asleep to the incessant clicking of a merry, overnight defrag. Oh, the nostalgia.

If you're having a hard week, or just fancy a little blast from the past, the HDD Clicker will let you enjoy the sounds of a spinning platter—even as the age of the hard disk wanes.

We've been discovering the ins and outs of the HDD Clicker from Arne Schmitz of Root42 (via PC Watch). He's dedicated to retro gaming and tinkering with old tech, and explains that the device is meant for retro gaming builds to simulate the noise of a hard disk.

"A lot of the old hard drives have failed, they're cumbersome, they're loud, they're slow. So usually what we do nowadays: we take compact flash cards instead of hard disks. The advantage here being that many of these are more or less compatible to regular old ATA hard disks because it's basically the same interface." 

He makes it clear that's not always the case, but the main takeaway is that just because the HDD is pretty much defunct doesn't mean you should be robbed of the joys of the hard drive ASMR as you use your device. This way, you'll also be sure never to be subject to what Arne calls the "Dreaded clicks of death when the hard disk was dying."

The device was designed by matze79 who posted their development on the Vogons forum. The final design, now available on Serdashop is "directly pluggable on HDD molex power" according to dreamblaster, who helped matze79 make their design a reality.

The HDD Clicker is, by default, set to high volume Quantum mode, but the listing says you can "put some tape on the buzzer hole" for Medium volume LGR mode, or on the speaker directly for a Low volume modern HDD mode.

While writing this, I'm happy to say I rediscovered the soothing sounds of the PCs of old and am now on a bit of an ASMR journey. Now, I understand why people enjoy the nostalgic click of a HDD, or even tactile button clicking ASMR, but much of the ASMR landscape (even those related to gaming PCs) still makes me rather uncomfortable. Maybe, I'll just stick to falling asleep to a little defrag.

It wasn't all that long ago when external hard drives were enormous cubes that made black box recorders on commercial airliners look petite by comparison. Today, the vast majority of them are lightweight and compact, and offer masses of storage for very little money.

The WD My Passport is the best overall external HDD drive we've tested so far, thanks to its cheap price, ability to automatically backup data, and ability to work without external power. When it comes to carrying around huge amounts of data, though, you'll find that the Seagate Expansion drive is the best large-capacity external HDD. We've also included our best external SSD pick, the Adata SD810, for those of you looking for an external drive with serious speed for close to HDD prices.

Whether you're looking to add to your gaming desktop PC's storage or find more space for your gaming laptop, you'll find the best external HDDs below. Grab one of these, and you'll never have to worry about storage for a long, long time.

The Quick List

Best overall external HDD

The WD My Passport is the best external HDD you can buy right now. It’s not as compact or fast as the Samsung T5, and it can’t withstand an armageddon like the LaCie XtremKey, but at up to 4 TB for $110, it offers copious storage space for a very reasonable price, and ultimately that combination wins the day. We also like that Western Digital fares well each time cloud backup provider Backblaze releases a hard drive reliability report.

The 4 TB model is compact and weighs just 210 g. You probably wouldn’t want to try and jam one into a shirt pocket, but they’re almost as portable as a smartphone, just a little chunkier. The 1 TB Passport is slightly thinner and weighs a mere 120 g if you don't need as much space.

No external power supply is required in order to use WD's drive—plug in the USB cable and start backing up your files. You can also install WD's backup software to automate the process. Just don't expect SSD-level data transfers, but even so, with a peak of 640 MB/s when plugged into a USB 3.2 Gen 1 port, it's as fast as any internal HDD.

WD also goes the extra mile with password protection and hardware encryption. And if you're looking to make a fashion statement, you can select a My Passport in various color options, which is a nice extra bonus.

Good external HDDs aren't necessarily the most exciting of products, but what you're looking at here is one we can hang our collective hat on, and trust your personal data with, too. It's simple to use, comes in some funky colorways, and stands up to some intense usage. All you want really, isn't it?

Best large capacity external HDD

If you need to go big with your storage requirements Seagate's 8 TB Expansion drive is the best large-capacity external HDD. It's not exactly the fastest external hard drive, though, as you'll barely get anything more than 150 MB/s during both read and write data transfers.

What you are getting is masses of storage for proportionally very little money. For example, the 18 TB model is regularly on sale at around $300, which is a ridiculous level of capacity for the cash. It becomes a little less cost-effective, though, as you come down the storage ranks—this 8 TB version is around the $150 mark.

It's USB 3.0 compatible, so you have a drive that'll plug into most PCs and laptops, though it does require an external power supply (which is provided with the drive), and if your PC only has USB Type-C ports, you'll need to buy a separate cable. That knocks its portability down a notch or two, as you'll need to carry two items around with you.

Slow transfer speeds and external power requirement aside, there's little to touch the Seagate Expansion drive for sheer portable data capacity. It's a big chonker of a storage unit when combined with that power supply, but the capacity on offer here simply cannot be argued with. Not the prettiest, not the fastest, not the most portable—but still, the best for vast amounts of storage at a very reasonable price.

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Best rugged external HDD

For ultimate portable drive toughness, the LaCie Rugged is by far the best rugged external HDD. When you think about what external hard drives are used for, durability suddenly becomes essential. It might look like a dog chew toy, but LaCie's portable HDD is as tough as they come and even has a rubber cover around the edges to dampen the shock from any impacts.

While we absolutely recommend that you don't test this out at home, you can drop this thing from a fair height, and it'll stay perfectly intact.

The latest version of LaCie's Rugged now supports a USB Type-C to Type-C connection, but the speeds it operates at are pretty slow. We found that it consistently hit around 130 MB/s in read-and-write tests, which isn't very fast, even for an HDD.

Still, you can pick up the LaCie relatively cheaply, despite all the durability, with the 2 TB model typically being sold around the $110 mark. You can go bigger, but we recommend the 2 TB because it will last so long that it'll store your files for years, and it's nicely priced.

If you're careless with how they pack their bag, or you genuinely take your PC files on more extreme outings, this is the external HDD for you. Rove with impunity, oh traveller ye. The LaCie Rugged is ready for all your mishaps.

Best external SSD

The Adata SD810 is the best overall external SSD. Wait, what? I thought we were talking HDDs? Well, SSDs are much, much faster, so we've included the best external version we've ever tested. HDDs have their uses, but if it's modern, super-fast external transfer speeds you want, this is the drive you should be looking at.

Not only is this little drive an order of magnitude faster than any external HDD, but it can keep up peak speeds better than any other external SSD we've tested. That made it a shoo-in for our best external SSD guide, but also absolutely worth pointing out here.

You can buy this mega-fast drive in 500 GB, 1 TB, 2 TB and 4 TB flavors, although it's worth bearing in mind that the top capacities are fairly pricey. Still, what you're buying is performance that makes sense for video editors, production staff, and those who need fast storage on the go beyond what an HDD can provide.

Speaking of on the go, the Adata SD810 is so portable you can shove it in a shirt pocket without much fuss. It's got no moving parts, so while it's not as drop-resistant as a built-for-purpose rugged drive, it should still survive the odd fall from a reasonable distance—at worst, you'll just crack the casing.

Plus, it's got a dust cover that, while being a little hard to pop off, means it achieves IP68 dust and water protection. That doesn't make it waterproof exactly, but it does mean it should survive the odd splash without issue.

This is our best external SSD pick for good reason, and if you're sizing up external HDDs (and I can't think why else you might be here), you owe it to yourself to consider the Adata SD810, too.

Read our full Adata SD810 1 TB review.

Where to buy

Best external HDD FAQ

I'm about to show my age, but the changes in portable hard drives over the years has been crazy to watch. I remember buying a large 1TB "portable" drive that required external power with pay from one of my first jobs. It was an unwieldy beast with more memory than I thought I could ever need, and I'd lug it to friend's houses with pride as we exchanged digital media. 

I also vividly remember the sting of advancement. About a year later smaller USB-powered units were commonplace, and about the same price as I'd paid. These tiny pocketable drives were among the coolest things my data-hoarding eyes had ever seen. That has just been knocked completely out of the field by these gorgeous Spider-Man HDDs from Seagate.

These drives follow on from the Star Wars series, and look like fairly capable 2TB portable units with respectable stats. They're USB 3.2, should work with basically any device, and weigh under 170 grams. Portable HDDs aren't constantly zooming forward like they were 15 or so years ago, at least not until Seagate brings out the 50 TB HDDS in 2026, so there's not really anything too interesting here spec-wise. Instead, it's all about that drip.

The Spider-Man art is just gorgeous. It's based on the animation styles of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, which has been lauded as some of the best animation of all time. Sometimes even by people other than me. It's a vibrant, creative, heartfelt masterpiece, and these HDDs get to take that style and bring it into something you use in everyday life.

There are three models, one featuring the traditional blue-and-red Peter Parker iteration of Spider-Man's costume. It has a nice red background with spider motifs to match. Another is black with Miles Morales's iconic suit front and centre. Then of course we have Gwen Stacy, or Ghost-Spider, on a white case of her own.

The images also show off the LED lighting under the HDD, which is set to match the various suits. Ghost, for example, has a bright pink light, while Peter's light is red to pick up the highlights on his eyes and webbing. This is all configurable using a PC with the Seagate software. 

We're not expecting these to be the best portable HDDs around for your money, but they are some of the coolest-looking. For something you're going to be carrying around, having out on the desk, or even sharing with other people, aesthetic flair is a great optional extra for your tech.

The downside is these appear to be going out of stock fairly quickly in the United states where they released last month. They'll be hitting Australian stores soon, and are up for pre-order at many retailers. You'll want to check at your local electronics store to get your hands on one these Spidey storage devices.

It shouldn't come as much of a surprise to discover that the world is slowly moving away from hard drives. The latest report from Trendfocus has HDD shipments dropping by 31% in the last quarter to finish 35% down year-on-year. 

This drop isn't just in one particular area either, with enterprise, desktop, and laptop markets all seeing fewer HDDs ending up in machines. In case you're wondering though, it's laptops that have seen the biggest drop—down as much as 40% quarter on quarter (via Storage Newsletter.)

Desktop PCs are lumped in with surveillance and retail, so it's hard to pick out how bad things really are for the future of hard drives in gaming desktops. Apparently though, just 13 million HDDs were sold in the last quarter. Desktop PCs include non-gaming machines as well, so our gaming systems with HDDs are probably a tiny fraction of the market.

Hard drives can't compete with SSDs in terms of straight performance, but they do still offer great value for money, with 1TB HDDs regularly available for around $40. SSDs are closing the gap, and this Prime Day we saw several speedy 1TB NVMe SSDs duck under the $100 barrier. SATA SSDs can often be had for as little as $80.

Hard drives aren't completely out for the count though. Recently we've had announcements of some ridiculous large capacities being squeezed into 3.5-inch hard drive enclosures. Western Digital announced its 22TB CMR hard drives alongside a 26TB UltraSMR model just this May. And while these are aimed at niche markets, it shows that the technology that helped make the PC what it is isn't quite ready to slink off just yet.

SSDs will keep getting cheaper and cheaper though, and that makes for a grim future for the hard drive market. While they'll potentially always have a place in enterprise, they could soon be phased out of all but the most budget of desktop and laptop PCs. 

Especially if Microsoft has its way with OEMs and phases out HDDs.

Western Digital has announced its upcoming 22TB Ultrastar DC HC570 and 26TB Ultrastar DC HC670 UltraSMR HDDs, the first of their kind. But in an age of super speedy SSDs, you might wonder what the point of coming out with yet more hard disk drives can do for us, as a species—particularly us gamers.

HDDs may not be as speedy as the SSDs of today, but the capacity is still miles ahead. And with WD spearheading the movement, those numbers are now reaching unprecedented heights. Within a decade we're likely to be seeing 30TB, even 40TB capacities hitting servers.

Given the chance, us mere mortals could fit 104 copies of the 250GB DCS World, or 152 copies of Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond, which is a whopping 170GB. But these bad boys aren't for accomodating your massive game library, full of unprecedented storage hogs. These drives are meant to live for the cloud.

"As a longstanding partner of the industry’s leading cloud providers, we understand their unique requirements in building next-generation cloud infrastructure," Ashley Gorakhpurwalla of WD explains. The company, as such, has "invested in several HDD innovations we developed alongside our areal density technology."

The plan? "Deliver on a roadmap that would also support the evolving economics of their data centers for decades to come." It comes as a sequel to the announcement of WD's 20TB OptiNAND HDD monsters last year, and works much the same way but with some spicy new installments.

The journey has involved launching energy-assisted PMR (ePMR), which allowed WD to jam more bits per inch onto their platters; OptiNAND, the lovechild of HDD and NAND tech; and now WD has come in with UltraSMR.

SMR, which stands for Shingled Magnetic Recording, isn't a revelation in the HDD space. Shingled storage has been around since Seagate introduced it in 2013, and upped potential storage capacity by about a quarter of what it was.

WD says the new UltraSMR has improved the tech by adding in "large block encoding along with an advanced error correction algorithm that increases tracks-per-inch (TPI) to enable higher capacity."

That's all wonderful, but unless you have access to a server room with spare HDDs, us plebs are unlikely to get ahold of 26TB HDDs anytime soon. Not that we really need them. I mean, how many of us swap between 100 or more storage-hogging games on the regular?

Seagate keeps pushing the limits of hard disk drives and has just released the SkyHawk AI HDD, which is now available at a whopping 20TB. This is a drive aimed at network video recorders with support for some AI cleverness no less, and isn't really aimed at the likes of you and me, but still, it's a good sign that Seagate is on track to fulfil its promise of 50TB hard drives by 2026.

