Best Consumer Hard Drives: Q3 2019

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Best Consumer Hard Drives: Q3 2019

Data storage requirements have kept increasing over the last several years. While SSDs have taken over the role of the primary drive in most computing systems, hard drives continue to be the storage media of choice in areas dealing with large amount of relatively cold data. Hard drives are also suitable for workloads that are largely sequential and not performance sensitive. The $/GB metric for SSDs (particularly with QLC in the picture) is showing a downward trend, but it is still not low enough to match HDDs in that market segment.

From a gaming perspective, install sizes of 100s of GBs are not uncommon for modern games. Long-term backup storage and high-capacity NAS units for consumer use are also ideal use-cases for hard drives. This guide will help readers choose the appropriate hard drive based on their workload, while also keeping the price factor in mind.

There are three active vendors in the consumer hard drive space - Seagate, Toshiba, and Western Digital. While Seagate offers hard drives targeting consumer workloads at their leading capacity points, Western Digital and Toshiba reserve the leading edge for enterprise and datacenter drives. The previous version of our purchase guide from November 2018 only dealt with Seagate and WD drives. Since then, we have seen a number of announcements in the consumer space from both Seagate and Toshiba. These have given us a few additional HDD models to consider in our Q3 2019 guide.

Consumers looking to purchase hard-drives need to have a rough idea of the use-cases they are going to subject the drives to. Based on that, a specific set of metrics needs to be considered. We first take a look at the different metrics that matter, and how various hard drives stack up against each other. Since many hard drive families from different vendors can satisfy the requirements, it may all come down to the pricing. We will present a pricing matrix for various hard drive families against the available capacities.

The following hard drive families will be considered in our guide today. Note that this list does not include surveillance-focused drives such as the WD Purple or Seagate SkyHawk. We will also consider some of the enterprise / datacenter SATA drives that are available for purchase from e-tailers.

Seagate BarraCuda Pro
Seagate IronWolf NAS
Seagate IronWolf Pro NAS
Seagate Exos Enterprise
Toshiba N300
Toshiba X300
Western Digital Ultrastar DC
Western Digital Red
Western Digital Red Pro

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