The Best Storage Devices: SSD, HDD, External Drives & NAS

[Julio Franco]

With solid state drives now fully mainstream and hard drives being more affordable than ever, there is a broad a mix of high-performance and high-capacity options to choose from in a range of form factors. Fortunately for you, we have spent dozens of hours testing storage, so we have a pretty clear idea about what devices are worth buying.

Read the full article here.

https://www.techspot.com/bestof/storage/

 

[BSim500]

"Best Mainstream SATA SSD = 860 EVO. Alternative = MX500"

As usual, Samsung's regional pricing complicates things. Eg, in the UK, Crucial's MX500 2TB is over £100 cheaper than the 860 EVO 2TB (more than the 850 EVO vs 850 PRO difference used to be). Or in other words, Crucial 2TB MX500 is only +55% more expensive vs 860 1TB for +100% capacity at virtually same performance and 5yr warranty (and Crucial generally having a much more pleasant RMA process putting it politely). If high performance matters, you buy an M2. If capacity matters more, you get the MX500. Can't ever see when I'd buy that awkwardly priced "between a rock and a hard place" as first choice until Samsung trims a good 15-20% off their price inflation.

"Best 2.5" Portable Storage = 250GB external SSD"?

At capacities that low, you might as well buy a large 256GB USB stick. Given external secondary / backup storage is typically non performance driven, how about an actual "Best 2-4TB portable 2.5" HDD" option that's actually useful as a backup drive without running out of space 6 weeks later (yet is still pocket sized and doesn't require bulky 3.5" powered units of +6GB requirements)? Likewise boasting "hardware encryption" isn't always a good thing. If the external USB-SATA controller (but not the drive itself) fails inside a sealed 2.5" external unit, you can usually still pull a working drive and use it as an internal if it's unencrypted. If it's hardware encrypted, you're screwed for self-recovery. And yet for portable security, the drive itself can still be software encrypted if required.

Likewise, the age-old advice rings true - don't make A backup, make 2-3x. Random electronic failures occur on everything (inc SSD's) and personally for backing up irreplaceable photo's or a lifelong music collection, I'd recommend someone get 2-3x external 2TB HDD's over same-priced 1x single 500GB SSD any day for redundancy / security with the quadrupling of capacity being icing on the cake.

 

[Evernessince]

"Best Mainstream SATA SSD = 860 EVO. Alternative = MX500"

As usual, Samsung's regional pricing complicates things. Eg, in the UK, Crucial's MX500 2TB is over £100 cheaper than the 860 EVO 2TB (more than the 850 EVO vs 850 PRO difference used to be). Or in other words, Crucial 2TB MX500 is only +55% more expensive vs 860 1TB for +100% capacity at virtually same performance and 5yr warranty (and Crucial generally having a much more pleasant RMA process putting it politely). If high performance matters, you buy an M2. If capacity matters more, you get the MX500. Can't ever see when I'd buy that awkwardly priced "between a rock and a hard place" as first choice until Samsung trims a good 15-20% off their price inflation.

"Best 2.5" Portable Storage = 250GB external SSD"?

At capacities that low, you might as well buy a large 256GB USB stick. Given external secondary / backup storage is typically non performance driven, how about an actual "Best 2-4TB portable 2.5" HDD" option that's actually useful as a backup drive without running out of space 6 weeks later (yet is still pocket sized and doesn't require bulky 3.5" powered units of +6GB requirements)? Likewise boasting "hardware encryption" isn't always a good thing. If the external USB-SATA controller (but not the drive itself) fails inside a sealed 2.5" external unit, you can usually still pull a working drive and use it as an internal if it's unencrypted. If it's hardware encrypted, you're screwed for self-recovery. And yet for portable security, the drive itself can still be software encrypted if required.

Likewise, the age-old advice rings true - don't make A backup, make 2-3x. Random electronic failures occur on everything (inc SSD's) and personally for backing up irreplaceable photo's or a lifelong music collection, I'd recommend someone get 2-3x external 2TB HDD's over same-priced 1x single 500GB SSD any day for redundancy / security with the quadrupling of capacity being icing on the cake.