Back in May last year Seagate launched its Mach.2 Exos 2X14, which weighed in at an impressive 14TB, and since then it has continued to release newer, denser drives. It now offers 20TB versions of the IronWolf Pro (NAS) and Exos X20 (Enterprise), with the newly announced SkyHawk AI being the latest model to get the 20TB treatment.

That Exos was a bit of a special case, in that it used the SAS 12GB/s interface to hit its impressive 524MB/s sustained transfer rate—an interface you won't find in normal gaming PCs. Seagate has released plenty of drives since though, that like this one, make do with the more consumer-friendly SATA 6GB/s interface. It isn't as fast as the Exos mind, topping out at a sustained transfer rate of 260MB/s. 

The wonderfully named SkyHawk AI isn't a drive you'd actually want to jam inside your gaming rig mind, as you're paying over the odds for technologies you're not going to use. That said, $530 isn't as outlandish as I expected, and if anything represents a pretty good $0.03/GB, which will put even the cheapest SSD to shame. 

The important point of all of this though is Seagate's original promise from last year, where it said we'd have 50TB hard drives by 2026. Not only that but hard drives with sustained throughputs that are competitive with SATA SSDs. 

In order to get there, it stated that it needed to transition away from Perpendicular Magnetic Recording (PMR) or Conventional Magnetic Recording (CMR) and move over to Heat-assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) instead. The fact that it's hit 20TB using CMR here is a good sign that hard drives still have a few surprises up their sleeve.

Of course, SSDs are pushing things forward too, with speeds and capacities improving all the time. The imminent release of DirectStorage promises good things for speedy SSDs, with 1s load times, but there's always room for a seriously chunky hard drive in our hearts, and in our machines too.

4k+ HDR films and giant modern games have made PC storage more demanding than ever. I never dreamed I’d fill a single 1TB HDD as a kid, and now I have multiple just laying around my house, too small to be worth taking up the space in my tower. One day we may even have Data crystals able to hold unfathomable amounts in cold storage. For now, Toshiba has laid out its roadmap for the future of HDDs.

A Business Wire press release (thanks Tom’s Hardware) outlines the company’s vision for the next five years. The ambitions include releasing a 26TB HDD in about 4 months time as well as a 30TB drive in 2023, followed by a whopping 40TB or more drive in five years time. Toshiba’s current high capacity drives cap out at 18TB, so this is going to be a significant step up.

The first step in this roadmap is a 20TB drive not too dissimilar from Toshiba’s current 18, allowing the company to catch up on sizes currently offered by other brands like Western Digital. The main difference between this drive and the previous 18TB model is that this will install an extra platter bringing the count from 9 to 10, and allowing for more storage. This will be a great base to test the company’s new storage technology without having to make something brand new.

The 26TB HDD to follow will also use this 10-platter helium-filled platform, but will use a new microwave assisted switching technology to further increase storage capabilities. This change will require Toshiba to make other changes to the other components which could be quite costly and requires collaboration with other technology partners. The 30TB drive that Toshiba plans to release in five years time will also use technology but add yet another platter to reach the size.

To get any larger, Toshiba plans to move to yet another recording technology called Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording or HAMR. HAMR is looking like the front runner for the future of HDD recording but it will again force the company to restructure its production. It will also require even more collaborative work so it’s unlikely we’ll see this change in mass production any sooner than the five year mark Toshiba has given due to these hurdles. But who knows how big games are going to be by then, we may well need it.

"Toshiba continues to work closely with the cloud companies to understand their exact capacity and performance requirements, and the ability to utilize our next-generation technologies will be key to meeting our customers’ needs," said Raghu Gururangan, Toshiba America Electronic Components, Inc. Vice President, Engineering & Product Marketing. "Many years of close collaboration work with our key component suppliers is leading to impactful technology breakthroughs to achieve higher capacities, which ultimately reduces TCO (total cost of ownership) of our nearline HDDs." 

Based on this I’d hold off buying any HDDs unless absolutely necessary for the moment. With higher capacity drives on the horizon current lines have a chance at getting much cheaper, and there’s nothing worse than buying tech that immediately goes down in price thanks to new advancements.

Conventional wisdom says solid state drives are inherently less prone to failures than mechanical hard disk drives because they lack any moving parts. But as it turns out, having spinning platters, actuator arms, and a motor, as found in all HDDs, may not be a big disadvantage as it relates to reliability, a new report by Backblaze suggests.

Backblaze is a subscription-based cloud storage and backup service that has been in operation for over a decade. As such, it is in a unique position to offer real-world data on drive failure rates, and it often makes its stats on drive failures available for public consumption.

The company had been exclusively using HDDs up until mid-2018, at which point it began employing SSDs as boot drives on a trial basis. The experiment went well, so it ended up switching to only using SSDs as boot drives in new storage deployments, and also when replacing failed HDDs.

"In our case, describing these drives as boot drives is a misnomer as boot drives are also used to store log files for system access, diagnostics, and more. In other words, these boot drives are regularly reading, writing, and deleting files in addition to their named function of booting a server at startup," Backblaze explains.

This allowed Backblaze to compare the failure rates of 1,666 SSDs to 1,607 HDDs, and the initial data favors the latter—there have only been 17 SSD failure since deploying the speedy storage medium, versus 619 HDD failures.

At first glance, it would appear SSDs are overwhelmingly more reliable than HDDs. However, Backblaze points out that the average age of the SSDs drive is just 14.2 months, with the oldest of bunch having been employed for 33 months. Meanwhile, the average age of the HDDs is 52.4 months, with the youngest being 27 months.

"To create a more accurate comparison, we can attempt to control for the average age and drive days in our analysis. To do this, we can take the HDD cohort back in time in our records to see where the average age and drive days are similar to those of the SSDs from Q2 2021," Backblaze says.

Here's what it looks like when controlling for drive age:

The bulk of HDD failures came after an extended period of time. When turning back the clock to look at drive failures after around 14 months, SSDs still fail less often, but not by very much—they have an annualized failure rate of 1.05% versus 1.38% for HDDs.

"Where does that leave us in choosing between buying a SSD or a HDD? Given what we know to date, using the failure rate as a factor in your decision is questionable," Backblaze says. "Once we controlled for age and drive days, the two drive types were similar and the difference was certainly not enough by itself to justify the extra cost of purchasing a SSD versus a HDD."

That doesn't mean you should go back to using HDDs. Backblaze highlights several other deciding factors, such as speed, electricity, and form factor requirements (or preferences).

It's also worth noting that the data is limited in scope. While early failure rates don't heavily favor SSDs over HDDs, it is entirely possible that over time, SSDs will prove more reliable. Only time will tell. In addition, not all drives are created equal. While still interesting, the data is just too narrow.

That said, none of the SSD failures were the result of write endurance or based on SMART monitoring stats. Backblaze says it is only at the beginning of using SMART stats to proactively fail an SSD, meaning it yanks an SSD if it believes a failure is imminent. These were all reactive failures, where the drives simply stopped working.

The HDD vs. SSD storage war is over. A modern PC gamer should not be loading the bulk of their games from a standard hard drive; you simply won't get the most out of your system. And as console tech catches up with solid state storage of its own, more and more next-gen games are going to expect you to use an SSD.

The consensus is that solid-state trumps—pricing's down, speeds are up, and next-gen consoles are even sporting capacious SSDs. But that doesn't mean there isn't still a place for a good ol' fashioned spinning platter in your PC, especially with prices plummeting on 12TB hard drives and the like.

Solid-state drives (SSDs) have been getting pumped up over the past decade, reaching the stage where it's hard to imagine using a new PC that doesn't at least include some form of SSD storage. Hard drives (HDDs) are the old guard, having been around since the first 5MB model in the 1950s, with sizes now reaching 20TB.

It's not an all-or-nothing decision, thankfully. Some of us may feel that the HDD is dead, but that's more of a personal take than a universal truth. When comparing HDD vs. SSD, the main difference comes down to price vs. performance. Even the best SSDs still cost 9 cents per GB or more, while HDDs start below 2 cents per GB. That's over four times the price for the same amount of storage capacity, but running Windows on an HDD makes your whole PC feel sluggish. SSDs are just so much faster for booting Windows and launching your favorite applications.

Thanks to decreasing prices, many prebuilt PC manufacturers are skipping the HDD entirely. Ship a PC or laptop with a 1TB SSD, and most users will have more than sufficient storage. You can easily add secondary storage for desktops in the form of a spacious HDD if needed, while many laptops will have to look at external storage devices. There are affordable high-speed USB SSDs that can still outperform an internal HDD, and newer NVMe SSDs offer even more tremendous gains in performance.

HDD vs SSD: The growing size of games and other data

As anyone with a digital game library can attest, modern games storage requirements know no bounds, with new games including updates and add-ons easily pushing up to and in some cases beyond the 200GB mark—looking at you, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. 

With the PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X, and Xbox Series S making a point of including fast SSD storage, the shift is likely to result in another significant spike in AAA titles' size. Games in the next generation will likely breach 150GB, and some already have.

Where 40-60GB install sizes used to be typical, large modern games often weigh in at over 10GB currently and often climb to more following the release of patches, seasons, and updates. That's one-eighth of a 1TB SSD! The good news is that a 1TB-class SSD can be had for $100, so you're 'only' dedicating about $10-$15 of storage to even the giant games. But if you keep a large collection of games installed, that 1TB can go fast.

It's not all just fun and games, however. Consider traditional backup and media storage. There's no need to back up your PC to high-performance SSD storage. Should you need to restore from a backup, sure, it could save you several minutes, but restoring from a backup in the first place will be far more painful. Given the durability and reliability of modern HDDs, they're still the single best solution for backing up your precious data.

HDD vs SSD: Having an SSD for your boot drive is essential

There are multiple reasons SSDs are faster than HDDs. There are no moving parts or spinning platters, making access times substantially quicker, almost instantaneous in some cases. That means SSDs don't suffer from degraded performance due to file fragmentation (where a file gets placed in non-sequential sectors).

On a hard drive, the heads have to reposition the correct sector to read each fragment and then wait for the right part of the platter to spin under the drive head. As files get written, edited, and deleted, over time, this can slow down access to data on hard drives, especially for things like booting Windows.

With a clean Windows 10 build and a fast WD Black 4TB HDD, boot times (from the end of the BIOS POST sequence to being at the Windows 10 desktop) can take 20-30 seconds. On a slower WD Blue 2TB HDD, under the same circumstances, boot times are typically 30-40 seconds. And for just about any good SSD, booting in well under 10 seconds is typical.

We've said it before: using an SSD for your boot drive is one of the most noticeable upgrades you can make on an older PC. Many people (including most of us at PC Gamer) refuse to use a PC that doesn't have an SSD boot drive. It's just not cricket.

HDD vs SSD: SSD performance gains in games aren't that staggering 

Windows boot times are one thing, but games tend to behave differently. There's a lot of sequential data to read, and usually, you're not running a ton of other stuff in the background that's hitting your storage. The practical difference for gamers between SSDs and HDDs isn't as mind-blowing as the hyperbolic marketing copy from manufacturers would have you believe. It's undoubtedly not imperceptible, but we're talking in terms of seconds rather than minutes.

Testing a range of top SSDs, including add-in cards, NVMe, and SATA drives, against the best of a crop of 7200 RPM HDDs in Metro Exodus produced some significant results. Using the RDY ELIBG205 as a testbed (packed with a powerful Geforce RTX 2080 Ti and Core i9-9900K) and loading into the Taiga section of the primary campaign, the slowest of the HDDs (a Western Digital Blue 1TB)  took just over 48 seconds to get us in-game, with the most fleet of the HDD pack (Western Digital's 2TB Black) loading gameplay in 40 seconds. On the SSD side, the top-performing 480GB Intel Optane 900P add-in card delivered Taiga in just over 22 seconds, while the slowest of the SSDs we tested, the 500GB Western Digital Blue 3D SATA, took just clear of 33 seconds.

Those results might look pretty stark if you're considering the best effect against the worst. However, a high-end Optane AIC is ridiculously expensive, and we'd stick with something more reasonable, like the XPG SX8200 Pro, which is nearly as fast. Contrast that with the WD Black 2TB: 16 seconds longer to load Metro Exodus, with twice the storage capacity and a lower price.

Testing reveals an even narrower gap when you consider indie titles. To gather some data from a lightweight indie game, we tested all eight drives against loads in the first episode of Life: Strange 2, and even the fastest of our SSDs roundup shaved a mere ~5 seconds offloads compared to the slowest HDD. If you're primarily playing smaller indie or 'double-A' games, upgrading to an SSD is unlikely to impact your play experience markedly.

Obviously, if you have the cash and want top-performing hardware, SSDs will always be the better solution, especially if you don't want to keep your friends waiting in the lobby. But if you're more interested in value, HDDs look pretty attractive, even with TLC and QLC flash storage continuing to slip in price.

HDD vs SSD: Network considerations

If you're living under the tyranny of a data cap, this decision has likely already been made for you. Having to constantly redownload games in the shuffle that's inevitable with just a single, limited capacity SSD vastly expands the value of capacious HDDs if you're working with finite bandwidth. The same is true if you live in an area with poor internet connectivity. If a single AAA title takes an entire night to download, it can be a real deterrent to jumping back into older titles or taking a chance on new ones when it means having to clear drive space. 

Even if you live somewhere with sturdy, reliable, blindingly fast internet, when you compare the length of time it takes to download titles against the slender moments you save in terms of load times, there's not much difference, particularly in shorter or well-optimized games. Naturally, you may weigh that time differently, doing something else while a game downloads compared to the time you're restlessly sitting, controller/mouse in hand while you're waiting to play. Still, in terms of raw time saved, there's not a tremendous overall difference.

