Apparently, hard drive manufacturers had agreed to raise the price of hard drives in August. This will affect retail models, come on, those that are sold in any store, including Amazon. Said agreement hides behind increasing income to improve the development of solutions.
Although it is most likely that this increase will matter rather little to you. SSDs have eaten the ground, relegating HDDs for mass data storage. This means that many users no longer pay the slightest attention to them.
But, if you want to purchase a storage unit of this type, we bring you several options. The first and cheapest is this Seagate BarraCuda Compute 4 TB for 70 euros. We are talking about a 3.5-inch format hard disk drive with a SATA 3 interface, come on, a standard drive.
The Seagate unit is the most “basic” that can be found on the market today. Said unit offers us a speed of rotation of the plates of 5,400 RPM. Something that stands out is that it has 256 MB of cache, something that can improve performance a bit.
The read and write speeds of the drive are not highlighted, but will be around 80MB/s, which is typical speed for these drives. This is precisely the reason why their use has become a minority, although they currently play an important role.
Other interesting storage solutions
If you want something more powerful for secondary storage or games, you have the WD Black 2 TB for 105 euros. This 3.5-inch drive has been specially developed for storing games and large volumes of data. The strength of this hard drive lies in the speed of rotation of the disks, which is 7,200 RPM, which optimizes performance.
Internally this unit has only 64 MB of cache, much less than the previous model. This drive allows transfer speeds of up to 160MB/s, although this will possibly be read. (https://www.stocktargetadvisor.com/) It is not specified, it is simply given.
The truth is, we find the Seagate unit much more interesting, which is much cheaper and has twice the capacity.
For massive storage and constant use, we bring you the WD Red 4 TB for 99 euros. This unit, although it is focused on NAS systems, can also be used as secondary storage. The good thing about these drives is that they are very efficient, quite fast, and very robust.
This unit has more than interesting features. This unit has a spin speed of 5,400 RPM and makes use of SMR recording technology. The unit is complemented with 256 MB of cache memory. Thanks to all these elements, the unit can offer a transfer speed of up to 5,400 RPM.
We see that, for everything, it is a much better option than the WD drive, since it has twice the capacity, better performance and features.
portable storage
Not all are internal storage units, there are also quite interesting external hard drives. We have made a small selection of units so that you can transport your data comfortably. These are:
- WD Elements 4TB for $100: This drive is based on the USB 3.0 interface, has a 2.5-inch form factor, and requires no separate power supply.
- Toshiba Canvio Basics 4 TB for 105 euros: this unit makes use of a USB 3.2 Gen1 interface, which allows for higher transfer speeds. It has a 2.5-inch form factor, which makes it very comfortable to carry
- Seagate Expansion 4 TB for 106 euros: this unit offers us a USB 3.0 interface, which makes it a little slower than the previous model. It is based on a 3.5-inch form factor and is fully plug and play.
- LaCie Rugged Mini 4 TB for 168 euros: the interesting thing about this unit is that it has a rubber coating that protects it from shocks. Obviously, if the blow is strong, the unit will be damaged no matter how much protection it has. It is based on the USB-C interface being compatible with Thunderbolt 3, offering speeds of up to 130 MB/s
