Final Words & Conclusion
Conclusion
Wowzers, while testing I realized how long it has been since I used an HDD. I mean my home and office NASes, of course, are loaded with them but in an era where the SSD has become something standard, it is simply getting more unusual for a company to present them.
There is still a place for traditional storage like an HDD, for it to be able to do so it needs certain variables. Obviously bigger is better, the price needs to be really good and warranty, lot's of warranty. These three factors a company needs to offer to be able to battle the SSD, as really, you're not going to use an HDD as OS boot device considering an SSD are a dozen, maybe even hundreds of times faster with small files. Sustained and linear performance however still is good with an HDD, in the 250MB/sec range you just cannot complain.
The SSDs are still relatively expensive. You can purchase them for 20 cents per GB running upwards top 80 cents per GB for the fastest NVMe units. The HDD tested today runs at roughly 4 cents per GB. So for massive storage requirements, an HDD can make a lot of sense. I have been saying this a long time now, if you're on a budget use an SSD for your OS and an HDD for the rest, it is a pretty good symbiosis.
The new 14TB BarraCuda Pro ain't no slouch either, while it cannot handle the high IO workloads an SSD can manage on small files for things like games, your music, and movies it's fast enough for what it is and needs to be (for most people). The Barracuda is an HDD rated for 24x7 operation and gets a 300TB/yr workload rating. Seagate also offers a really good 5 years warranty on this unit, alongside you get two years of free data recovery should something go wrong, that's great service.
So yes, in a desktop PC combined with an SSD this can make can make sense at 4 Cents per GB, or of course, inserted into a NAS the Barracuda Pro could make even more sense. The bottom line is that there Seagate proofs today that there still is plenty of reason for the HDD to be around if you're looking for massive storage at a far more affordable price per GB ratio. And for an HDD, that amazing volume size of 14TB at these speeds sits really well with us.
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