HDD vs SSD: The hybrid storage solution

Budget will always be a major consideration when you're choosing whether or not it's time to shift completely to an SSD lifestyle—in a world where you have access to unlimited discretionary income, of course, SSDs are the obvious option, as you can afford to stack them in multiples and surround them with the hardware to support them. But for the financial mortals among us, HDDs still have a place.

Even if you want an SSD for your boot drive (and you should), nabbing a cheap and capacious HDD for secondary or tertiary storage is arguably the best approach to a sometimes complex discussion. Use it for mass storage, most of your games library, videos, backups, and more. You can still put a few games on your SSD as well, but there are plenty of files that don't need SSD speeds. We'll be the first to welcome the solid-state future with open arms, but keeping a large HDD handy still makes sense.

There are other alternatives to just a pure HDD or SSD setup. Intel Optane Memory Provides a fast SSD cache that supplements your HDD, and you don't need to worry about which data gets to reside on the faster cache—the software and drivers take care of that for you. AMD's StoreMI (a branded variant of Emotus FuzeDrive) takes a slightly different approach, with tiered storage. You get the full capacity of the HDD+SSD, with the drivers and software managing where data is located.

In short, the debate over HDD vs. SSD storage isn't over just yet. SSD capacities are increasing, and enterprise solutions can store up to 100TB on a single drive. That's five times larger than the current top HDDs. However, the price for such drives isn't even worth mentioning (*cough* $50,000 *cough*). We're still a long way off from SSDs actually beating HDDs at a price per GB, and until that happens, HDDs will remain a viable option for many people and businesses.

Seagate has unveiled the fastest hard drive known to man, a 14TB behemoth of spinning platters that can rival some SSDs in the raw transfer speed race. Before you Chia pets get too excited about the possibility of making your crypto fortune off the back of a ludicrously speedy new hard drive, the new Seagate Mach.2 Exos 2X14 (PDF warning, via Tom's Hardware) is only getting close to the sustained transfer speeds of SATA based SSDs, and mainstream ones at that.

But still, the fact that Seagate's dual-actuator tech is able to be mentioned in the same breath as a solid state drive just highlights how effective it is. Maybe the consoles moved onto SSDs a generation too early? Haha, silly consoles...

As the 14TB capacity might have hinted at, the new hard drive is aimed squarely at the datacentre crowd and certainly isn't something you can just pop into Micro Center and pick up on a whim. But hey, it's still the fastest hard drive in the world and that's got to count for something, right?

It also won't plug into most of our gaming PCs as it relies on the SAS 12Gbps interface rather than the standard SATA 6Gbps you'll find on most motherboards. But Seagate's promised 524MB/s maximum sustained transfer rate is mighty close to the 550MB/s speeds of SATA SSDs you can plumb into your gaming board.

That is just the max transfer speed, however, which is great for general storage requirements but it's the random read/write performance of modern SSDs—even slow SATA-based ones—that makes them feel so slick when you're running an operating system or even a game from one. And in that no hard drive is ever going to be able to compare.

So how the hell has Seagate managed to squeeze out this level of performance from a physical set of spinning platters? It's not the helium filled chamber, but the fact that the Mach.2 technology describes a drive with twin actuator arms capable of operating independently.

Think about the arm on a record player (see, we are talking about real old tech here), and imagine how quickly you could switch between tracks on a vinyl recording if you had more than one. It's kinda of like that. Only different. And quicker. 

While this is not exactly going to change the world of gaming PCs, it's still fascinating to see there is still a place for genuine innovation in one of the oldest technologies in computing.

Which is the more reliable storage medium, a solid state drive (SSD) or a hard disk drive (HDD)? To help answer that question, cloud backup provider Backblaze provided some interesting drive failure stats in its latest reliability report, and things are looking good for SSDs. So far, anyway.

Before now, Backblaze has never included SSD stats into its reliability reports. It only began using SSDs as boot drives a little over two years ago, as that is when it could finally procure models around 200GB in capacity for less than $50, which is what it was paying for 500GB HDDs.

So now two years later, Backblaze is able to compare failure rates between its SSDs and HDDs as boot drives, from within the same environment. Out of the 1,518 SSDs deployed, only two of them failed last quarter (January 1 through March 31, 2021), for an annualized failure rate of 0.58%.

Meanwhile, 44 out of 1,669 HDDs failed during the same time period, resulting in a much higher annualized failure rate of 10.56%.

Backblaze also provided lifetime HDD and SSD annualized failure rates, from April 20, 2013 to March 3, 2021. Over the past eight years, Backblaze experienced 559 HDD failures, for a 6.04% annualized failure rate, compared to eight SSD failures for a piddly 0.65% failure rate.

Simply put, "SSD drives fail less often than HDD drives," so case closed, right? Not so fast. Backblaze readily acknowledges "that ignores one important factor: drive age."

"If we focus on the age of each of the cohorts, there are potential cracks in our 'SSD drives are better' supposition," Backblaze says.

On average, the SSDs included in the latest reliability report are just 12.7 months old, versus the average age of the HDDs deployed as boot drives being 49.6 months. The oldest SSD in Backblaze's stable is 30 months, while the youngest HDD is 24 months. And the oldest HDD is 96 months, or eight years).

So there is a big discrepancy in drive age, and it is a data point that matters when it comes to evaluating storage reliability and drive failure stats.

"Basically, the timelines for the age of the SSD and HDD drives don’t overlap very much and in general drive failure rates typically increase as drive population ages. These two considerations make the conclusion that SSD fail less often than HDD drives not as clear cut as it first seems," Backblaze says.

There is another aspect that is not really discussed in detail by Backblaze, that being the limited write durability of SSDs. That becomes a bigger factor when using an SSD to perform frequent backups—NAND flash memory cells wear out after many repeated writes. This doesn't matter quite as much when buying an SSD for a gaming PC (though generally speaking, if looking for the best SSD for gaming, you should still consider the endurance rating in terabytes written, or TBW).

Probably for that reason, Backblaze does not use SSDs for storing customer data. However, the company says labeling them as boot drives "is a misnomer as this cohort is also used to store log files for system access, diagnostics, and more." They're regularly reading and writing data, in other words, and deleting files, which are chores in addition to booting up servers.

So what's the takeaway? In the early going, it sure seems SSDs fail less often than HDDs, at least in a supercharged boot environment. But more time and stats are needed for a better comparison with HDDs. In the more immediate future, Backblaze says it will plans to examine failure stats from the early years of each storage medium, and will publish those results in the coming months.

Certain high-end CPUs are hard to come by (like AMD's Ryzen 9 5900X and 5950X), and it's near impossible to buy a graphics card at fair market value these days, in part because of cryptocurrency mining. Adding to the tragic state of PC building in 2021, solid state drives (SSDs) and hard disk drives (HDDs) are at risk of becoming the next hard-to-buy items.

It's because of a new cryptocurrency project called Chia, the brainchild of Bittorrent creator Bram Cohen. Chia is billed as a "better blockchain and smart transaction platform which is more decentralized, more efficient, and more secure," but what sets it apart from most cryptocurrencies is that it is mined with unused storage space rather than graphics cards or specialized ASIC hardware.

Chia is built around a cryptographic technique called proof of space and time, as opposed to Bitcoin, which leverages a proof of work model.

"Proof of space can be thought of as a way to prove that you are keeping some storage unused on your hard-disk drive. Users of the Chia blockchain will 'seed' unused space on their hard-disk drive by installing software which stores a collection of cryptographic numbers on the disk into 'plots'. These users are called 'farmers'," Chia's FAQ explains.

"When the blockchain broadcasts a challenge for the next block, farmers can scan their plots to see if they have the hash that is closest to the challenge. A farmer’s probability of winning a block is the percentage of the total space that a farmer has compared to the entire network," the FAQ continues.

The proof of time part of the equation requires that a small period of time elapse between blocks.

We don't know what impact Chia will ultimately have on the market as a whole (both in terms of its impact on PC gaming hardware and its effect in the world of cryptocurrency), because it has not launched yet—Chia will be available for trading on May 3, 2021. 

We've been a little hesitant to report on the possible shortages caused by this new cryptocurrency for this very reason. Yet ahead of the launch, HDD prices have ballooned by as much as 67 percent in China, so perhaps there is some proof that Chia is having an effect on the market even prior to its launch. Additionally, Seagate acknowledged in a recent call with investors (via Seeking Alpha) that it is seeing an "uptick in demand" due to the use of HDDs for cryptocurrency mining.

It's not necessarily a direct effect, though. According to Time Finance (via Tom's Hardware), part of the reason for the increased pricing is because some dealers are holding onto their storage inventories in hopes of cashing in on a much bigger payday.

The storage pipeline in China consists of the manufacturer (like Western Digital), then an agent, then a distributor, and finally the merchant, before ultimately ending up in the hands of a consumer. It's said a small number of agents are the ones stockpiling storage devices.

It's artificial demand, in other words, due in part to Chia and the speculation surrounding the new cryptocurrency. If Chia takes off in a big way, it is entirely possible this plays out on a larger scale, affecting both HDD and SSD prices in other parts of the world.

In theory, HDDs should be more susceptible to price hikes, because the cells on SSDs can wear out over repeated write cycles. But as we have seen in the GPU space, it's not just the parts that are best suited for cryptocurrency mining that are in high demand. If Chia proves popular and HDDs dry up, you can bet SSDs will be next. Let's hope it doesn't come to that.

Backing up data is not really fun or glamorous, but it's one of those things you will kick yourself for not doing if disaster strikes. So why not be prepared? You can get started with WD's 12TB Elements, an external hard drive that is on sale for $179.99 at B&H Photo today.

That's $70 off its normal price (the sale price is applied after adding the item to your card). The timely discount arrives just in time for World Backup Day. While not a valid excuse to skip work, you can celebrate it by finally committing to backing up your photos, videos, important documents, game save files, and anything else you deem important.

Being an external HDD that connects via USB, WD's Elements box is also handy for backing up every PC in your household, or even multiple locations (it's portable, after all). It's a USB 3.1 Gen 1 connection, though this is more about capacity than speed (it leverages a 5400 RPM HDD).

Note that backup software is not included. If you want automated backups, something like WD's My Passport, one of the best external hard drives, is more suitable.

It is plug-and-play, though, so all you have to do is plug it into your PC and begin manually moving files over. Then rinse and repeat for any other PCs you want to back up.

If things go as currently planned, Seagate will launch a 100TB hard disk drive (HDD) in less than a decade, which is more than five times the capacity of today's biggest HDDs. Then sometime after 2030, it will push single-drive storage capacities even further, to 120TB and beyond.

Even if Seagate needs to adjust its recently updated storage roadmap at some point, the fact that much bigger capacities are on the horizon reiterate that HDDs are not dead. Just the opposite, they accounted for over a zettabyte (1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes) of shipped storage last year. The need for bulk storage is continually growing, and that's not going to change anytime soon.

If you head over to Newegg, the largest HDDs available are 18TB. There are several different models starting at around $400. Among them is Seagate's 18TB Exos X18, a standard 3.5-inch SATA HDD stuffed with nine platters, that is intended for the enterprise market.

Part of Seagate's effort to massively increase storage capacities rests on heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology.

"HAMR is a technology designed to enable the next big increase in the amount of data that can be stored on a hard drive. It uses a new kind of media magnetic technology on each disk that allows data bits, or grains, to become smaller and more densely packed than ever, while remaining magnetically stable. A small laser diode attached to each recording head heats a tiny spot on the disk, which enables the recording head to flip the magnetic polarity of each very stable bit, enabling data to be written," Seagate explains.

Looking a little closer down the line, Seagate anticipates launching 30TB+ HDDs in 2023, followed by 40TB+ drives by 2025 and 50TB HDDs in 2026.

Seagate revealed its updated roadmap during its recent Virtual Analyst Event (via Anandtech), where it talked about the need to move on from perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) in order to continue pushing capacities into new territories.

"As we approach the maximum useful capacity of PMR technology, each successive drive increases by 1TB or 2TB at a time," said Jeff Fochtman, Seagate's senior vice president of business and marketing. "With HAMR technology, it allows us to jump in steps of 4 terabytes, 6 terabytes, or even 10 terabytes at a time."

Seagate also talked about adopting fully bit patterned media (BPM) to hit increasingly bigger capacities. This will enable increasing the maximum areal density from 2.6 terabits per square inch to more than 8Tb per square inch.

It will be interesting to see how Seagate approaches the consumer market in the coming years as HDDs balloon in size. HDDs are still great as secondary storage options, but for primary storage chores, solid state drives (SSDs) offer much better performance. SSDs will be getting bigger as well, just not on the same level of HDDs.

SSDs have also permeated the data center market in some instances. Seagate acknowledges that SSDs will increase their value proposition in the coming years, but believes HDDs will still deliver a lower TCO (total cost of ownership) throughout this and next decade.

Outside of the data center, the industry at large is shifting towards solid state drive (SSD) storage, trading capacity for speed, new research suggests. This is evidenced by SSDs outselling hard disk drives (HDDs) by 28 percent in 2020.

That's according to the latest data compiled by Trendfocus (via StorageNewsletter), which noted a 6 percent jump in SSD shipments during the fourth quarter of last year, to 87 million units. The strong finish helped SSDs leapfrog HDDs in full-year shipments, with around 333 million SSDs sold in 2020 versus around 260 million HDDs.

