Decades ago we had the same conversations as we moved from magnetic tape to magnetic disks. Tape still remained relevant for a long time after magnetic disks became mainstream. Tape was (and is still) used for cold storage backup purposes. Same today as we move from magnetic disks to solid state. Magnetic disks will be increasingly used for cold storage purposes due to magnetic being more cost effective for large data storage.

Thanks Brian. I tend to agree that HDD's are still relevant today. Mainly being used for "cold storage" as already mentioned, where speed of access isn't a big concern.

Realistically you need to double the price, because having one backup disk is almost as dangerous as having none, it can still fail So buy two identical drives and save everything on both so if one drive fails you still have another This makes spinning drives a much more sensible alternative

I replaced my 1TB harddrive with a Samsung SSD and kept the drive for storage I also had a couple of old SKY HD boxes I took the harddrived from, I purchased a caddy from Amazon for just over a tenner so they are swapable, I use them to store family photos taken over the years.

I only buy mechanical hdd's for my backup since I don't trust SSDs yet for archive-storage.

Thanks for the Video Brian

I use a 16T drive for backups. My PC 1T SSD backups once a day to a 4T internal hard drive. Once a week I copy the BU's to the 16T drive that I slide in. This has worked well for me for the past 15-20 years as my BU drive went from 500g to 1T, 2T, 4T, 8T and the 16T. It does seem like more space is needed as time goes on.

Data centers buy spinning hard drives by the pallet load. One of the big disadvantages of an M.2 SSD is that if you want to make a change like swapping it out or replacing it, you've got to perform major surgery on your rig. For some people that's okay but a lot of other people just want to set it and forget it. The SATA SSD is a good store option jobs like he says. A 2 TB drive can hold a lot of stuff; a lot more than you think. But the other thing that's not being talked about anymore is Q LC versus TLC and all that stuff. Not too long ago everyone was saying that a QLC drive was for people in the cheap seats and if you were going to be "in" you had to buy the more expensive (sponsored) M.2 drive. The M.2 drives are faster and I'm not going back to a spinning hard drive as the boot drive unless I have to. That includes the old SCSI protocols as well. But for bulk storage, he's right, a large spinning hard drive is a good deal. My only caution is watch the warranty because some of these drives have a two year or three year warranty and I wouldn't buy any serious storage device with less than a five year warranty.

Oh, yes, mechanical HD's are still relevant; SSD's do wear out rather quickly if you don't use them "properly". And it does not take much to wear-down a SSD, just write data to it in bulk every day, for example. We always calculate costs per GB, and HD's always come on top, they can, if you calculate also the risks, last for a very long time. (just for an experiment, we have units running 24x7 for 7+ years now, without issues) Our SSD's, used for caching etc, usually last for about 2 years max, until they health drops to below 80% which we found to be the risk-level we found acceptable. As a business, we replace mechanical HD's every 3 years, and I can count on 1x hand the number of failures. Where the failures are either heat-warnings or SMART failures but the drive(s) still kept operating, with little to no impact. No real mechanical crashes (e.g, head-crashes). SSD's can be great for specific applications and even be superior to mechanical HD's on many fronts. But you do need to take good care of SSD's, they are rather unforgiving when under stress (either thru use or temperature). Last time I checked we held about 5PT on capacity, using the 3-2-1 backup-method. SSD's are in my personal view, great for caching and keeping your OS etc, but not your data on the fly. I rather have durability & reliability than speed. Mechanical HD's often alert via their SMART of pending issues before they really happen. SSD's should too, but it is not that uncommon that all of a sudden a SSD goes bad really, really quickly before you can intervene.

I use Seagate IronWolf Pro 8TB 7.2K SATA's for cold storage. Around £200 and I haven't had any problems yet. Obviously not as quick as an SSD but not slow. 👍

Well Brian I think that this video is really helpful to those who do not realise any of the facts of the different versions of hard drives. My self I use an internal 1TB spinner which came ready installed with the machine I bought. Plus I use a couple of external 1TB spinners that I back up my data using AOMEI software on both of my main machines.. I have to date no issues with the spinners. Also the spinners featured here and I do remember that you use these spinner hard drives for a NAS setup.