Not everybody has the money to mirror their data 3-4 times. Make a backup sure, make an offsite back for really important stuff sure, make a 3rd backup? No one but companies and mission critical personal need to do that.

You can prevent allot of headaches by torture testing any hard drive before you start using it. It's not that hard to simulate half a year's worth of use in a few days to suss out bad drives.

 

[stewi0001]

Good job TS.

Side note, I still don't trust Seagate lol!

 

[Diabolik707]

960 EVO has been rendered completely obsolete by the recent launch of the HP EX920. When looking at actual availlable prices ( not MSRP, especially in some countries other than the US, it is also always cheaper at 1TB even in the US ), so it's cheaper, it's faster overall, much faster at low queue depths ( where it matters for most users ) and actual real world usage tests as well as beats/ties even the 960 PRO in some tests.

Review links:

http://www.thessdreview.com/our-rev...-review-1tb-great-speed-for-a-dynamite-price/

https://www.guru3d.com/articles-pages/hp-ex920-1-tb-m-2-ssd-review,1.html

 

[DelJo63]

Likewise, the age-old advice rings true - don't make A backup, make 2-3x. Random electronic failures occur on everything (inc SSD's) and personally for backing up irreplaceable photo's or a lifelong music collection, I'd recommend someone get 2-3x external 2TB HDD's over same-priced 1x single 500GB SSD any day for redundancy / security with the quadrupling of capacity being icing on the cake.

BRAVO!! (y)
If it's truly important, then this is the ONLY choice.

 

[poohbear]

I would have to disagree with the "negligible" performance difference between the WD Blue & Black. I own both and the Black is much faster than the blue when displaying all the thumbnails of my pictures and video folders and even for loading games. I never bought another blue again after that.

 

[CLASYS]

I would have to disagree with the "negligible" performance difference between the WD Blue & Black. I own both and the Black is much faster than the blue when displaying all the thumbnails of my pictures and video folders and even for loading games. I never bought another blue again after that.

Isn't the Enterprise class GOLD drive currently the best [it was not mentioned]?

 

[FreeBetaTester]

WD is really not doing themselve any favors when they have names so similar. WD Black NVME vs WD Black 3D NVME. The plain old black doesn't even come close to matching a 960 evo. This is a great way for WD to create confusion, and for people to get upset how their "black" drive is not delivering the expected performance.

 

[Julio Franco]

@BSim500 it's hard (or near impossible) to account for pricing in different regions, so we always use US as base which has the clearest path and market based pricing.

@Diabolik707 "rendered completely obsolete" is too strong a statement. The HP drive looks great, but the few reviews out there are a week old and are limited to the 1TB drive, so no one outside of HP has long-term tested them yet. Hopefully we'll test it ourselves soon, but in the meantime I do agree a mention of this drive alongside WD's latest M2 SSD is deserved. Especially given the prospective pricing of that terabyte model.

I would have to disagree with the "negligible" performance difference between the WD Blue & Black.

And who said that?

 

[DelJo63]

Would have been interesting to see statistical info on MTBF, serial bytes/sec Read and random bytes /sec Read.

Going "Mac 2 with my hair on fire" to only catastrophically fail within the hour is not an intentional choice for me.

 

[Ben Myers]

Good job TS.

Side note, I still don't trust Seagate lol!

Me too. Too many drive failures. To much dependence of offshots of Maxtor designs, not known for greatness.

 

[lostinlodos]

Good job TS.

Side note, I still don't trust Seagate lol!

Seagate fell off my map when the shingled methodology came out.
Note to anyone who uses a shingled drive for anything other than write once never delete backups: it simply doesn’t work.

I have two different shingled drives. Both have had problems on windows 7, and 10, AND Linux.
Windows randomly drops the drive on writes (new or erase/cut). Then remounts and continues the process. Without teracopy the drives would be useless in windows as I’d never get a full file moved on OR off.
With Linux distros the drive drops out and never comes back, requiring a reboot.

But those problems showed up AFTER writing massive amounts of data to each. I’ve slowly been offloading it to new SSDs ever since.