Introduction and drives 1-4
What’s the best hard drive you can buy? Your hard drive is out of date if its capacity is measured in Gigabytes. Even a Terabyte of space can seem cramped when you’re stockpiling your 4K movies, lossless music, massive games and high resolution photo collections.
2TB isn’t a bad starting point unless you’re heavily into editing movies, and with prices tumbling, you don’t have to pay much to enjoy excellent performance and gargantuan storage space.
At the moment, buying an internal drive gives you exactly three choices: a flash-based SSD, one that blends flash with a classic spinning drive (a hybrid), and a regular mechanical drive. The key difference is that while SSD offers far superior performance, it comes with a price to match and you only get a couple of hundred GBs before the cost ceases to be appealing.
Traditional drives are much slower, but hold far, far more, and in most cases you simply don’t need the extra performance. Everything will still work just fine, just not quite as quickly. The cheaper hard disk drives have a 5400RPM spinning speed while their more expensive counterparts spin at 7200RPM, providing a theoretical 33% speed boost.
As long as you’re not used to the speed of Windows booting from SSD though, you’re unlikely to be put off by even a midrange drive’s performance. There’s plenty of life in the traditional style of hard disk yet, and it remains the best way to handle your electronic life.
In this article, we’ve gathered together what we consider to be nine of the best drive offerings currently available, boasting 1.5TB or more at assorted price points, designed for single-desktop use or RAID servers or NASes (Network Attached Storage).
In practice, the main difference between the two types of drive is the tolerances they’re built for, which shouldn’t be particularly important for the home. However, these drives and their energy saving features can really come into their own in bulk, especially in an enterprise setting.
Could larger capacity flash drives spell the end for the hard disk?
Best overall value for money: Toshiba 3TB PA4293E-1HN0 DT Series
Price: around £72
Buy: Amazon
If all you care about is getting the most bang (or storage) for your buck, then you can hardly do better than the Toshiba PA4293E. The Japanese company is not well known for its storage devices but this model steals the show by offering the cheapest per TB price on the market at just under £24.
That said, note that external hard disk drives cost even less starting at £22.50 per TB. This Toshiba drive has a 5700RPM rotational speed, with a decent 32MB cache and is relatively quiet when in use at 25dBA. It is unlikely to be the fastest drive around, but if you just want a cheap internal hard disk drive, it’s probably your best bet.
Best value performance: Seagate 3TB Barracuda 7200.12
Price: around £80
Buy: Amazon
3TB still appears to be the sweet spot if you are looking for a performance hard disk drive. The Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 fits the bill if you prefer to have a single fast drive rather than, say, an SSD and a slow hard drive. This model has three 1TB platters, 64MB of cache and uses a number of Seagate-specific features (OptiCahe, Acutrac, SmartAlign and DiscWizard) to generally improve performance. Note that Seagate suggests using it in so-called 8×5 environments (i.e. not 24×7) and because of its higher spinning speed, it will be noisier, consume more power and have a higher operating temperature.
Best for NAS: Seagate 16TB Business Storage 4 Bay NAS Solution
Price: around £355
Buy: Ebuyer
Looking for a NAS drive? Then look no further than this 4-Bay Seagate solution – the STBP16000200 comes preloaded with four 4TB Seagate NAS HDDs (model ST4000VN000) that come with 64MB cache, 7200RPM and a three-year warranty. Why am I suggesting that you buy this solution?
Well, for starters, it is damn affordable at around the £355 mark – that gets you a fully functional, loaded, ready to go NAS with a per-Terabyte cost lower than the PA4293-E drive above. If you only want the drives, keep them and get rid of the enclosure. Compared to traditional drives, NAS-optimised drives are designed to operate on a 24×7 basis while sustaining higher operating temperatures and working in a team rather than solo.
Best for capacity: Seagate Archive Nearline 8TB HDD
Price: around £200
Buy: MoreComputers
If you want the biggest hard disk drive around – one that will not be used in a NAS, and you don’t really care about random writes – then the Seagate Archive Nearline 8TB should be top of your list. Seagate uses SMR technology to cram more storage than ever before in a 3.5-inch form factor – this drive is not cheap at £220, but the cost per TB is still reasonable at £27.50.
