KitGuru KitGuru.net – Tech News | Hardware News | Hardware Reviews | IOS | Mobile | Gaming | Graphics Cards
Psst Mister, fancy buying a 5TB or 6TB hard drive? Going cheap? Well, cheapish anyway. In a perfect world it would be simple to sort out storage for your new PC or laptop by installing a 4TB Samsung 890 SSD at a cost of £99, and once they develop such a drive I shall be sure to buy one myself.
Right now any self-respecting tech enthusiast is booting off a relatively expensive SSD with a hefty hard drive for their movies and other files. Hard drives may sound like yesterday's technology but you can buy a colossal amount of storage for very little money. For example a 3TB Seagate Barracuda 7,200rpm desktop drive currently costs £75 inc VAT which is cheap enough to make a MacBook Air owner spit tacks.
There are times it seems the industry has rationed storage just to make our lives difficult and expensive. Laptop users are usually limited to a single drive bay while thin and light laptop owners are hampered by fixed flash storage.
These days we all own a smartphone and also wish we had an SD card slot but are instead limited to 16GB or 32GB of flash memory. Did you know you can buy a 64GB Class 10 SanDisk MicroSD card for £30?
The IT industry – that's Amazon, Apple, Dropbox, Google, HP, Microsoft, Mozy and a thousand other companies – are keen to charge you for cloud storage. There's no denying the Cloud is convenient, provided you have superb Wi-Fi or a brilliant mobile data tariff, but it is expensive. For example Dropbox will charge you £399 a year for 500GB of storage.
That's a lot of money to store a few Blu-ray rips. In fact it makes better sense to store your files on your own NAS where they are safe from the prying eyes of Amazon, Google and the NSA, which means you're going to need a hefty hard drive or two. Or three or four.
Up to the end of 2013 the largest drive you could economically buy was 4TB in size and 3TB rapidly established itself as the best value and most popular capacity.
We know that 8TB development drives are in circulation but right now the largest drives on the market are 5TB and 6TB in capacity.
We have three drives lined up here; the 6TB Seagate Enterprise v4 costs £430, the 5TB Toshiba Nearline Enterprise costs £270 and the 6TB Western Digital Red £210 – so that is a total of 17TB of storage for £900.
| System | Seagate Enterprise v4 6TB | Toshiba Nearline Enterprise 5TB |
Western Digital Red 6TB |
| Model Code | ST6000NM0024 | MC04ACA500E | WD60EFRX |
| Capacity | 6TB | 5TB | 6TB |
| Firmware | SN02 | FP1A | NASware 3.0 |
| Price | £420 | £270 | £210 |
| Type Of Drive | 3.5 inch SATA | 3.5 inch SATA | 3.5 inch SATA |
| Formatting | 512E | 512E | 512E |
| Sustained data transfer speed | 216MB/sec | 205MB/sec | 175MB/sec |
| Formatted Capacity | 5.59TB | 4.66TB | 5.59TB |
| Cost Per GB | 7.5p | 5.8p | 3.8p |
| Rotational speed | 7,200 rpm | 7,200 rpm | Intellipower – 5,700 rpm |
| Drive configuration | six platters/twelve heads | Five platters/ten heads | Five platters/ten heads |
| Platter density | 1TB | 1TB | 1.2TB |
| Cache | 128MB | 128MB | 64MB |
| Interface | Sata 6Gbps | Sata 6Gbps | Sata 6Gbps |
| Other capacities | 2TB, 4TB, 5TB | 2TB, 3TB, 4TB | 1TB, 2TB, 3TB, 4TB, 5TB |
| Utilities | Seatools 1.2 Instant Secure Erase |
||
| Warranty | Five Years | Five Years | Three Years |
i have 3 tbs if i need more i shall get an hdd barracuda i would not buy anyother harddrive if i can help it
I have a chepo 1TB samsung that came with my pre.built PC, and later got a 1TB WD blue. So far I dont need more, but if I do, I might as well buy a new PC (current I3 3220 NVidia GT 240, 4gb RAM) get an SSD, and free that ~300MB space from windows.
Cloud storage isn’t as expensive as you make it out to be.
$119.88 (~£72) will get you 1TB on Google Drive. That’s £327 less than Dropbox per year for double the space!!!
There’s also Google Drive for Work which gives you an *unlimited* amount of space for $10/user/month (so roughly £361.80 per year because there is a minimum of five users to get unlimited space). That’s still cheaper than Dropbox and you could store all of your Blu-rays in the cloud. 🙂
That said, a 6TB HDD (or two) would still be cheaper when the cost is spread over 3-5 years.