Protip: SSDs will help your PC boot up and run programs faster. If your computer doesnt have an SSD, you can always add one or two later.

Ya and keep a spinning drive for important data because unless you run over it with a car store it in -50 F or degauss it it is recoverable
An SSD is not !

@AvatarOfKaine SSDs became quite durable.... Unless you take the cheapest shit available.

HDDs aren't as reliable as they were before - the new technologies like HAMR / EAMR / MAMR took a long time...

And technologies like shingled magnetic recording to "fill the gap" left more than a bad taste in many people...

I like HDDs for large storage - but you really need to be very careful when buying large quantities, as SMR drives are not always labeled and finding it out after having them built in is mostly an unwelcomed surprise.

@IntrusionCM something i didn't know. what kind of capacity usually is where smr's start is the question ? does the 500 gb or 1 tb drive likely fall into that ?

what I was commenting on is if if the motor burns out or some sectors go bad, they can usually extract the disk from inside the hdd and rig something to recover it supposedly.

when the flash inside an ssd goes bad, it just is dead dead.

@IntrusionCM do you consider WD ssd's crap ?

@AvatarOfKaine

It is extremely hard to tell nowadays.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/...

You have to have a good seller in my opinion and do your research well.

1 TB HDD isn't something common nowadays.... We have 2 TB per platter in the newest models. Resulting into disk space of 22 - 26 TB.

You might find a lot of lower capacity drives - which is where the research and good seller starts...

E.g. we had to completely take out 5 SAN servers with 10 HDDs per server, so 50 HDDs per total as we were surprised by SMR and a severe hit in performance on all raids.

After going back and forth with the seller, it turned out that nearly all hard drive companies didn't clearly label their SMR drives.

When you look up in Google "SMR drives relabeled" you find that nearly all did it.

We had luck - our seller went above and beyond, exchanged the drives and even tested them to make sure we didn't get another surprise...

SMR is death for incremental backups - which is exactly what we needed the drives for. :(

Due to that experience I'm pretty much paranoid when it comes to the topic...

Same btw for SSDs as seen above - unless you're sure that the hardware manufacturer doesn't relabel and the seller does check it's inventories and sells the right stuff, it's really a gamble.

Doesn't matter for home use, as a simple SSD is sufficient - should be in my opinion in mid range, don't buy cheap stuff. Check what controller is used, check if thermal problem / firmware problems are known and you made your homework.

@IntrusionCM sounds like you're describing server drives.

@AvatarOfKaine server drives aren't much different from consumer drives.

Just a higher quality standard.

Otherwise pretty much the same.

@IntrusionCM well thats what I mean. I've never seen a 22 TB consumer drive.

Most like 5-8 TB I believe I've seen. Commonly whats on the shelves everywhere during this 'time period' is 1 - 4 TB drives.

@AvatarOfKaine WD Blue goes up to 8 TB.

Then starts purple / red.

Purple for surveillance, Red for NAS. Red goes up to 20 TB.

Other vendors have similar marketing.

While NAS is strictly speaking not consumer, I know many gamers / tinkerers / devs / ... who buy these.

After all, it's cheapest storage you get if you want to store large quantities.

@IntrusionCM oh I could see video files and photos being placed on these. I just wonder if consumer grade laptops would recognize the address range on them or size.

@AvatarOfKaine GPT is nothing new.

No problems there unless you run earlier than Windows XP.

@IntrusionCM well thats the partition table type, I meant the os or bios being able to recognize a device that size, I imagine GPT was made quite extensible though also learning from the problems of the 1990s.

@IntrusionCM notably i'm not sure what the limits are.

i don't know if sata is rigged to address in a specific way or not, i would imagine it would be fairly analog since that would be faster circuitry wise.

sorry if i said something reflecting my ignorance of hardware addressing where disks are concerned :(

but like it sort of made sense to me since 32 bit addressing and all had limitations which had a physical cause...

but obviously the bios or firmware would correspond to the standard unless server's with disks that large had special interfaces...

which i didn''t check...

sigh

wanna call me stupid and crazy ?

or repetitive in my logic fault ?

@IntrusionCM *weeps at the neglect*

Bonus points if your SSD technically counts as a tape drive.

(see pic)

@AvatarOfKaine

As long as the device can be initialized, BIOS / UEFI shouldn't matter.

GPT was a requirement, plus a filesystem that supports partition sizes > 4 TiB

NTFS is able to handle devices with no problem.

My neglect stems from sleeping btw ;)

@IntrusionCM humpth a likely story ! Lol

Instructions unclear. Got disk stuck in CPU fan.