Client (or consumer) SSD sales were the main driving force. For whatever reason, enterprise SSD shipments plunged by 31 percent in the fourth quarter, and shipments of PCIe SSDs to enterprise customers fell for the third straight quarter. The report does not provide a ton of details on the decline, saying only "elevated inventories and reduced demand" played a role.

As much as consumers have embraced the speedier storage medium, HDDs are not dead. Far from it, the value proposition for bulk HDD storage is not something SSDs can touch, and that is reflected in the capacity breakdown between the two storage options. Even though SSDs held a 28 percent shipment advantage in 2020, HDD shipments accounted for five times more capacity, at over 1 zettabyte compared to 207 exabytes (there are 1,000 exabytes in a 1 zettabyte).

Nevertheless, SSDs are narrowing the gap. It wasn't that long ago when 128GB SSDs were frustratingly all-too-common among prebuilt desktops and laptops. These days a 256GB SSD is considered skimping, and many systems ship with 512GB or higher capacity drives. This is somewhat represented (indirectly) by the report's data, as doing some quick math reveals the average capacity to be 0.62 terabytes.

Not by coincidence, this likely means most SSDs shipped in 2020 were 512GB and 1TB models. There are other possible breakdowns that could arrive at the same average capacity, but based on what we've seen, this seems to be the more likely scenario.

The champion of this shift is the declining cost of NAND flash memory—SSD shipments accounted for 45 percent of all NAND flash chip shipments, according to the report. As a result, you can find a 512GB SSD for around $50 nowadays, and a 1TB SSD for less than $100. Faster models command higher prices, obviously, but even a SATA SSD offers a significant speed boost over an HDD.

The hard disk drive (HDD) might be dead to some people, now that solid state drive (SSD) pricing is on a pedestrian level, but don't go throwing dirt on the mechanical storage medium's grave. As a whole, HDDs are still very much alive and well—storage makers for the first time ever collectively shipped more than a zettabyte of HDD storage in 2020.

A zettabyte is 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes (or 1 sextillion bytes). To put that into perspective, a zettabyte is equivalent to a million petabytes, a billion terabytes, or a trillion gigabytes. It's a lot of data, in other words.

Toshiba revealed the staggering stat in a press release championing its lead in average capacity growth for the nearline HDD market, high capacity drives that are mostly bound for the data center.

"Our rapid increase in capacity shipped per unit, as well as increasing total exabyte shipments almost ninefold in just five years, is a testament to the hard work and effort by our HDD team here and abroad to grow our cloud data center scale while continuing to broaden in the enterprise, and is a reflection of our key customer partners’ trust in our products and support," said Kyle Yamamoto, vice president, HDD marketing and business operations at TAEC.

Toshiba's HDDs top out at 16TB spread across nine stacked platters, in a helium-sealed chassis. It would take 62.5 million of these drives to reach a zettabyte, by the way.

Incidentally, while Toshiba is leading the way in nearline HDD capacity growth, it actually trails Seagate and Western Digital in HDD market share, according to Coughlin Associates (via Forbes).

The main advantage of HDD storage is cost. These days you can find a 1TB HDD for as little as around $40. In contrast, the cheapest 1TB SSD on Newegg right now is a Team Group GX2 model on sale for $82.

That's not to say you should build a PC around an HDD, even a performance oriented model. Upgrading from an HDD to an SSD for primary storage chores is one of the best ways to make a system run and feel faster, as it effects everything from just navigating Windows and moving files around, to game load times. 

Be that as it may, the HDD clearly isn't disappearing anytime soon.

Mechanical hard disk drives are no longer in fashion as the primary storage medium in a gaming PC, but bulk HDDs still have their place. Primarily, they're still the best option for bulk backups. They can also be instrumental in managing ever-expanding game libraries, if you find yourself short on SSD space. This is why I'm always interested when Backblaze, a cloud storage provider, posts detailed reliability reports on the HDDs it uses. In its latest report, Backblaze offered up some preliminary (and encouraging) data on dozens of 16TB HDDs in its employ.

I'm especially interested in larger capacity HDDs because there is an inherent conundrum—the bigger the HDD the more space you have for things you don't want cluttering up your SSD, but if a monstrous capacity HDD fails, you could potentially lose a whole lot of data all at once.

The alternative is to go with multiple smaller capacity HDDs, but that takes away from the convenience that a bulk storage medium has to offer in the first place. Choose your poison, if you will.

Another consideration is brand. Anecdotally, I've seen more people complain about Seagate HDDs than any other manufacturer. But are Seagate drives actually less reliable than other brands? That's where Backblaze comes into play.

Backblaze runs storage pods containing more than 129,000 HDDs from various manufacturers, and ranging in capacity from 4TB to 16TB. The cloud backup service periodically posts detailed stats on failure rates, which include an estimated "annualized failure rate." It's based on a math equation: (drive failures / drives days / 366) * 100. In non-leap years, 366 is replaced with 365.

For the most recent quarter, Backblaze added dozens of 16TB models to the mix. It only provided stats on Seagate's 16TB drives, because it removes any models that were either used simply for testing purposes, or those for which it had less than 60 drives in service.

Here's how it went:

The "drive days" category is indicative of how many drives were employed on each and every day in a given time period. For example, if there are 10,000 drives in use on any given day, that equals 10,000 drive days for that single day. And if all those drives were employed each day for 30 days, you're looking at 300,000 drive days for that particular model.

As it relates to Seagate's Exos X16, a 16TB enterprise HDD, Backblaze has 5,036 drive days worth of data, based on that formula. More importantly, not a single one of those drives failed in the past three months.

This is encouraging, though also limited in scope. Out of those models that got recorded, there were fewer Exos 16 HDDS than any other drive. The way Backblaze calculates things, had just one of those drives failed in the past three months, it would have equated to a not-so-peachy 7.25 percent annualized failure rate.

In other words, the data and Backblaze's accounting methods leave some things up for interpretation. As it relates, collectively, HGST's drives seem to be doing well with low failure rates across the board. There are less HGST drives overall compared to Seagate models, but out of 29,074 drives ranging in capacity from 4TB to 12TB, only 27 failed in the last three months.

None of this data is perfect, but I've yet to find a better accounting of HDD reliability.

AMD has pulled the plug on its StoreMI technology, the drive caching technology that it gave away free with 400-series motherboards. Support actually ended on the 31st March, which means you can no longer download the tool from AMD's site. You can keep using it if you've already downloaded it (obviously), although AMD offers no technical or end user support from now, which isn't ideal. There is a replacement on the way at least.

"AMD will focus its internal development resources on a replacement solution with a rearchitected feature set and a planned release window of 2Q20." AMD stated in its Product Change Advisory. 

The advisory continues, "Those seeking a storage acceleration solution after March 31, 2020 may wait for the new AMD solution, or may seek an alternative solution such as Enmotus FuzeDrive." Enmotus worked with AMD to produce StoreMI.

If you visit this page on the Enmotus site, you'll discover that it is offering free technical support for AMD users of the StoreMI until the 15th May, which could indicate the day on which AMD's replacement comes out. 

I built a system around StoreMI when it was introduced a couple of years ago in response to Intel's Optane caching system, with the release of AMD's Zen+ CPUs, and it worked well. The idea is certainly promising enough—combine the performance of an SSD with the capacity of a traditional hard drive to get lots of speedy storage. It takes a while for the caching to kick in, but once it does it seems to deliver on the promise. 

It's a tiered caching system though, which does have its pitfalls—you're hitting the SSDs more than you normally would, it doesn't work so well if you use lots of different apps, and the smaller the SSD the more limited you are with how many of those apps you can cache). The free version limited you to a maximum 256GB SSD as well. Having said all that, it's fine for most day-to-day applications where you use the same apps a lot.

The problem is, SSD pricing has continued to tumble, which means larger SSD are now available at affordable prices, leaving this as little more than a niche. When I built that system with a Ryzen 5 2600 in May 2018 I used a 250GB M.2 PCIe SSD that cost $110 and a 1TB hard drive that cost $44. You can now buy the likes of the Crucial P1 1TB M.2 PCIe SSD for $100. Obviously you can now use faster bigger drives to still get improvements, but the fact of the matter is, the vast majority don't need to. 

An external hard drive is never going to get the pulse racing, but it's still a useful tool to have in your collection. It's somewhere to store your most precious files (be they images, videos, documents, etc), as a quick and dirty backup of your main system, or for adding storage to a laptop or system that is fit to burst. It's portable too, which means it can be an easy way of moving data around.

If you're not talking about much data, then the traditional route here is to pick up a USB stick and be done. However, while the size of such devices is improving all the time, they can't compete with the capacity offered by spinning hard drives. These platter-based wonders still offer the best bang for your buck for storage.

The Western Digital WD Black P10 is a case in point. Here is an external drive from a reputable manufacturer that costs just $130 (£124) for 5 TB of space. You obviously don't get five terabytes of SSD space inside the robust and attractively styled case for so little cash, but you do get plenty of raw capacity to play with. It's bus powered too, so you don't need to carry around an external power connector, which helps in the mobility stakes.

The WD Black P10 is not going to rewrite the hard drive performance record books. This is an external drive connected over USB 3 that uses a 5,400 rpm spinning mechanical drive. When it came to synthetic testing, ATTO maxed out at 120 MB/s for the reads and 112 MB/s for writes, while CrystalDiskMark 6.0.2 produced slightly higher sequential read figures of 130 MB/s and 125 MB/s writes. Random access performance isn't great, but there's no surprise there.

When it comes to real world performance, you can't beat copying across data to see how the drive stands up (we used an SSD as the source). First up was Hearthstone, which weighs in at a mere 3.4 GB, this took 57 seconds, which equates to 61 MB/s. I then copied across a World of Warcraft install, which is a mixture of some huge files, and plenty of tiny ones (there are 10,742 files altogether, with the whole lot coming to 73.8GB), this took 16 minutes and 35 seconds, which averages out at 75 MB/s. Nothing to be sniffed at.

There are a few drives in the WD Black P10 range: 2TB for $80 (£81), 4TB $120 (£97), and this the largest member, the 5TB model for $130 (£124). This model makes the most sense financially, and is the one we'd recommend dropping your hard earned cash on. There are plenty of external hard drives out there of course, and there are cheaper ones than this, but with decent performance, a whole lot of space, and a strong brand behind it, this WD Black gets the nod here.

It's still too early to write the obituary for mechanical hard disk drives (HDDs), but the landscape is definitely changing. Solid state drives (SSDs) are faster, they don't have any moving parts to worry about, and they've come in down in price exponentially over the past decade. It's no wonder that in the laptop space, HDDs are hanging by a fingernail, at least in Western Europe.

That's according to Context, a market research firm that says over 93 percent of new laptops sold in the fourth quarter in Western Europe had SSDs as their primary storage component. Just two year prior, SSDs were found in two-thirds of laptops (66.7 percent).

This was bound to happen as SSD pricing continued to become more favorable. However, Context also points to other factors that have led to the near-abandonment of the HDD.

"The sharp fall in price per gigabyte observed in 2019 is the main driver of accelerating SSD adoption as it enables vendors to sell SSD configurations at competitive prices," said Gurvan Meyer, an analyst at Context. "Meanwhile, online storage services are getting cheaper, and the use of streaming online services more common, so there is less need for high-capacity local storage."

It's not clear how many laptops in Western Europe still include an HDD as a secondary storage device, next to an SSD for primary storage duties. Either way, the merits of SSD storage have laptop buyers in Western Europe willing to pay more per gigabyte than what they might get with an HDD.

"The majority of consumers have now experienced the advantages that SSDs bring to day-to-day computer use so are happy to pay a little more for a machine with this type of storage," Meyer added.

Context predicts that by the end of 2020, every new laptop sold in Western Europe will sport an SSD as the primary storage drive. The Netherlands will likely get there first—it's nearly an HDD-less region already, with only 2 percent of laptops and desktops combined having an HDD in 2019.

"Germany follows—there, SSD share of the overall PC market is 93.4 percent—and the UK completes the podium with only 9.9 percent of PCs sold in the country in Q4 2019 containing HDDs. The transition is slower in Southern Europe where an average of 85 percent of PCs sold at the end of 2019 came with SSDs."

Context's prediction is only slightly bold, though it does hinge on NAND flash memory pricing holding steady and/or continuing to decline. Either way, the SSD has been the best thing to happen to PC hardware in the last decade, and that will remain true whether it completely takes over this year or not.

SSDs are becoming more affordable all the time, but it can still be tough to fit everything you'd like faster access to onto a single drive. We discuss the choice between HDD vs SSD in more detail elsewhere, but Intel Optane Memory looks to bridge the gap between the faster speeds of a solid-state drive and the space available on a mechanical hard drive. If you need other fresh parts to go with Optane, check out our list of best CPUs, best graphics cards, and best SSDs for gaming. Here's everything you need to know about how Intel Optane Memory works, the benefits, and the possible drawbacks.

What is Intel Optane Memory?

Fundamentally, Optane Memory is a form of disk caching. The idea is to provide users with the fast data access of SSDs combined with the high capacity of HDDs. (Technically, Optane Memory can be used with an SSD as well, but for purposes of this article I'll just say HDD for the slower mass storage.) Commonly used data gets replicated onto fast M.2 Optane Memory storage while less important data is pulled from the hard drive. It's great in theory, but Optane Memory isn't always a perfect solution.

How Intel Optane Memory works

Optane Memory uses a "least recently used" (LRU) approach to determine what gets stored in the fast cache. All initial data reads come from the slower HDD storage, and the data gets copied over to the cache. Data writes go first to the cache and then get replicated over to the HDD. Each time a block of data in the cache gets read or written, its last access time is updated. Eventually, the cache fills up and old data gets evicted—and it will be the data that has been sitting unused for the longest amount of time. The larger your cache, the more data it can hold, and the more likely reads and writes will use fast cached storage rather than hitting your slow HDD.