It would be nice to hear some discussion about reliability and MTBF rates for mechanical vs SSD. It's my understanding that once mechanical drives make it past the 1 year mark, they likely have a long life ahead of them. Whereas the same isn't necessarily true for SSD storage. I think it's a topic that merits discussion, since we've not totally transitioned to a 100% disposable world, yet.

I use a 1 TB WD HDD for my files storage and a 250 GB WD NVMe SSD for running my OS and Gotta love with that combo

I use them as Backup Drives. SSD for Windows - HDD for Music, Videos & personal Stuff. Toshiba, Seagate and Hitachi HDD's are way too noisy. I prefer WD. Enterprise Gold. Nice Video Brian, keep up your fantastic Work. Happy Holidays from Germany. Merry Christmas & a prosperous New Year to you & yours 💯🙏🍀🛡🍻

Yes, for long term storage of infrequently used files or for backup. In fact tape cartridges are still used in that way for backups.

In my opinion hard disk drive are a very good medium mainly because o large storage in comparison to the price. I just bought a seagate exos enterprise 16 tb for 285$. At this price you probably can only find a ssd at only 4 tb

Thank you.

No problem for NAS storage and a cheaper option but not for PCs

I wish you had included the difference in long term storage and reliability, etc.

I have recently bought a pair of Crucial 1TB SSDs to replace some HDDs. A 1TB SSD was cheaper than a 1TB Seagate so it made sense. I have also had a pretty bad experience with HDD reliability from Seagate Barracuda and Video drives in particular.

I started using 5.25" floppy drives at the beginning of my PC experience. Yeah I'm that old. HHD are hit and miss like all things. Sometimes they come DOA or last for years. Cheers all.

I'm an amateur photographer and have approx 150,000 photos, I purchased a Synology NAS 4 bay back in April and have 3 x 14tb Toshiba NAS drives in it set to SHR, to be honest they are very quick and also use it as a media player. I also have a DAS with 3 x 14tb Toshiba hard drives as a back up and a separate 14tb Toshiba hard drive which I use as my primary drive when editing viewing my photos, I would like to think that I have my data protected. Excellent video many thanks

Quite right and well said. You hit right about cost and I think that is the number one issue. However with me I believe in balance, I use a 500GB NVME for OS + apps and a mechanical HDD for storage. Between 250 and 500GB is perfect for main system with applications. A 1TB, 3, 4TB or higher is ideal for storage. Another reason besides costs for using a HDD for me is, I am not quite a 100% trusting on SSD or NVME drives for long term storage yet. But I will still use both types depending on need, my main focus is on long term storage and survivability for Data, backups, clones and more. Which will last longer on un-powered storage? I know everything degrades over time. That's why I am not a 100% trusting on an electrical chip for long term. Like a rechargeable battery, it can only be recharged so many times and same holds true for any other device. It can only be re-written or used X amount of time before they become useless.

😄 brrrrrrrrr ☃🎅 all this talk about Cold Storage is giving me the shivers, i'm going to go put on a sweater and turn up the heat LOL