You get a comprehensive three-year warranty, the reassurance that this is a drive designed for a 365x24x7 environment, with extremely low power consumption and some exceptional performance, especially on reads, despite a low spinning speed. Just be wary of its only big weakness, which is random writes, as we’ve already mentioned.
Drives 5-9
Worth considering: Seagate Solid State Hybrid Drive
Price: around £135
Buy: Dabs
For some scenarios, desktop hybrid solid state and hard disk drives can offer a boost in performance without having to resort to a pair of drives. Seagate’s 4TB desktop SSHD is an interesting proposition packing a 4TB spinning hard drive and 8GB of flash storage. The drive is a 7200RPM model with a three-year warranty, 64MB cache and three platters – and now for the surprising part, it actually costs less than traditional HDDs at around the £135 mark. Seagate’s claims that the drive performs five times faster than other 7200RPM HDDs and improves overall responsiveness by nearly a third are a bonus – and effectively a free bonus, to boot.
Best overall for laptops: HGST Travelstar/WD Blue
Price: around £43/£63 respectively
If you want to upgrade the hard disk drive in your laptop, there’s only one choice really – swap it for a 1TB hard disk drive. The HGST Travelstar 1TB 2.5-inch hard disk drive is a great candidate at around £43. It is part of the 5K1000 family, uses a pair of 500GB platters and has 8MB of cache. This is a 9.5mm drive so if you want a thinner one (7mm), you will probably need to fork out extra. The 1TB WD Blue is a good performer, backed by 16MB of cache with the rest of the specs similar to the HGST Travelstar (not really a surprise given that HGST and WD are part of the same holding). That 2.5mm shrinkage comes at a price though, and you’ll pay around £20 extra compared to the Travelstar.
Best capacity for laptops/Sony PS4/PS3: Samsung M9T
Price: around £81
Buy: Dabs
Toshiba launched a 3TB 2.5-inch hard drive that will be the biggest hard disk drive for laptops and gaming consoles when it is available later this year. Until then, the Samsung M9T remains the quasi-indisputable king of capacity for the 2.5-inch form factor. This popular drive has been around for a while and managed to cram 2TB into a standard 9.5mm thickness. It has 32MB of cache, three platters and spins at 5400RPM, but its high platter density means that it will perform on a similar level compared to smaller 7200RPM drives. A two-year warranty is also a welcome bonus as well. At just over the £80 mark, it offers the cheapest price per TB in this category.
Best for performance: HGST Travelstar 7K1000
Price: around £51
Buy: Scan
Not everybody can afford to pay for a large capacity SSD so if you’re looking for a laptop hard drive with space to spare, check out the Travelstar 7K1000 from HGST. It is a 9.5mm model that has a 32MB buffer and two 500GB platters plus a two-year warranty. What makes it special, though, is that it’s the only 7200RPM drive in its category (we’re happy to be proven wrong though). Spinning 33% faster means higher transfer rates but that has a negative effect on power consumption, noise and heat dissipation. At just over £50, this drive also carries a premium over its slower 5400RPM counterpart.
Worth considering for laptops: Seagate 1TB SSHD
Price: around £65
Buy: Dabs
Seagate was an early pioneer of hybrid hard disk drives with its Momentus XT series and the current third-generation has finally managed to bring down pricing and tweak its flash algorithm, otherwise known as adaptive memory technology.
It costs around £65 and while that’s a 50% premium over a comparable non-flash drive like the HGST Travelstar, it does come with that additional 8GB of flash which should in theory, and in most configurations, boost performance for end users – that will depend entirely on your usage, but you will almost certainly see an improvement over a standard 5400RPM drive. Plus you also get a three-year warranty which is a nice add-on.
Best hard drive deals in the UK: Our top 30 storage recommendations of 2015
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Updated: Top 9 best internal desktop and laptop hard disk drives