That brings up the tricky question of how large the cache needs to be in order to hold all the "important" data. Originally released in 16GB and 32GB capacities, Intel later added a 64GB Optane Memory option, and you can also use an Intel Optane 800p drive as an even larger 118GB Optane Memory cache if you so choose. The reason for the larger capacities is simple: for some users, 16GB and 32GB caches simply aren't large enough. Windows 10 alone can use a big chunk of the 16GB model for commonly accessed data. Run a few applications or games and "old" data gets kicked out of the cache.

In a worst-case scenario, sequentially accessing slightly more than 16GB of data (eg, 17GB) first fills up the Optane Memory cache, then evicts the oldest 1GB data to make room for the last 1GB of data, and then flushes the whole cache as "new" uncached data is accessed again. Any data not already in the Optane Memory cache ends up with HDD performance, largely negating the benefits. This specific scenario is unlikely to happen in the real world—a lot of data usually gets used multiple times and will benefit from caching—but having a cache that's large enough to hold the working data set is ideal.

The difficulty comes in determining exactly what gets cached in the first place. Optane Memory relies on Intel's Rapid Storage Technology (RST) application and drivers, and RST has some intelligence in what types of data get stored in the cache. For example, if you're viewing a large HD movie stored on your PC, there's no real benefit to putting all 8GB of movie data into the cache. Movies are read sequentially at relatively low rates (maybe 5-15MB/s) and would simply waste cache space.

Intel hasn't provided exact details on its caching algorithm, but even a small 16GB Optane Memory module can provide a noticeable improvement in Windows boot times and game load times—despite the fact that many games are now in the 50-100GB range. At the same time, it's easy to get into a place where the 16GB Optane Memory size is limiting. AnandTech as an example did some benchmarks with and without Optane Memory on various capacities, and the larger data sets in some tests caused even a 64GB module to basically fall back to HDD levels of performance.

Intel Optane Memory specs

Optane Memory tends to either work great (all the important data is in the cache) or only okay (some data is on slower storage). Technically, the Optane Memory drives have different performance depending on whether you have the 16GB, 32GB, or 64GB models, but I don't generally recommend the 16GB option. Here's how the three models compare, and again it's worth pointing out that Intel Optane 800p SSDs (58GB and 118GB) can also work as Optane Memory drives.

Maximum sequential throughput is limited by the PCIe x2 interface on the higher capacity models, but in practice it doesn't matter much. Few real-world operations will saturate the x2 link—copying files can get there, along with some synthetic benchmarks, but if you're loading applications and games Optane Memory is plenty fast.

Optane Memory is built using Intel's 3D XPoint Technology, a form of non-volatile memory that's sort of like the NAND used in most other SSDs, except it relies on changing material properties rather than storing charges. First discussed in 2015, 3D XPoint made a lot of promises: faster read and write speeds compared to NAND, higher capacities, and extreme durability. The specs are certainly better than NAND in most regards, though not quite as good as initial claims—at least not yet.

The raw throughput for Optane Memory isn't really any faster than NAND right now, but one of the big advantages of Optane Memory is the low latency access times. Where most NAND-based SSDs have read/write latencies of around 100/50µs, Optane Memory latencies are 18/7µs for the 32/64GB drives. That's more theoretical, especially since some data accesses may not be cached and so HDD latencies come into play, but when testing the similar Intel Optane 800p SSDs, overall performance was often better than significantly larger SSDs.

Intel Optane Memory performance

While Intel touts the ability for Optane Memory to accelerate slower SSDs as well as HDDs, the latter is the most common use case. For most real-world use cases, Optane Memory performs as advertised. A 32GB or 64GB module paired with a larger HDD yields performance results—Windows boot times, application and game load times, level load times, etc.—that are similar to that of a decent SSD.

To give some specific examples, I loaded several games (multiple times), including Anthem, The Division 2, and Metro Exodus. HDD load times were about 30 percent slower (using one of the fastest HDDs available, a WD Black 4TB). With Optane Memory, load times are nearly identical to most SATA SSDs (including Crucial MX500 and Samsung 860 Evo). Windows boot times with Optane Memory are also nearly the same as with a good SSD—about 12 seconds, compared to 30 seconds for the HDD. But there's one caveat.

The biggest concern is that the first access of any uncached data ends up with HDD speeds. Over the long haul this becomes less critical, but in testing right after enabling Optane, the first boot of Windows is only marginally faster—it's subsequent boot times that are improved. Loading a game or application the first time will also be slow—and if you fill your cache (a real possibility with the 16GB model) you're going to get "first run" performance on applications more often. If your cache is large enough for your routine workloads, Optane Memory can be substantially faster than a hard drive, but it needs a bit of warming up before it's fully ready to go.

How this plays out depends on what you're doing. For lighter use cases, a 32GB Optane Memory drive is generally sufficient, but heavy workloads can definitely reach the point where even 64GB isn't enough. Do note that AnandTech's heavy test scenario is certainly not representative of most end user daily routines, however.

How much does Intel Optane Memory cost?

Given the generally good performance, price is obviously a major consideration. A 2TB HDD paired up with a fast Optane Memory cache sounds like a reasonable solution. Right now, Optane Memory will set you back $28 for 16GB, $88 for 32GB, or $111 for 64GB, or $199 for 128GB. The original pricing from Intel was a bit more sensible ($39, $69, $129, and $199), but retail pricing is all over the place.

I still strongly recommend against the 16GB model, just because it's so easy to exceed its cache capacity (plus it's slower in general), and given the relatively similar pricing on the 32GB and 64GB options (yes, the 800p 58GB functions as a 64GB Optane Memory drive), grabbing the 800p 58GB makes the most sense. Of course you have to factor in overall pricing with a hard drive, so that's another $60 for 2TB of storage.

Right now, SSD prices have dropped to the point where the cost of a 32GB Optane Memory drive isn't far off the price of a 1TB SATA SSD, and you can get a good 1TB SATA SSD for less than the cost of the 64GB model. The 118GB meanwhile is pretty much out of consideration, as it costs as much as a 2TB NVMe SSD. The SSD will deliver 'fast' performance for all data, while Optane Memory can be slightly faster for cached data and slower for anything not in the cache.

If you want a single drive that does everything well and holds 2TB, a 64GB Optane Memory stick combined with a hard drive now costs about $160—more than a decent 1TB SATA SSD, and $80 less than a fast 2TB NVMe SSD.

System requirements for Intel Optane Memory

Given the name, it's no surprise that Intel Optane Memory is only for Intel platforms. Specifically, Optane Memory requires a motherboard with either a 200-series or 300-series chipset—the one exception being the H310, which doesn't support Optane Memory. It will also work on X299 chipset boards. There are also CPU requirements, and you'll need a 7th Gen or later Intel CPU. There are exceptions on the CPU front, however: all Core i3/i5/i7/i9 CPUs support Optane Memory, but Pentium and Celeron models do not.

Optane Memory modules come in an M.2 2280 form factor and will require the use of one of your M.2 slots. Some motherboards only include a single M.2 slot, which precludes using Optane Memory alongside an M.2 NVMe SSD. Intel does offer combination drives that include both Optane Memory and 660p SSD storage on a single M.2 stick, but those are for OEMs and system builders. They could start showing up at retail if demand is high enough, but so far that hasn't been the case.

Besides the hardware requirements, Optane Memory has some software and OS requirements. You'll need Windows 10 version 1803 or later (that's the April 2018 update, so any Win10 install should be viable by now). You'll also need Intel's RST 15.5 or later software. Again, that shouldn't pose a problem considering the latest release is 17.7—and you'll want to use the latest RST as there have been quite a few improvements over the past year with Optane Memory support.

Alternatives to Intel Optane Memory

There are other SSD caching solutions available, including PrimoCache and AMD's StoreMI, which is based off Enmotus FuzeDrive. Those solutions can use an Intel Optane Memory module as the cache / fast tier, but the actual implementation behaves differently. StoreMI/FuzeDrive for example uses tiered storage as opposed to SSD caching. I won't get into all the nitty gritty details, but tiered storage is generally considered a superior approach to pure caching. You get the combined storage capacity of all tiers, for example, rather than duplicating data on fast and slow tiers.

StoreMI is free with any AMD Ryzen 400-series or later chipset motherboard, or Threadripper X399 and TRX40 motherboards. You can also purchase FuzeDrive and use it with any other motherboard—AMD or Intel.

One thing to note is that caching drives (ie, with Optane Memory or PrimoCache) often end up doing more writes than normal SSDs, plus smaller NAND SSDs often have relatively weak performance. That's where 3D XPoint's advantages are more apparent. Where modern NAND cells can be erased and rewritten anywhere from 1,000-3,000 times (for TLC/MLC NAND) before the cell walls wear out and stop storing charges properly, 3D XPoint endurance is much higher—at least 20,000 cycles, probably more. That might not sound like much, but when you're dealing with smaller SSDs as caching drives it can certainly help.

Is Intel Optane Memory worth buying?

In the current market, Optane Memory is difficult to recommend for DIY PC builders. Pairing up a higher capacity HDD with Optane Memory can give SSD-like performance for far more data, but we still prefer a single large SSD. While 4TB SSDs remain very expensive, 2TB models have dropped below the $200 range. Unless you need more than 2TB of fast / cached storage, a single SSD is arguably much easier to deal with. For 4TB and larger HDDs, however, Optane Memory remains viable. The problem is that Optane Memory is best with a 64GB module, which costs as much as a 1TB SSD.

Personally, I'd rather have a 1TB or 2TB SSD and no HDD, or a 500GB SSD with an HDD, than to end up with a 64GB cache and an HDD. I'm okay with doing a bit of storage micromanagement to put data that doesn't require fast access on my HDD and keep important data on my SSD.

If you want a simpler solution that doesn't require managing storage on a lower level, and particularly if you're not routinely using massive data sets that could flush out your SSD cache, Optane Memory is worth a look. That's especially true with prebuilts from OEMs (eg, Dell, HP, Alienware, Lenovo, etc.), as Optane Memory sometimes gets tossed in at a discounted rate.

In terms of performance, SSDs will always beat HDDs, but an HDD with Optane Memory can be a reasonable compromise.

It was barely over a month ago when Jarred shoveled dirt on the mechanical drive, saying HDDs were dead to him because "even large SSDs are now affordable." He's not wrong. At the same time, Seagate says hold the boat—it's planning to launch more capacious HDDs in the near future, and if things go to plan, will have a 50TB HDD by 2026.

"Today, Seagate is the only company mass producing 16-terabyte drives, which are the capacity benchmark for the industry. We are preparing to ship 18-terabyte drives in the first half of calendar year 2020 to maintain our industry capacity leadership," Seagate CEO Dr. Dave Mosley said during an earnings call, a transcript of which is available at Seeking Alpha.

In addition to launching an 18TB HDD in early 2020, Seagate plans on introducing a 20TB sometime later in the year.

Seagate posted a roadmap in September that indicates its upcoming 18TB model will use the same conventional magnetic recording (CMR) technology as its 16TB model. Further out, however, the 20TB will be built around Seagate's shingled magnetic recording (SMR) technology. On how these differ, Synology's article on the topic offers a pretty good breakdown.

Looking ahead to 50TB capacities, by then Seagate will be using heat assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology. This works by having a small laser diode attached to each recording head heat up tiny spots on a disk, which enables the recording head to flip the magnetic polarity of each stable bit for recording data.

We'll have to wait and see how much these more capacious drives cost. Falling prices of NAND flash memory have made SSDs more affordable, and with Black Friday deals being right around the corner, upgrading to fast storage is more affordable than ever. At the same time, HDDs still offer more capacity for the money, which is a large reason why they've stuck around. Just imagine a NAS stocked with 50TB drives. You might be able to download Steam. All of it! The possibilities are endless.

I've been using PCs since the original 8088 and 8086, and progress in processors and graphics over the decades has been phenomenal. Meanwhile, storage by comparison was limping along for most of the time, and it wasn't until SSDs started showing up in the late aughts that storage became exciting. The best SSDs can radically change the everyday feel of using a PC, and if you're still wondering about the merits of HDD vs. SSD, it's time to put that debate to rest. Hard drives may be cheaper, but as far as I'm concerned, HDD tech is dead.

The first time I used an Intel X25-M 80GB SSD, I was blown away. Windows, browsers, and other applications seemed to launch almost instantly, and it was awesome. What wasn't quite so awesome was the price. $595 for 80GB was more than steep—it put the SSD out of reach for many users. Over the coming years, prices fell and capacities increased, but there have still been naysayers.

"Sure, you can get a 128GB SSD for $200 … or you can get a 2TB hard drive for the same price". That was said by many people back in 2011, where SSDs were at least an order of magnitude more expensive than hard drives. More recently, in 2016 NAND shortages caused a spike in SSD prices and we went from 500GB models selling for $100 back to $200 or more.

Thankfully, those shortages are now well and truly behind us, and you can find quite a few 1TB SSDs for less than $100 these days. And with advancements like QLC, it's not just SATA SSDs—Intel's 660p 1TB and Crucial's P1 1TB top the list in terms of value, at 10 cents or less per GB, and faster NVMe SSDs aren't far behind. (Actually, a few M.2 drives are now cheaper than SATA drives!)

