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Choosing an Internal HDD

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Xatrius

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Apr 15, 2025
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Hello everyone.
I'm looking for an HDD to use in my (old) gaming PC.
I would use this hard drive mainly for games (although I would put the more speed-demanding games like Starfield and Indiana Jones on my 1TB SSD).
In particular, the characteristics it should have are a large capacity (6 or 8 TB so this excludes SSDs), be reliable over time (in addition to games, i will put there my personal documents, such as my photos) and obviously good performance. But more than anything else, it should be cheap/not too expensive.
Any ideas on what I could choose?
 
Xatrius said:
Hello everyone.
I'm looking for an HDD to use in my (old) gaming PC.
I would use this hard drive mainly for games (although I would put the more speed-demanding games like Starfield and Indiana Jones on my 1TB SSD).
Click to expand...

This link to a previous discussion including how well IJ runs may be of interest. The best is going to be WD Gold with understanding it never parks the heads, i.e. loud at idle and much louder than consumer drives while active.

www.techpowerup.com

WD Black or Gold for Gaming (10TB)

After five years it's time to replace my main gaming hdd, the WD4005FZBX edition. But it's not easy to find the Black model with 512 MB cache and 10 TBs of capacity, here in Greece and when I finding it, costs a lot. So it's ok to go with WD103KRYZ Gold Enterprise? It's faster than the...
www.techpowerup.com www.techpowerup.com

Gold are not cheap. Depending on your location a used one may still be viable. 8TB is on the low end of Enterprise drive sizes and $/TB at retail is much higher than 20TB. Red Pro are also noisy but less Enterprise'y.
 
I buy my HDDs at a local mom-and-pop computer store. I just set a budget and consider the models that are within that price window. I don't really have a favorite manufacturer, they have all produced good models and also have suffered through some reliability issues.

I do favor larger capacities though, they always end up filling up, it's just a matter of when.

That said, usually the top capacity drives aren't the best in the storage value metric (gigabyte-per-dollar). I'll usually go one size below where there is better overall value due to better manufacturing yields and cost reductions. I don't require top disk performance (I use them mostly for archiving) so I don't really look at specs (like buffer size or revolutions per minute) or worry about acoustics (since they usually are turned off).

However I will glance at the warranty period, that's probably as good of a feature as any other to judge HDDs by.
 
They are pricier and noisy, but I would absolutely take a look at enterprise HDDs, like WD Ultrastar or Gold.
 
For your personal documents/photos don't trust any single drive. With that said just look at capacity, read speed and price. Details like SMR vs CMR aren't going to affect your use case. So really just look at the 3 cheapest ones with the capacity you need and pick whichever has the highest RPM.
 
No matter what: STAY AWAY FROM SMR.
 
I would not recommend a HDD for games. Some modern titles are especially picky and would take forever to load each individual asset from a spinning drive.

I'd rather look for an SSD, even a SATA one, even if I had to drop down my storage capacity a bit to fit the budget.
 
anonuser57 said:
For your personal documents/photos don't trust any single drive.
Click to expand...
So in other words:

Make a back-up of your main photos/documents drive, then make a back-up of that back-up, and yet another one (or 2-3) for offsite storage (preferably), hahahaha :D
 
AusWolf said:
I would not recommend a HDD for games. Some modern titles are especially picky and would take forever to load each individual asset from a spinning drive.

I'd rather look for an SSD, even a SATA one, even if I had to drop down my storage capacity a bit to fit the budget.
Click to expand...

OP has a 1TB SSD for those games.
 
anonuser57 said:
Details like SMR vs CMR aren't going to affect your use case.
Click to expand...
If games end writing to the drive during runtime they will be affected by SMR like any other random-write scenario.
If possible, why not avoid it. In this case CMR are not much more expensive, so I think that's the better idea.
 
Anyone looking at bulk storage should consider a NAS.

But if you are fine with just a hard drive and of the smaller 8TB sizes (modern HDDs are 20TB or 30TB), then the Toshiba x300 series is excellent.