Sweet! this topic is right up my wheel house, I can tell you alot and a ton, we would need to do a 4 hour documentary on the need for Massive Local Storage for the Home End User. I'll try to keep this condensed. First Point, there is an effort around the world by gov & corp that they dont want you to own anything, another reason is because they want total surveillance of u so if u have no local storage that means ur stuff is on a server somehwere around the world which means they are making a backup copy of any files u have in the cloud. Also if all ur stuff is in the cloud thats means u have to buy more bandwith to download ur stuff over and over again each and every month. Everybody wants to get paid and get a Bag off of u. So in their perfect world they want u to keep paying for your stuff over and over again ad infinity and they want to keep tabs on your files 24/7, that includes your files and contacts and fon numbers and pictures and your gps location and ur camera and ur microphone. On a new laptop your kinda screwed cause they are all switching over to m.2 so what u can do for now is switch out the ssd for the cheapest 4tb m.2 ssd and along with that u want to pickup an external hard drive between 239 usd 12TB up to 312 usd 20 TB. Now when it comes to your home desktop then the world is your oyster, just depends whats ur home living situation if u got enough room to setup a home server with routers and cables and stuff. If your living in a tiny apartment then at the very least you should still purchase a 3.5 NAS Hard Drive spinning at 7200RPM, the namebrands u want are HGST, Toshiba, WD, Seagate. Price and Capacity rite now, look at: 199usd 12TB all the way up to 274 usd 20TB. If you want to have idea on the size of pc video games, rite now I have 1000 GOG Games in my library, I have them all downloaded to my NAS. The Download Folder Total is 5.6 TB, please keep in mind thats the size of the offline installer which means it is fully compressed and you cant run the game like that, so If I want to uncompress and install everysingle game onto the same hard drive then the total would be at least double which would be at minimum 12TB of occupied hard drive space. Now what about everything else I have on Steam, Epic, Ubisoft, EA ? And what about all my video files and music files? What about my torrents and my ISO's and all my ripped CDs and DVDs? And dont forget you also need to purchase Backup hard drives cause drives can fail out of nowhere for no apparent reason. So I hope you are all starting to understand the need for Capacity and lots and lots of it. Hope that helps. Merry Christmas.

I only use an SSD for the Windows 10 installation. After that, I use a 2TB hard drive as my installation folder for programs and games. 2TB hard drive for personnel files, 4TB hard drive for videos. Never had any issues with the hard drives. They work as they're supposed to and are cheaper in cost. If they ever reduce the prices of SSDs to match hard drives then I would consider moving over, but that's not likely to ever happen with greed, so these mechanical hard drives are going to be with us for at least another decade if not longer.

Somewhat ironically. I had a 16TB spinning drive arrive today.

It's a good point, mechanical drives are excellent for backup storage with relatively good restore speed.

i only buy 7200 RPM desktop speed hard drives plus if you have a NAS and Nas drives in a raid you can get speeds pretty good too and add extra storage to any PC/Mac via ISCS as well

Sure they are.. I recently bought a new WD Black 6tb drive for $70! I use it for movie and backup storage. You can’t get that kind of storage cost anywhere else. I also bought an 8tb Sata SSD also for movie storage… cost was about $300… still very reasonable.

Hi This video is Amazing , thank you for 2023,

Could you show a video of a game or other program installed on each of these types to see if any noticeable advantage between the three

I agree with you, Brian. HDD's will be around for a very long time. I currently use an external WD MyBook HDD in the 4TB capacity. I am currently considering replacing it with a much larger-capacity HDD for use as general storage and as a media device. I have a LOT of DVDs that I want to transfer to an HDD. Not sure if I want to build a Windows 10 NAS with the components I have on-hand or purchase new parts and build a Windows 11 NAS or HTPC. Your, or anyone else's, thoughts? Maybe a new video topic for building a NAS and/or HTPC in 2024 with Windows 11. I would watch that video and/or series.

A year ago I imaged my 1TB 5400RPM HDD with a Crucial MX500 SATA SSD (model shown in the video) and the difference in speed - especially booting Windows 10 - is staggering. I don't know how I managed so long without one, in retrospect.

I agree. I will not be going to SSD anytime soon, for the most part. Definitely for storage are the mechanical drives. For main PC operation, SSD but a very small one. Just big enough to double the operating system size. All saved stuff goes on mechanical drives.

I have a pair of 8TB ironwolf's in a highpoint tech pcie rocket RAID card in RAID 1 configuration for data storage with 4 partitions. What's cool about Rocket RAID is that, even in a RAID 1 configuration, for larger files, it reads from both drives. Further, it has its own BIOS and is therefore independent of the PC. I have an m.2 Samsung 990 pro 1 TB for windows and programs, and a SATA SSD for caches. It all seems to work quite well. I'm not a gamer though. The PC is a 13900k and an rtx 3070, both overclocked and water cooled, works well for rendering.

I'd like to see a comparison, pro's and con's and your opinion of Hybrid SSD's.

i still use them for all complete backups and system drive cloning

My main drive is a 2TB NVMe Gen 4 M.2 drive. But I also have a 4TB Mechanical for long term storage, as old spinning rust drives can hold data much longer than SSD's.