Sure, you can still make the case that HDDs cost less. 4TB hard drives start at around 2 cents per GB. The thing is, while games continue to increase in size, I don't really need several terabytes of storage. 1TB may not be enough for all of my favorite games, apps, and benchmarking tools, but 2TB certainly is—and the Intel 660p 2TB is actually the lowest priced 2TB class SSD at just 9 cents per GB. It originally launched at a recommended price of $399 about a year ago, and it now sells for less than half that amount. That's the kind of progress I like to see!

Keep in mind that not all SSDs are created equal. If you run a bunch of write-heavy workloads, particularly random access writes, the QLC drives can struggle a bit. Outside of benchmarks, however, the most storage intensive task I'm likely to do is installing a new game—which is mostly a sequential access workload. That means throughput of 1,500MB/s or more for M.2 drives, compared to a maximum speed of 550MB/s for SATA. But whether it's a SATA or M.2 drive, for general home and consumer use, even a "slow" SSD is plenty fast. More importantly, because there are no moving parts, access speeds are often several orders of magnitude faster than a hard drive—microseconds compared to milliseconds.

Hard drives continue to slowly increase in capacity, but with the advent of SSDs, manufacturers have basically abandoned higher RPM models, leaving 5,400 and 7,200 rpm as the two main options. With a 7,200 rpm spinning platter, that means about 4.2 ms on average for the right sector to pass under the drive heads, and usually another 8 ms to get the heads over the right track. 12 ms total might not seem like much, but for pseudo-random access workloads (like booting Windows), there can be thousands of such accesses. Contrast that with access times of anywhere from 10-150 μs (depending on the SSD) and it's easy to see why solid state storage handily eclipses spinning disks.

As far as longevity goes, there's nothing to worry about on the larger modern SSDs. The 1TB Intel 660p and Crucial P1 drives are rated for 200 TBW (TB written), spread out over five years. That's about 110 GB per day, if you're wondering—and the 2TB 660p doubles that to 219 GB per day. For consumer use, even 20 GB writes per day on average would be a lot, and it would take 27 years to burn out the NAND cells. 27 years ago, a state-of-the-art PC would have used a 486 processor, with perhaps 16-32MB of memory and a 250-500MB hard drive. I wouldn't even want to try guessing at what sort of hardware we'll be using two decades from now.

I'm not saying everyone has to fully abandon the venerable HDD now. They're great for backups, for example—I've got a 4TB model that I use for archiving old files and other data, and the past decade or so of documents, movies, and pictures still only uses about half of its capacity. But I know people with NAS setups that hold 100TB or more of movies, and HDDs are perfectly fine there. Still, my 4TB HDD is probably the last one I'll buy. As SSD prices continue to drop and performance and capacity continue to increase, HDDs are going the way of the floppy disk.

The HDD is dead. Long live the SSD. At least until something even better comes along.

Mechanical hard drives have proven a resilient storage medium over the years, just as floppy disks once were, before USB flash drives eventually took the baton. Will HDDs see the same fate? Not today and not tomorrow, but it's bound to happen one day. It's certainly trending in that direction, with one of the biggest suppliers of HDD motors anticipating a massive decline PC HDD shipments this year.

Our friends at AnandTech came across a report by Nidec (PDF), a Japanese motor manufacturer that produces HDD spindle motors found on around 85 percent of all HDDs. It's fair to say that Nidec has a pulse on the HDD market.

According to the report, HDD shipments continue to slide, with PC HDDs being hit the hardest—shipments of PC HDDs are on pace to drop in half from 124 million units in 2018 to 65 million units in 2019.

Shipments were declining more gradually before this point, with 289 million units shipped in 2013. However, PC HDD shipments are about to fall off a cliff.

It's not difficult to understand why. Just as USB flash drives effectively supplanted floppy disks (for the most part), PC storage schemes have been transitioning to much faster solid state drives.

This past year, we have seen NAND flash memory pricing go into free fall, leading to much more affordable SSDs than ever before. Crucial's MX500 in 1TB form, one of the best SSDs for gaming, can be had for only $129.95 right now. We've also seen 1TB SSDs drop below the $100 mark. It's not just SATA drives, either—just last week, Intel's 1TB 660P NVMe SSD was on sale for $101.99.

SSDs have reached the point of being viable for consumers and OEM system builders alike—these days we routinely see desktop and laptop deals with SSDs inside instead of HDDs.

Of course, if looking only at the amount of storage, HDDs still offer a better bang-per-buck, or bang-per-gigabyte. As such, I don't anticipate them joining floppy disks in the near future, especially since hundreds of millions of HDDs are still being shipped annually when factoring in data centers and non-PC devices. But the gap is definitely closing, especially on home PCs.

It's not an exaggeration to say that upgrading from a mechanical hard drive to a solid state drive is one of the best ways to make your PC run and feel faster—it makes a huge difference even just navigating Windows. On the NVMe side of the equation, Western Digital's Black SN750 is one of the best SSDs for gaming. It's also a bit expensive (compared to SATA SSDs), though if you preorder a drive with a heatsink, WD will soften the blow by tossing in a 1TB Black hard drive.

The combination of a speedy SSD as your primary drive and a capacious HDD for bulk storage makes a lot of sense—Windows and games can go on the SSD, while photos and videos (and everything else that may not require faster access) can reside on the HDD. As such, this is a nifty preorder promotion.

WD is taking aim squarely at gamers with its Black SN750 family. Granted, a SATA-based SSD is fine for gaming as well, but NVMe drives have the advantage of potentially much faster read and write speeds, and that is certainly the case here. The Black SN750 is rated to deliver sequential read performance of up to 3,470MB/s and write speeds of up to 3,000MB/s, depending on the model (those metrics apply to the 1TB model).

In our testing, we found it ends up being faster than the Samsung's 970 Evo and effectively tied with the newer 970 Evo Plus, two of the best NVMe SSDs out there. That's good company to be in.

As for the bundled HDD, it's WD's Black model, which has a 7,200 RPM spindle speed, and not a slower 5,200 RPM model. Kudos for that decision. The caveat? The preorder bonus applies to versions of the SN750 that ship with a heatsink, which are a bit more expensive than the naked drives.

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As the best SSDs for gaming and best NVMe SSDs become bigger in capacity and lower in price-per-gigabyte, the question of reliability is more important than ever, especially in comparison to mechanical hard drives. Backblaze, a cloud backup company that frequently posts HDD reliability reports based on its own usage, has offered up some thoughts on the subject, with an interesting conclusion.

"SSDs generally will last as long as you need them to," Backblaze says.

Case closed, right? Not so fast. There are several caveats, not the least of which is that Backblaze's latest blog post on the subject is very different from its typical HDD reliability reports. It doesn't contain any concrete data on fail rates, as the company doesn't employ SSDs to the same extent and manner as it does HDDs.

It's more of an explainer, albeit an interesting one with some notable nuggets. For example, did you know that NAND is not not an acronym, but is derived from the memory's logic gate called "NOT AND?" Now you do!

While the blog post lacks concrete numbers, it's still a good and easily digestible read about SSDs in general. According to Backblaze, you can expect an SSD to "last as long as its manufacturer expects it to last, provided that the use of the drive is not excessive for the technology it employs."

The blog post also goes over warning signs that your SSD might be dying. Unlike HDDs that go bad, there is no audible clicking sound or grinding that might alert you to an impending fail. Instead, Backblaze says to be on the lookout for errors involving bad blocks, files that cannot be read or written, the file system needing repair, crashes during boot, and the drive suddenly becoming read-only.

In case you're wondering, Backblaze does actually use SSDs in its datacenter. In a separate article, the company went so far as to suggest it would replace all of its HDDs with SSDs if there wasn't such a big difference in the price-per-gigabyte.

"In just about all respects, SSDs are superior to HDDs. So why don’t we replace the 100,000+ hard drives we have spinning in our data centers with SSDs? The primary reason is cost. We’d love to have the performance and density of SSDs available for our Storage Pods (see our post Seagate Introduces a 60TB SSD—Is a 3.6PB Storage Pod Next?), but the cost/benefit ratio of SSDs is not yet in our favor," Backblaze says.

We imagine that will likely still be the case for a long time to come. In the meantime, though, let's hope that SSD capacities keep going up and prices keep coming down.

Earlier this week, one of our editors, Tyler, started having some issues with his primary PC. He powered it up and was greeted with the ominous warning that no boot devices were found. From there it was the usual troubleshooting steps. Power off, stare blankly at the innards of the computer, poke around at some cables, sacrifice a slide rule, hope for the best and power it back up. And then, as if by magic, everything worked and he was running Windows again, the warning perhaps unheeded. (It was probably a loose SATA cable, and not an SSD on its last legs.)

It got me thinking, though: When was the last time I backed up my critical files? Or to put a different spin on things, how many of the files on my PC would I be OK with losing? For many people, the answer to the second question is "none of them," while the answer to the first question is "uhh… is that something Windows does automatically?" It is not.

In the modern age of massive drives and fast solid-state storage, there's no good reason to not back up your important files. Multi-terabyte drives can hold years (decades even) of data, and they're relatively cheap. There are backup solutions that will upload your data into the cloud as well, though they require a subscription and of course you need to trust the company A) won't go bankrupt and vanish into the ether, and B) won't spy on or otherwise use your data.

There are plenty of reliable options, but for a basic backup all you really need is a decent external USB drive. If it doesn't come with its own backup software (many external drives do), grab some free backup software and configure it to your liking—or shoot for the cloud with Google's backup and sync, a basic but free tool if you trust the company with your stuff. You can also set it to use "high quality" encoded versions of your photos and movies with unlimited storage, if you don't mind the slight drop in quality.

If you go for local storage, you're not protected from things like theft or natural disaster, but it's better than skydiving without a parachute. Plug your drive in on a weekly or monthly basis, depending on how critical you feel your files are, and run your backup. Then breathe a little easier.

Whether it's cloud-based or local storage, the point I'm hoping to convey is that backups aren't all that hard, and they're important. It's generally possible to recover data from the platters in a hard drive, but it can cost over a thousand dollars, and recovering data from SSDs can be even more expensive. So if you haven't done so already, take a break from gaming and get a backup solution in place. It can be a lifesaver when the inevitable poop hits the fan.

Updated 2/20/2019: After initial testing earlier this week, a patch to improve Anthem loading times was released and I have rerun all the tests. Things have improved in all cases, though there are still plenty of loading screens. These are the updated results.

A big complaint from our Anthem review is the excessive number of loading screens—loading the game, loading into Fort Tarsis, loading into a mission, loading when you're too far behind your squad in a mission, loading to respawn, loading into a smaller area within a mission, loading back into the main world, loading to the mission summary page, loading back into Fort Tarsis… There are a lot of loading screens, and prior to the final public release some of them could stick around for more than a minute. Ugh.

But there's some good news. BioWare promised a "day 1 patch" that eventually morphed into a "day -2 patch" that is already available. I suspect articles like this are part of the reason the fix was pushed out sooner rather than later. 4.84GB patch in hand, I've set about testing Anthem load times, on several different drives.

For testing, I have three storage devices: a Samsung 860 Evo SATA SSD, a Samsung 970 Evo NVMe SSD, and a WD Black SATA HDD. I tested several loading sequences that you're likely to encounter during the game, as detailed below. For my testbed, I'm using my normal performance analysis hardware—shown in the boxout on the right. Keep in mind this is a very high-end gaming PC sporting an overclocked CPU, and CPU speed can definitely impact load times as well. More on that in a moment.

Testing Anthem load times

There are a lot of things we could try and measure, but I wanted test sequences that are readily available and easily reproduced. That means using a mission halfway through the campaign isn't really a good idea. Here are the three tests I've run.

1) Launch time: This is the time from pressing Play in Origin until you can start moving around in Fort Tarsis. It's the sum of two stages, first from clicking Play until the "Press [space] to resume" message appears, and second the time from pressing space until you arrive in Fort Tarsis (and the news screen appears).

2) Launch mission: Various missions may take different amounts of time to launch, depending on where in the game world they take you. But free play expeditions are always the same, so I used that for the level load time. I walk/jog to my javelin at the fort and start a free play mission at the location nearest Fort Tarsis. The time reported is from clicking "start expedition" to when I can move my javelin.

3) Finish mission: At the end of each mission, you're taken to a summary screen. From free play, you open the map and hold F to exit free play. I time how long it takes before the expedition summary screen starts to appear, pause, and then time how long it takes from pressing space (return to Fort Tarsis) until I'm back at the fort.

Other notes: Because of the Windows caching mentioned below, repeating steps 2 and 3 without exiting the game (or exiting the game and relaunching without restarting the PC) can result in faster load times on subsequent runs. I'll report these as well, but the PC gets rebooted between each 'standard' benchmark run (after moving the game installation folder to the desired drive).

Anthem hard drive performance

Let's start with loading times of the hard drive, keeping in mind that this is basically as good as it gets for HDDs since it's a practically new HDD without a ton of other files on it, plus it's running as a secondary drive so the OS isn't peppering it with extra read/write request.

1) Game load time: 78-85 seconds
2) Free play load time: 65-75 seconds
3) Exit free play time: 33 seconds

Both the game load time and level load time are much slower than with an SSD, although subsequent runs (without rebooting the PC or restarting Anthem) do better. Exiting the game and immediately launching it again reduced the initial load time to about 65 seconds, while getting into free play on subsequent runs takes about 45-50 seconds.

If you have an older hard drive, a hard drive with lots of other files on it (and file fragmentation), and/or a 5400RPM hard drive, you can expect load times to be even worse than shown here. A 4TB WD Black HDD remains one of the fastest options for conventional storage.

Anthem SATA SSD performance

I've used a fast SATA SSD, one of the best SSDs for gaming in fact, and it has plenty of free space available so it shouldn't run into any hiccups. While slower SSDs might affect load times, in general all modern SATA SSDs are fast enough that I expect most results for tests like this to be within a narrow margin of a few seconds.