CMR, Toshiba inherited the Hitachi facilities and Toshiba x300 consistently get very high reliability from Backblaze tests.

www.backblaze.com

Backblaze Drive Stats for 2024

The 2024 Year End Drive Stats Report is here. See the the latest annualized failure rates and data insights for the Backblaze drive fleet.
www.backblaze.com www.backblaze.com
 
avoid SMR like the plague.
SMR is basically for cold storage.
just get a WD gold with the most capacity and cache as you can find. if you want speed out of it, look into primocache and using an ssd as cache. i can personally vouch for the combination of traditional hdd with ssd cache, i use a 1 tb samsung nvme drive as cache, best of both worlds.
 
I've always been a fan of Seagate drives. Been through a lot through the years and never had a single failure. I have 4 of them in my server in RAID 10, they're all >7 years old and still working perfectly. The server is on 24/7 and the drives work all the time (turn off disk after = 0 :laugh: )

Since you're planning on putting sensitive files on the drive, using at least RAID 1 with 2 drives would be a smart move(or make a backup task to duplicate those files every once in a while to a different drive - Veeam Backup is great for that and it's free. I don't need so much space but if I were you, I'd go for something like this:
https://amzn.eu/d/9mtQpEo (it's CMR)
 
Last edited:
GerKNG said:
No matter what: STAY AWAY FROM SMR.
Click to expand...
So i need to avoid seagate barracuda under 10 TB?

And what about WD Blue WD60EZAX (6 TB)? 8 Tb version is too expensive.

I also have a 5 TB toshiba x300, perfect hdd, which I would buy again immediately if it cost less and partly unobtainable, at least in Italy
 
@Xatrius

Moral of the story here is lower end drives are unpredictable. Could last 10 lifetimes or buy 10 consecutive drives that fail in the first week.
 
Xatrius said:
So i need to avoid seagate barracuda under 10 TB?

And what about WD Blue WD60EZAX (6 TB)? 8 Tb version is too expensive.

I also have a 5 TB toshiba x300, perfect hdd, which I would buy again immediately if it cost less and partly unobtainable, at least in Italy
Click to expand...
The WD is SMR as well. Check my previous post. Should be a good drive for you, but it's quite costly (170 € for 10 TB).
 
Thimblewad said:
The WD is SMR as well. Check my previous post. Should be a good drive for you, but it's quite costly (170 € for 10 TB).
Click to expand...
Sorry, I hadn't seen the link. So you think exos drive are good for desktop use, like gaming or document storage?
The drive you link, in italy is more costly that in german (thx to our politicians); in any case, the wd blue WD60ezax are cmr, 256 and 5400rpm. But i don't know how are his performance.
 
Something to consider if you hoard games due to low availability/bandwidth/whatever: Have some understanding of the size of your game library.
My Steam alone is 3TB over dedicated iSCSI and has a growth rate of ~40GB/mon.
Without a schedule, updates eat bandwidth at record speed. If you're already here, good luck.
1745568642520.png

Epic isn't such a sour case but I also neglect installing and updating from it lately. Any other launcher is pretty much on its own.
So looking at this, I would have to chunk out 3.5TB for Steam if I want it to last the rest of the year or 4TB to make it through next year.
1745568990467.png

Your plan most likely doesn't involve remote storage so you're not as likely to plan out what you need let alone think about it this much.
ALL of my storage positions have to be carried out well in advance just to make this work.
If your HDD plan is a local disk, you only need to consider initial library size and growth rate.
In case of an emergency you CAN get all of that data back but it's a burden on bandwidth.
You don't want to mix sensitive data on a volume like that unless you're really sure about it.
Good luck.
 
Xatrius said:
Sorry, I hadn't seen the link. So you think exos drive are good for desktop use, like gaming or document storage?
The drive you link, in italy is more costly that in german (thx to our politicians); in any case, the wd blue WD60ezax are cmr, 256 and 5400rpm. But i don't know how are his performance.
Click to expand...
When it comes to Amazon, I order both from IT and DE, whichever is cheaper. It will only take a few more days to arrive from DE.
Can't say anything about the speed of the WD drive, but do know that the Seagate is 7200 vs WDs 5400 rpm and that makes a difference too!
 
I'd get WD or Toshiba.
 
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