I currently have 4 mechanical hard drives connected to my PC. 3 are 2TB and 1 is 5TB all Seagate. They seem pretty good quality and fast enough for me. The PC came with an internal 2TB hard drive that runs the Windows programs and my Kaspersky Premium Internet Security. SSDs maybe faster but too expensive for my budget.

I got 2 4tb hdd for storing assets used to make games, mods, and videos. they don't need to be stored on the ssd, I don't need the speed for the assets.

Hi, please teach us and make a video if today in 2023 any home user who has never seen let alone use it, wants to have tape drive in home pc, ignoring obsolescence and just for trying that technology getting feel of it. Please show us how one should proceed for doing this ... Thank you in advance

Tapes and HDDs, CDR/RWs, DVDR/RWs, BDRs BDXLs for long term storage. SSD/USB flash for short term

I still operate the classic hybrid setup. My boot drive is an NVME, but I have a large hard drive for all my documents, photos, videos, email and music. SSD's are fantastic at loading hundreds of files quickly, as is the case when booting Windows for example. However, how fast do you need a drive to be to load, say an 8Mb photo? Or, say a 2Mb Word document or similar sized spreadsheet. Again, how quickly do you need to load and play a 6Mb mp3 file? I submit you would not notice the difference in those workload scenarios between a hard drive and SSD and this is why I use a cheap, high capacity HDD for all my data. Of course, if you're editing large video files or playing games etc, then working from an SSD makes sense, but for the vast majority of home users, the above scenario I have is likely the case and for that, a hard drive is more than adequate.

damn i downloaded a movie to my ssd and it took a forever ten seconds, only took five for my nvme. that ten second wait was brutal

The "real" problem with HDDs are the rather high base BOM (Bill of Materials). Whether its a 4TB or a 12TB+ one. The cost to manufacture the basic chassis, magnets and circuity does not really change. We are still in the roughly 20-30ish range for those items.

they are good for backing up data. espescially since data recovery on an ssd, deleted file recovery is basically impossible using data recovery software.

Really big ones YES !!

Where did you get the footage of the people in the server rooms toward the end of the video?

None of the PCs I interact directly with have HDDs in them. But I have two TrueNAS PCs with RAIDZ2 setups using six drives each (4+2 drives). One uses 8TB drives and another uses 4TB drives.

W11 now, originally on a Samsung SSD system disc, no backups. But 'saw the light', (thanks son!) and last year changed to a 1Tb Crucial P5 Plus 1TB M.2 NVMe, and entered another world of system/gaming speed again . ;) Still run a couple of 1Tb Hard drives ... mirrored 1Tb backups. I don't need much backup, just system and personal stuff and game backups, and about 150G music and about 100G films which are always changing, apart from 'a few favourites' .. I use the SSD as an external backup, 'C:' USB for transferring large files from Desktop to Tablet. 😜

I found a great deal on a 4tb m.2 ( around 200CAD ) that I use just for my gaming and a 2 tb m.2 for all other things . the reason why I grabbed the 4tb m.2 is became it was cheap plus its games which take up a lot of space. My none gaming pc has a single 8 tb mech drive for files videos and backups.

I use a mme 3.0 data centre grade drive for my supermicicro workstation but hard drives for data backup

I have ssds as a boot drive for my laptop and both desktops but my storage and nas are all hdds and I've been using hdds for the last 18 years when I got really into computers and I have a few hdds that still work just fine after 18 plus years.

My main drive is a 1Tb ssd. I use a 4Tb HDD for my secondary drive to store my multi-media.

I use ssd’s ONLY for OS and „D:/E:”.etc in Pc, but as primary archiving and collections storage I use only HDD’s, bechause they can last even 30 years. High speed with SSD? Don’t care, prefer durability for all my data storaged yet.

Where to store many terabytes of movies and music? Of course on the hard drive.

I've got 12TB of storage on my server, using mechanical drives. They are perfect, and reasonably priced.