1) Game load time: 59-60 seconds
2) Free play load time: 43-45 seconds
3) Exit free play time: 32 seconds

Switching to an SSD definitely helps reduce load times. The game launches about 20 seconds faster, and getting into free play likewise is over 20 seconds faster. Exiting free play and getting back to Fort Tarsis still feels agonizingly slow, as it takes 16 seconds to get to the summary screen, then you have to stab escape multiple times to get through the several screens (this can take another 10 seconds minimum, but after a lengthier run sorting through things might take a couple of minutes), followed by another 16 seconds to return to Fort Tarsis.

Exiting Anthem and immediately restarting it doesn't really help the initial load time. There's a 23 second delay before you get to the "Connecting to Online Services" message, probably half of which is for two unskippable logo videos. It's not clear how much of the delay at the "connecting" prompt is server side, and how much is from loading and processing data. Launching another expedition also didn't improve much on a subsequent runs, and in fact was a bit slower (49 seconds) for some reason.

Anthem NVMe SSD performance

What happens if you put Anthem on an ultra-fast M.2 NVMe SSD? Samsung's 970 Evo 1TB is one of the best NVMe SSDs, and for these tests it's basically empty before copying over the game files, so this is as good as it's likely to get.

Many people will tell you that NVMe SSDs don't make your games load or run any faster. Those people are generally correct. If a game has to process data as it loads (and that's pretty much always the case), it might only be pulling data from storage at a rate of 100-200MB/s, but rarely would it actually exceed the 500MB/s that a fast SATA drive can provide. Which means the results are basically what you'd expect:

1) Game load time: 58-60 seconds
2) Free play load time: 43-45 seconds
3) Exit free play time: still 32 seconds

All of those figures are within one second of the SATA SSD. Does that mean there are never scenes or areas where the NVMe drive would be faster? No, but at least during testing I was unable to produce results that gave the 970 Evo any noticeable advantage. (Moving files from the SATA SSD and then having Origin verify those files did go substantially faster, however.)

Anthem SATA SSD with Core i3-8100

One thing I haven't touched on yet is how much the CPU affects load times. I used the same SATA SSD but swapped out the CPU for a Core i3-8100. With two fewer cores (and one third as many threads), things definitely slowed down.

1) Game load time: 76-78 seconds
2) Free play load time: 53-56 seconds
3) Exit free play time: 45 seconds

That's almost worse than using the HDD with a faster CPU, though the combination of hard drive and Core i3-8100 (or a similarly slow CPU) would increase load times even more. The main point here is that even the fastest storage can only take you so far if you have a slow processor. And with Anthem, as I'll show in our upcoming performance analysis, you definitely benefit from having something better than a 4-core/4-thread processor.

Also worth noting is that subsequent runs didn't seem to get much faster. The limiting factor here is the CPU speed, not the storage (or at least, not primarily the storage).

Thoughts on Anthem load times

Given the excessive amount of loading screens, trimming down how long you see each one is a great quality of life improvement for Anthem. The initial patch has shaved off about 20 seconds for launching a mission on an SSD or HDD from my testing. But you know what would be better? Get rid of some of the screens.

Given how long it takes to launch into the free play mode, when you die (which is inevitable in games like this), I'm not sure why a full reload has to happen for you to spawn back at your last 'base' location. I also don't know why there's a "Press [Space] to resume" message at the start of the game, since most of the time you don't have any other choice. Maybe just show that screen if the system detects a mission in progress, and allow you to rejoin, or otherwise drop you straight into Fort Tarsis.

It's little things like this that make me shake my head. And the good news is that most of them can be addressed with future patches. Maybe even the stale environment of Fort Tarsis can be improved, and a fast travel system could let us skip all the walking around, but let's not be too optimistic. For better or worse, this is the Anthem that launches this week.

Seagate just laid the HAMR (heat-assisted magnetic recording) down in the storage space by unveiling the world's first formatted and fully functioning 16-terabyte hard drive, the highest-capacity HDD ever produced.

Built for the enterprise market, the new 16TB model conforms to the standard 3.5-inch HDD form factor and, in theory, should work just fine in any modern desktop. It's part of the company's Exos family and will presumably ship with the same SATA 6Gbps and 12Gbps SAS interface options that other Exos drives do.

While not intended for the consumer market, it's only a matter of time before Seagate (and others) bring 16TB to home users. After all, Seagate already offers a 14TB model as part of its Barracuda Pro line for consumers.

The new 16TB model isn't just more capacious, though, it uses a different type of recording technology—HAMR instead of PMR (perpendicular magnetic recording). Here's a short video that breaks it down in plain English:

Seagate views HAMR technology as being key to enabling increasingly higher capacity HDDs. The company says it's on track to exceed 20TB in 2020, and could even reach 100TB within the next 5-7 years.

In an blog post from last year, Seagate defended the need for bigger HDDs, citing a recent IDC report predicting worldwide data creation will grow to 163 zettabytes by 2025. That's a tenfold increase in the amount of data that was produced in 2017.

As for the 16TB HDD that Seagate just announced, to put that kind of storage space into perspective, it could hold over 100 installations of Final Fantasy XV with the optional 4K high-resolution pack.

If you need an awful lot of external storage, Seagate's 4TB 'Game Drive for Xbox One' is a great option right now. Despite the name, it actually works just fine with PCs, and right now you can get it for $95—a $65 discount from the original price, and $5 lower than any other 4TB external drive on Newegg.

The description is a bit vague on details, but one customer review reveals the drive is 5400rpm with a large 128MB cache—making writes nearly as fast as a 7200rpm drive. It's formatted as NTFS out of the box, but if you need to use it with Macs and other non-Windows PCs, you can just reformat it as exFAT.

The drive is also blindingly green, as you've probably noticed by now. This is definitely something the Grinch (or maybe the Joker?) would use. You can buy it from the link below—make sure to use coupon code EMCEERT57 at checkout to get the full discount.

Some online stores give us a small cut if you buy something through one of our links. Read our affiliate policy for more info. 

It’s tempting to think that hard drives have become a commoditised item, where only speed and capacity matter, but this is not so. One of the most important considerations when choosing a hard drive is the workload it faces – because different drives are optimised for different uses.

Seagate’s new BarraCuda Pro packs a massive 14 terabyte capacity into its 3.5-inch exterior, outstripping any SSD on the market and making it a fantastic choice for anyone that needs lots of space. In fact, it’s the largest capacity drive on the market, and its high data density and head count combine to make it one of the fastest mechanical drives on the market too. But there’s much more to it than that. The BarraCuda Pro offers better reliability, energy efficiency, burst speed and longevity than any of its rivals. While these facets mean it’s suitable for almost anyone with large storage requirements, it’s designers and creative professionals that should seriously take notice – as this drive is tweaked for creative applications. Let’s go through its key features and discover why.

Plenty of speed

To the uninitiated, there might not be much excitement if you simply regard the 14TB BarraCuda Pro as a traditional 7,200rpm mechanical hard drive. Things change dramatically, however, when you learn that the Barracuda Pro drives make better use of their SATA III connection – and its 6Gbps throughput – than almost any other mechanical drive. That’s because the Barracuda Pro has a whooping 256MB cache, which means frequently-used data can be moved around at the fastest burst speeds.

When it comes to sequential writing, we tested the 14TB BarraCuda Pro using CrystalDiskMark benchmark and found that it could boast incredible 250MB/s sustained transfer speeds. This is significantly-higher than the previous-generation 8TB BarraCuda Pro, which managed an (impressive at the time) 200MB/sec sustained transfer speed. In the PCMark 7 System Storage Test, the 14TB BarraCuda Pro scored 3,000 which is likewise a significant way ahead of the 8TB’s sub-2,800 score.

The upshot is that if you’re regularly working with large multimedia files on a local or directly-attached hard drive, the BarraCuda Pro will save you time and reduce any annoying lag stemming from delays in read/write performance.

In addition to this, Native Command Queuing (NCQ) technology is present, which dynamically scans the data requests being made of the drive, analyses them to establish the most efficient order of retrieval/writing before executing the commands in the quickest possible way. In short, this reduces I/O operational latencies and makes usage much more responsive before any reading or writing even takes place.

NCQ works in conjunction with another of Seagate’s speed-enhancing technologies called ‘Multi-Tiered Cache (MTC)’. This uses a variety of different solid-state memory types to offer speed, reliability and even value enhancements in order to provide the best combination of caching technologies. It’s a little too complex to detail in full here, but if your someone with a more-inquisitive bent, you can read more about it here.

A side benefit of fast and intelligent caching is that this can also reduce mechanical wear, which in turn helps improve drive longevity. Which neatly brings us to our next point.

First-rate reliability

Seagate recognises that data is often far more important than the physical objects that house and surround it. Many physical items can be replaced when damaged, but information is sacrosanct. The good news is that BarraCuda Pro hard drives have many integrated technologies to not only stave off an inevitable death by the longest possible measure, but make restoration of data feasible if the worst-case scenario occurs and a drive stops working.

Indeed, Seagate is confident enough to provide a 5-year warranty for all Barracuda Pro hard drives and this includes 2-years of Seagate’s Rescue Data Recovery Plans, which cover against mechanical failure, accidental damage and even natural disasters! As anyone who’s experienced data loss knows, retrieving it can represent an expensive dark art. Seagate’s service has a 90% success rate and the company promises to get your recovered data back to you within 15 days.

Not that this is likely to occur. Technologies such as a ‘dual-plane’ balance system help keep vibrations to a minimum, while the drive has been designed and tested to work with an astronomical 300 terabyte workload each year. If none of that provides peace of mind, then Seagate’s 40-year industry heritage should help!

Astounding energy efficiency

Whether you regard power consumption as a primary concern of power bills or the environment, the 14TB Barracuda Pro once again has you covered. By drawing only 6.9 watts, it’s one of the lowest power-consuming 3.5-inch units on the market.

Why choose BarraCuda Pro?

Ultimately, the 14TB Barracuda Pro is one of the most all-round attractive drives on the market, and it’ll suit anyone with demanding computing needs. However, the particularly-fast random access performance, sustained transfer speeds, reliability and high capacity mean that creative professionals should especially take a look, whether it’s for an internal drive or an externally-attached unit.

If your use case is different, such as a NAS or surveillance system, Seagate has better-optimised alternatives for you – as those tasks that don’t require such high-performance boosts! If what you want is a large primary drive, robust working drive or a closely-attached drive that offers fast-access, however, then the 14TB Barracuda Pro offers an unbeatable combination of high capacity and solid speeds.

• Check out the entire Barracuda Pro range and find a retailer on Seagate's official site

For primary storage chores, we've ditched the mechanical hard disk drive (HDD) and have moved on to faster solid state drives (SSDs), but don't go writing the HDD's obituary. Companies are still cranking out bigger capacities HDDs, none more capacious than Western Digital's new 15TB Ultrastar DC HC620.

This drive isn't intended for home consumers. Instead, WD has its sights set on cloud and hyperscale datacenters that need the kind of massive storage drives like these provide.

"Enabling the world's densest server and storage systems, incorporating 15TB HDDs allows a fully populated 4U60 HDD enclosure to reach a raw storage capacity of 900TB, which is an additional 60TB per 4U rack in the same footprint compared to those utilizing 14TB HDDs. In an at-scale environment where floor space, $/TB, TB per square foot, or watts per terabyte are critical, this TCO savings can be significant," WD says.

That said, it's not unusual for these things to debut in the enterprise space before trickling into the consumer market. For now, it's only be offered to select customers in the standard 3.5-inch form factor, with both SATA 6Gb/s and SAS 12Gb/s interfaces.

WD may not retain the capacity crown for very long, not if Seagate is able to deliver a 16TB model by the end of the year as it initially planned in the beginning of 2017. This could turn into a game of capacity leapfrog—around this time last year, WD claimed it was in position to deliver a 40TB HDD by 2025 using microwaved-assisted magnetic recording (MAMR).

"Our ground-breaking advancement in MAMR technology will enable Western Digital to address the future of high capacity storage by redefining the density potential of HDDs and introduce a new class of highly reliable, ‘ultra-high capacity’ drives," said Mike Cordano, president and chief operating officer at Western Digital.

The 15TB drive WD just released uses shingled magnetic recording (SMR) technology, which essentially overlaps tracks on one another, sort of like shingles on a roof.

WD said its new 15TB HDD will be more broadly available later this quarter. The company did not announce a price.

Cloud storage provider Backblaze has been updating its storage pods with bigger capacity hard drives, and as more time passes, it's able to provide a more general review of overall reliability. What Black Blaze has seen so far is that 8TB, 10TB, and 12TB HDDs don't fail as often as lower capacity drives.

There are some caveats that go along with that finding, the first of which is the larger capacity drives have not been in use as long as some of the lower capacity models. However, they're no longer brand new, either. Backblaze began inserting 8TB models into its storage pods over a year ago, and has upped the ante with even more capacious models.

Some might also take issue with how Backblaze calculates certain statistics, such as "drive days."

"Each day a drive is listed in a daily snapshot file it counts as one drive day. For example, if there are 35,000 drives listed in a daily snapshot file that equals 35,000 drive days," Backblaze explains.

Quibbles aside, Backblaze is one of the more extensive resources for HDD reliability, because of the number of drives it employs and its willingness to share certain stats with the public. In its latest reliability report, Backblaze notes a quarterly failure rate of between 0.38 percent and 1.29 percent for five different 8-12TB models, and a 0 percent failure rate for one of HGST's 12TB models (HUH721212ALN604). There are only 79 of those drives employed though, compared to more than 25,000 of Seagate's 12TB model (ST12000NM0007) that saw a 1.29 percent failure rate.

