Please AT, can we have a detailed review of today's HDDs?

[mikeymikec]

A review across the board of 3.5" HDDs going from 2TB to the max would be really useful to me. I've just spent at least half an hour trying to figure out which drives are PMR or SMR, and whether I should even vaguely consider a ~5000 RPM drive for my use rather than the usual 7200RPM.

There seem to be an awful lot of "these are the drives we recommend this year" pages on the Internet that lack benchmark results and technical specifics.

I realise that HDDs aren't as interesting as SSDs, but plenty of people still want to have an HDD alongside a boot-SSD.

 

[fzabkar]

Good luck trying to get any information out of the HDD manufacturers:

WD Red 6tb WD60EFAX SMR???:
https://forum.hddguru.com/viewtopic.php?t=38673

SMR or PMR?
https://community.wd.com/t/smr-or-pmr/238623

Also be aware that some of WD's "5400 RPM class" drives actually spin at 7200 RPM.

A new twist to IntelliPower?
https://forum.hddguru.com/viewtopic.php?p=272530

 

[sheh]

Hear, hear.

 

[Billy Tallis]

For anyone wanting to geek out over esoteric details of hard drives, this popped up on /r/hardware recently: http://blog.stuffedcow.net/2019/09/hard-disk-geometry-microbenchmarking/

Disappointingly few modern drives included, but the source code for the tests is provided (but not for the plotting). I'm tempted to fire it up on some of the hard drives I have on hand.

 

[Soulkeeper]

storagereview.com is good for this kind of stuff, they review/benchmark new drives as they come out.

 

[sheh]

esoteric details of hard drives

Cool stuff, thanks.