I have a WD Black 500 GB for my C drive SSD 500 GB for my work storage and 1TB HDD for my games I also have another 1TB HDD for storage sometimes I move big game files to that drive, and they work great I love the set up I have never had a problem with speed or these drives, slow defraging the HDD's but I use them a lot.

While I have an SSD in my PC, but that is JUST for the OS, games and software, everything else still goes on to an ordinarry mechanical HD I have in there as trust I them more with my precious data.

I have a pcie 4.0 1TB NVME for my OS and programs, then a 10TB 7200rpm HDD and 7TB 7200rpm HDD for storage. I also have a 500GB PCIE 3.0 NVME but I use that with PrimoCache as cache for the mechanical HDDs and that makes reads and writes about the same speed as an SSD. Along with those Internal drives I also have a 2TB PCIE 3.0 NVME that I use for editing videos. As for external storage I have a 6TB HDD and a 7TB HDD along with two 4TB SSDs. I'm a data hoarder as you can tell, lol.

It really depends on what exactly you are doing with your computer.

The SATA SSD drive is a little slower than the M.2 SSD drive

One 1TB WD Black NVME for OS, two 2TB WD Black NVME for gaming, two 8TB WD Black HD for storade & back-up.

Yes I still have 3 mechanical 2tb drives in my system, I've also got 3 1tb SSD's and 2 2tb gen 4 Nvme drives

I also like the affordable part of HDs.

of course they're still useful because they will far outlast a ssd in the long run, so mainly for videos, pics and some important docs would be a good use.... not for gaming anymore or any type of video editing

I have old laptop HDDs still working that are over 10 years old.

I saw somewhere that optical drive technology now allows something like 500tb discs. The all-digital future (present) is incompatible with that.

Mirror your SSD to a hard drive once a week. Wire a switch into the power cable to the hard drive and only turn it on to do the backup. That hard drive will last a really long time only running 4 hours per week.

NVMe for OS and second NVMe for flight SIM etc. keep USB 3 external drives for video and photo storage, digital photos take up a large amount of space, and I'm not talking crap phone photos, I'm talking DSLR raw photos for editing in Lightroom etc.

SSD for main drive and mechanical for storage, I find if something still does the job I need it to, why change it

For read storage. Not constant writing

I use SSDs for boot drives but still use HDD for storage of files like video and backup. Not too sure how SSDs would last in something like a DVR where files are being written all day.

I require at least 16TB to store a commercial Music Video and Karaoke master collection. I can not afford that on Solid state storage. I source these for around 300 Euro each in bulk.

I have windows 11 installed in 512gb TS ssd but still I’m using hdd for software installed allocation and it just works fine

i would like to have a u.2/u.3 of 30 TB in my desktop, but for 2500to5000 eur range it would cost more than the computer itself

I'm still holding on my 12 years Seagate 1T HDD for random storage.

For huge bulk storage like movie backups, sure. Games that you're going to access and need fast load times.. no. Install host OS... nah that's a bad idea

I haven't bought a hard drive for many years. I have no hard drives in my system. I have two 8TB SSDs, and they were only about $400 US each.

I'd have a few HDs, I use my pc for work only so it's good enough. I'm planning on put a 2T HD in a pc I might build only because if I build some simple like what I want it will not cost much to upgrade if say, the mother board dies, HD. I also want an internal CD/DVD player because I'm older and still buy music CDs and I have a ton of movie DVD. :)

I had a desktop with 2TB of storage but when it broke I learned that out of the 2TB I only had used 50GB of space on the drive even though I downloaded a lot of music from KZfaq. I bough a refurbished PC with a 256GB SSD and I've 15GB in total. On another Desktop I connected an 8TB HDD and a 2TB HDD and have only used 1.5 TB downloading all my DVD collection to the 8TB HDD.