The lifetime stats are even more impressive:

"The failure rates of all of the larger drives (8TB, 10TB, and 12TB) are very good: 1.21 percent AFR (Annualized Failure Rate) or less. In particular, the Seagate 10TB drives, which have been in operation for over 1 year now, are performing very nicely with a failure rate of 0.48 percent," Backblaze says.

In addition, the overall failure rate of 1.71 percent is the lowest ever in Backblaze's tenure. The previous low was 1.82 percent, back in the second quarter of this year.

The takeaway from all of this is that larger capacity hard drives continue to look reliable, based on Backblaze's past and present stats. One thing to keep in mind, though, is that if a larger capacity HDD does die, there's the potential to lose a whole lot of data in one fell swoop. If you're using two 4TB drives and one of them gives up the ghost, at least the data on the good drive isn't lost.

Either way, it's a good idea to back up your data no matter how many drives you're using. It's also good practice to have multiple backups, including one that is off site in case of a fire or flood.

Head over to Backblaze to read the full report.

You can never be too careful with your data. For example, let's say you go to the zoo and visit the giraffe exhibit, and decide to pay a few bucks extra to feed them. Everything's going well, until you accidentally drop your external hard drive into the exhibit and watch in horror as your long-necked friend tramples all over it. Well crap, there goes your data. We've all been there, right? Right!? Maybe not, but Adata built an external HDD that puts those kind of worries to rest.

Adata's new HD830 is the company's most rugged external HDD to date. And by rugged, the company means it can withstand up to 3,000 kg (~6,600 pounds) of downward pressure. I was curious what kinds of things weight that much, which led me here. Next thing you know, my mind is swirling with scenarios.

Forget about giraffes, if someone is barreling through the zoo in a 2009 Ford Taurus, no problem—it 'only' weighs around 3,642 pounds. You're screwed if there's a Tyrannosaurus Rex, though, and you drop Adata's external HDD while running for cover.

Okay, these might be a tad far-fetched. To use Adata's own point of reference, the HD830 can withstand the downward pressure of "fifty average-sized people." Good to know in case things go wrong in a flash mob.

Moving on, the HD830 houses up to a 5TB HDD in a sturdy, triple-layer aluminum enclosure. It's IP68 rated to protect from dust and water, and also meets the MIL-STD-810G 516.6 standard to survive falls from up to 1.22 meters.

Of course, it's never a good idea to jostle a mechanical HDD around, even if its housing is sturdy. To that end, there are shock sensors to stop drive activity when needed, to prevent errors and bad sectors.

There are three capacities: 2TB, 4TB, and 5TB. Each one sports a USB 3.1 interface, and is backed by a 3-year warranty. Adata hasn't said when they will be available or how they'll cost.

Solid state drives are great, but hard drives will always win out in terms of GB per dollar. If you need to add a massive amount of storage to your PC (or NAS, or security system, or whatever else), Toshiba's P300 3TB hard drive is just $64.99 right now.

Not only is this currently one of the cheapest 3TB hard drives you can buy, it also has an average 4/5 star rating on Newegg (out of 400 reviews). It's a standard 7,200 RPM drive with a 64MB cache. Toshiba also provides a two-year limited warranty.

You can buy the P300 3TB from Newegg. Make sure to use coupon code EMCPXPR29 at checkout to get the full discount.

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Little by little, cloud backup provider Backblaze has been upgrading its storage pods with larger capacity hard drives, and so far things have been going smoothly. In several previous reliability reports the company published, 8TB, 10TB, and 12TB models have proven durable. More recently, Backblaze added some 14TB HDDs to the mix, and those are off to strong starts as well.

It's still early to make any kind of definitive judgement, but of the 20 Toshiba 14TB (model MG07ACA14TA) it added in the second quarter, not a single one has failed so far. They've only been in service for three weeks though, so the next reliability report will offer a better (albeit still limited) picture.

Even though it's early in the game, it's obviously far better to see these newly deployed drives get up and running without a hitch, versus one or more failures. It's pretty remarkable when you think about all the moving parts—Toshiba's 14TB drives feature nine platters inside.

These are Toshiba's first helium-filled HDDs, introduced at the end of last year. At the time, Toshiba noted it was the only company offering a nine-platter drive with 18 heads, with each platter having around 1.56TB of storage. As far as we know, that's still true. It's also interesting that Toshiba hasn't turned to shingled magnetic recording (SMR) like its competitors have.

"While enterprise server and storage customers realize that shingled magnetic recording technology can improve HDD capacity, the adoption of SMR HDD products into server and storage systems is a transition that will take several years," said John Rydning, Research Vice President for hard disk drives at IDC. "Toshiba’s new helium-sealed enterprise HDD is the world’s first 14TB of storage capacity using conventional rather than shingled magnetic recording technology, giving enterprise customers the highest capacity HDD available in the market today for existing server and storage system architectures."

As to the other higher capacity HDDs in Backblaze's deployment, annualized failure rates range between 0.32 percent (Seagate's 10TB HDD) to 1.18 percent (HGST's 1.18 percent). That's good news, as these drives have been in place longer than the 14TB models.

"The combined AFR for all of the larger drives (8-, 10- and 12 TB) is only 1.02%. Many of these drives were deployed in the last year, so there is some volatility in the data, but we would expect this overall rate to decrease slightly over the next couple of years," Backblaze says.

The drive with the highest annualized failure rate is Western Digital's 3TB WD30EFRX at 4.92 percent, followed by WD's 6TB WD60EFRX at 4.09 percent.

Backblaze's data also indicates there is little different in reliability between enterprise and consumer drives, in terms of failure rate. Enterprise drives failed slightly less often, but not much—the lifetime AFR for its 8TB enterprise drive stands at 0.97 percent, versus 1.03 percent for 8TB consumer drives.

Western Digital, a major player in the storage market, is erasing one of its three mechanical hard drive factories from existence, The Register reports.

The 1 million square-foot factory is located in Petaling Jaya, near the Malaysian capital Kuala Lumpur. It's the second-largest of WD's three HDD factories—the company also operates a 1.7 million square-foot plant and a 730,000 square-foot facility, both in Thailand.

"The data technology industry is undergoing substantial change. This market transformation is driving increased adoption of SSDs and NAND flash in traditional HDD applications. The change has contributed to growth in SSD/NAND flash and declining long-term demand for client HDDs," WD told The Register.

We've seen SSD pricing come down considerably over the past year or so. While HDDs still offer far more storage space per dollar, SSDs are competitive enough that clients big and small can afford to make the transition to the faster storage option. Larger operations also stand to benefit from the reduced power consumption.

This is not the first time that WD has decommissioned an HDD factory. Just two years ago, it closed down a plant that was operated by HGST, a wholly-owned subsidiary that it acquired in 2012.

Meanwhile, WD says it's in the final stages of commissioning its second SSD facility in Penang, and expects it to start producing SSDs in the coming months.

There are performance upgrades and then there are performance upgrades that actually yield visible performance. There have been times when I've encountered an upgrade that was so substantial, I had to do double-takes.

Take for example the day I upgraded from my 486 DX2 66MHz to a Pentium 100MHz. At that time, it seemed as though a jump in roughly 33MHz wasn't going to do much. The 486 DX2 was a solid CPU and even had an integrated math coprocessor for the extra punch in floating point calculations. But once that Pentium system turned on, man was I blown away. The jump in performance was so substantial, I found myself opening Microsoft Word and Excel just to see how instant they appeared. My own eyeballs were the benchmarks during those days.

These days, I'm finding it more and more difficult to actually see performance improvements with my eyes—at least on a system wide scale. Sure, upgrading to a new GPU can give you that visceral experience, but not on a overall system basis. CPUs are so fast now and full of untapped potential. Heck, I even think GPUs are full of untapped potential. If every game company had their own Carmack, we'd still be running on 4 year old CPUs and GPUs.

If you have a system that's a few years old, there's still yet lots of years left in it without spending too much money. All you have to do is make sure the slowest component in the chain is as fast as it can be: your storage. If you're still running your OS off a spinning disk drive, it's time to upgrade.

There are no words to describe the monumental performance that moving from a harddrive to an SSD can yield. While there are many flavors of solid state drives to choose from, even the slowest ones are much faster than the the fastest harddrives.

The slowest SATA-based SSDs these days can do 550MB/sec read and writes, and they're all essentially really good now at random access. In contrast, a fast harddrive will barely even crack 250MB/sec in any direction.

But numbers aren't everything. You can run benchmarks all day on your last-gen Core i7 CPU against the latest Core i7-8700K CPU and not notice anything tangible on your day to day use. Replace your clunky spinner with a SSD though, and you'll witness a boost in total system performance that no other upgrade will match.

As they say, a chain is only as strong as its weakest link, and a PC's storage subsystem is the slowest part of the system. Besides, SSDs are priced reasonably enough now that not having one is inexcusable.

What if you're already using SSDs? Then it depends. If you're running on SATA SSDs, the next big upgrade for you would be to switch over to NVMe drives. Going from SATA SSD drives to NVMe SSD drives yields substantial performance, one that you'll see too, but it won't be as dramatic. Also, switching to NVMe drives might require you to gut your system board for a new one, which might then require you to upgrade your CPU. 

The first time I witnessed huge leaps in performance was in 1994—the year the Pentium 100 came out. That was ages ago. Moving to SSD drives was the second time in my life that I launched Word just for kicks.

If you're looking for the best SSD for you, see our guide to The best SSD for gaming.

You're not going to find a 2TB solid state drive for $80, not unless you stumble across a shady deal that is most likely too good to be true. Likewise, you're not going to find an $80 hard drive that offers the speed of an SSD. However, Seagate's 2TB FireCuda Gaming SSHD does attempt to offer the best of both worlds, and it's on sale at Amazon today for $79.99.

This drive typically sells for around $95 and up. Case in point, Newegg has it on sale for $94.99, down from its list price of $129.99.

If you're not familiar with SSHDs, the trick with these storage devices is they supplement the mechanical storage with a chunk of NAND flash memory. Frequently used applications get loaded into the NAND portion for faster access, and in some cases, it can feel like using an SSD.

There's a little more to it than that. Seagate actually uses what it calls multi-tier caching (MTC) technology on the FireCuda, which consists of DRAM and media caching schemes in addition to NAND flash memory.

An outright SSD is still the faster option, but if you're wanting to save a few bucks, this is a decent alternative. You can find it on sale here.

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Attention Ebay shoppers, you can save up to $100 on eligible items today, among which is AMD's brand spanking new Ryzen 7 2700X processor. With the discount applied, you can bring one home for as little as $280.49.

That's the price after discount when purchasing the processor through Newegg's Ebay account, where it's listed for $330. All you have to do is apply coupon code PMAY4TH at checkout and watch the price plummet.

The coupon code is part of Ebay's 'May the 4th' sale. It's valid today only on items purchased and paid for by 4:00 PM Pacific Time.

"Discount applies to the purchase price (excluding shipping, handling, and taxes) of eligible items on eBay.com, cafr.ebay.ca and ebay.ca, and will be capped at a maximum value of $100. Eligible items exclude items from the Coins & Paper Money, Gift Cards & Coupons, and Real Estate categories," Ebay states in its fine print.

It's a one-time use coupon, though you can load up multiple eligible items into a single order. Here are a few listings where might considering using it:

• AMD Ryzen 7 2700X (Newegg)—$280.49, down from $330
• Intel Core i5-8400 (Antonline)—$161.49, down from $190
• Corsair K95 RGB Platinum Keyboard (Newegg)—$163.77, down from $192.67
• WD Easystore 8TB External USB HDD (Best Buy)—$144.49, down from $170
• Oculus Rift VR Headset (Best Buy)—$339.15, down from $399

If none of those are what you're looking for, just head to Ebay and search for what you need, or want. The coupon works across a wide variety of items.

Some online stores give us a small cut if you buy something through one of our links. Read our affiliate policy for more info.

You know that feeling you get when a hard drive fails, taking your data down with it? The resulting gut punch is directly proportional to how many files you end up losing, and the bigger the drive, the greater potential for devastation. The good news is, larger capacity drives don't appear to be any less reliable than smaller HDDs, even though there are typically more platters and moving parts inside.

That's according to the latest HDD reliability report from Backblaze, a cloud backup firm that frequently publishes detailed stats on its arsenal of drives. The latest report reflects results for the first quarter of 2018. Here's a look:

The above chart doesn't include drives that Backblaze used for testing purposes or ones that were employed for less than 45 days. That left the company with a little over 98,000 drives in all, ranging in size from 3TB all the way up to 12TB.

As we've seen in Backblaze's previous reports, the larger capacity models are able to hold their own, in terms of reliability. For example, Seagate's 12TB drive had an annualized failure rate of less than 1 percent, while none of the 10TB drives have failed yet.

The results aren't changed much when looking slightly longer term, though Backblaze hasn't been using higher capacity HDDs for a super long time.

"The failure rates of all of the larger drives (8TB, 10TB, and 12TB) are very good, 1.2 percent AFR (Annualized Failure Rate) or less. Many of these drives were deployed in the last year, so there is some volatility in the data, but you can use the Confidence Interval to get a sense of the failure percentage range," Backblaze said.

It's still early, but so far things continue to look good for higher capacity drives. That's not to say you should stuff all of your important data on a single drive and call it a day. Whether using a larger capacity drive or several smaller ones, having backups is still a good practice, and multiple backups for the really important data.