Best Consumer Hard Drives: November 2020

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. Since the release of the last HDD guide (coinciding with Seagate’s launch of the Ironwolf Pro and Exos 18TB drives, and Western Digital’s introduction of the 16TB and 18TB WD Red Pro models), we have seen the availability of the high-capacity drives improving. The Exos series, which used to present compelling price points, no longer offers that at the 18TB capacity point, though lower capacities continue to provide good value for money.Read MoreAnandTech