For backups yeah they are still worth it

For my new build early this year I've opted to get rid of all mechanical drives. 8TB samsung QVO 870 for storage and 1TB gen4 nvme for boot drive/apps. Another 8TB qvo drive for backups (can do an incremental in 5mins, or about 3-4 hours for 3.5TB. I just exclude all the game files as these can be easily re-downloaded. I've seen 4TB TLC nvme M2 drives for 200 euros already (Lexar NM790), if you have space for two on your mainboard that would be much cheaper than 1x 8TB, and not that much more expensive than a samsung sata 8TB (currently 339 euros). Honestly any SSD is fast enough for most games, even SATA ones. I've placed multiple games on the 8TB drive and games run fine. HDD are becoming too slow for AAA games. I can see a use for mechanical HDDs for 4k and 8K videos (compressed most likely or you'll hit the slow transfer speed) and archiving. I don't produce that much data anymore (I used to do photography and keep the raw files which are quite large, especially these days). I used to upgrade storage every 2 years, doubling the storage capacity. Or if you want to analyze large datasets like from radio telescopes and some such.

HDDs still make sense for media and backup drives, SSDs for boot and game drives

I've been doing Computing since the 1st days of home computing and I can only go by what I've learned is the best system use? Good old Mechanical Hard Drive are a good system which I found works well and lasts well. Costs are good for the speed and sizes you get too! SSD are too pricey for very limited space per price paid. Most are just now up to 4 TB but as you've shown very pricey for what size of drive you get. I never had one single Mechanical Hard Drive fail ever since I started doing computer work. In fact I store data on the old un-used drives that once where used for the OS and data of each of my many computers I had over the many years going from Windows 3.1 on to Windows 95 & 98 & 98 SE & XP & Windows 7 Pro. I also have data stored on the CD and DVD-Roms. But that was just as a way to access the data quick by the Optical drive. instead of digging out the HD Dock Station. I have found if you use one brand which is well known and stick with it, You be fine. I use and always used Seagate drives. I not bothering with the new SSD ones as they as stated are too limited in data storing size and way too pricey for what you get. Old English saying? "If it an't broke don't fix it" The newer SSD's may come down in price and go up in size someday! But unless I can't get the good old drives by then I will stick with what I know works and costs well for the size of drives I need.

Each medium has its place. HDD for long term storage. Also more traditional tech - some warning before failure and potential for data recovery via specialists of the worst should happen. Not sure how effective recovery is worth SSD or NVMe. I'll stick with a blended approach.

No mention about durability?

i will never use non spinning drives for archival storage. ive got drives from 2008 that still have non corrupted data.

And also one thing to take note. PCIE 3 is now mainstream, and PCIE 4 is getting mainstream, Gen 5 is still new. So PCIE 3 SSDs will still be around for awhile for budget builders. Don't rush to get PCIE 5 SSDs, Gen 3 and 4 are still relevant. I'm using a Gen 4(from an Acer prebuilt) on my PCIE 3 mobo

It depends on the application. I use SSDs for Linux operating systems, but hard drives for user files and video (I have 16 TB of video files). In my experience SSDs are much more likely to fail suddenly and completely than hard drives.

One thing we do not know about SSDs is how long they will last due to finite iops? Hard Drives are not infallible but I have had a 4TB one 10 years and still fine! I use an NVME as my boot drive 1TB Samsung 980, and a Corsair 500GB for Linux Mint. Use a few SSDs and the 4TB mechanical.

Where are we supposed to house huge data bundles? With over 10,000 songs and 3,000 movies .... only hard drive storage works.

Always SSD for Linux Mint OS, and plenty of HDD's for multiple backups of downloads and my own videos and photographs.

There are other differences: - SSD is much quieter, essential if you are doing podcasts, recording music etc. - SSD is not harmed as much by the box being knocked, transported etc. No contest really, frankly. The spinning mechanical drive belongs to a world of ten+ years ago. Even a technology troglodyte like I am, I've gone all SSD.

I use my 14tb hdd ones for films and music storage but games are better on ssd nowadays

In servers, yes. In a PC for gaming/creating, strongly leaning towards “no”. Overall, HDDs are still relevant but have died out of personal computers in favor of SATA and NVMe SSDs.

I have 2 HDD in PC and SSD I'm using them as backup

A game will being played faster if (OS & Game on SSD) than (OS on SSD & Game on HDD) ?

For a 20T drive, really need to get at least two because that’s a lot of eggs in one basket to lose