Seagate BarraCuda, 8TB, Internal Hard Drive, 3.5 Inch, SATA, 6GB/s,, 5,400 RPM, 256MB Cache, for Computer Desktop PC, FFP (ST8000DMZ04)

Product Information

We suspect the next generation of My Book will have this feature and offer USB 3.2 Gen 2 connectivity, but this model works for the broadest possible selection of customers right now, critically. John (He/Him) is the Components Editor here at TechRadar and he is also a programmer, gamer, activist, and Brooklyn College alum currently living in Brooklyn, NY. The BarraCuda Pro strikes a nice balance across many metrics, but it is rated only for 300K load / unload cycles. It also doesn't have the RV sensors present in the rest of the drives (other than the Toshiba X300 / X300 Pro). As we’ve already mentioned the review drive is sold as 8TB, and without dismantling it, we’ve assumed that the drive inside is a WD RED mechanism of the same capacity.

This mechanism is meant for NAS box use and is therefore designed to deliver reliable long-term performance, low power consumption and minimal heat generation. What is wasn’t built to offer was a high performance, but then compared with SSDs physical drives are relative snails to their hare-like solid-state counterparts.Price-wise, you’ll typically find that hard drives are less expensive than SSDs and offer quite a bit more storage capacity for a lower price. However, SSDs tend to be a lot faster than even the best hard drives because they don’t have to rely on moving parts like HDDs. The best SSDs can function up to 10 times faster than traditional hard drives. After filtering out models that don't apply to your use-case (as an example, for usage in a 4-bay NAS enclosure, one could rule out the Toshiba X300 straight away), we can then take a look at how the specifications of various drive families compare. Hard Drive Families - Metrics of Interest

Western Digital is about as established an HDD brand as it gets, and even today, it is putting out incredibly solid hard drives for long term storage at great prices. Nowhere is this more the case than with its line of WD Blue hard drives. Having a single drive storing potentially important data is always something of a gamble since physical mechanisms can, and do, go wrong. Therefore, we wouldn’t recommend putting any files on the My Book that you don’t store elsewhere, in case of failure.One of the aspects not mentioned in the above table is that the WD Red SMR drive is in the 5400 RPM class, while the other drives (including the Red Plus) are all 7200 RPM. Despite similar spindle speeds, the Red Plus firmware is optimized for a low noise profile across most capacity points. It might not win out on benchmarks, but possesses qualities that are important for some consumer use-cases. Another aspect to be kept in mind is that the WD Red line is now exclusively SMR-based, with the CMR drives moving to the WD Red Plus line. Unless the consumer is technically savvy enough to understand the pitfalls of SMR and its applicability to the desired use-case, the SMR-based WD Red line is best avoided. Hence, we do not include the WD Red lineup in our recommendatios. Pricing Matrix and Concluding Remarks

SSDs are incredibly popular, and it’s not hard to see why. But, if you need a lot of fast storage, and you don’t have a vault of cash, hybrid hard drives are a great option, especially for gaming. Synology has introduced 8, 12, and 16TB enterprise hard drives (rebranded Toshiba Enterprise HDDs with custom firmware), but they are meant specifically for Synology NAS units (no warranties if used in other systems) and are not part of this buyer's guide. Toshiba's MG09 18TB HDDs based on FC-MAMR are quite new in the market, and will be added in a future update to this buyer's guide There are a few differences between a hard drive and an SSD, but it’s important to first note that they pretty much have the same job, they just function differently.

If the computer this is attached only has conventional hard drives, then this won’t be an issue. But, compared to SATA and NVMe SSDs the My Book is slow. And, having an SSD in your system won’t improve the performance of this unit. It’s a little unfortunate that the Seagate IronWolf NAS drives come at a premium, but they aren’t priced much more expensively than a standard hard drive at their capacity. However, their native NAS optimization makes that premium totally worth it. It might not be anything groundbreaking, but if you need to dump 8TB, or more, of data from your computer and have it still accessible, the Western Digital My Book does this job admirably. We ran several synthetic tests on the My Book 8TB connected to a USB 3.0 port (USB 3.2 Gen 1), and they all pointed towards a plateau at around 190MB/s for reading and 180MB/s for writes.

Those that work at home, like many people these days, want files they’ve modified to be secured the moment that they’ve closed them, not an hour later. As that increases the probability that data won’t be secured before something unfortunate happens. So how do you know which hard drive is best for you? There are a lot of things to consider, so it's not as simple as just buying the "best" hard drive. Which hard drive is best? There’s a third option in the SSD vs HDD conversation as well - hybrid drives (SSHDs) offer the speed of an SSD and the capacity of a traditional HDD in a single drive. An option like this would be great if you don’t have space for multiple hard drives and want the best of both worlds. Is HDD or SSD better? What’s great about the My Book is that it is remarkably easy to configure and use, being the definition of a plug-in-and-go scenario. Traditional hard drives have a circular disk (platter) that stores your data - as the disk spins, the read-write arm reads data on the disc or writes data to it as it spins. Solid state drives (SSDs) have no moving parts, instead using NAND (Negative-AND) flash memory - the more memory chips an SSD has, the more storage capacity.The price differential is so small that the Elements drive might only be for those who might be buying in bulk, but there are cheaper options available elsewhere. That’s about a half of what you might expect from a SATA SSD externally connected via USB 3.0, and about a fifth of the best NVMe SSD external drives connected via USB 3.2 Gen 2 ports. There are two important issues here that need to be confronted, in our opinion, those of redundancy and securing live data.