How much you paid for each drive?
Has anyone shucked the WD 8TB BBGB0080HBK-BESN?
- Thread starter Extreme Gamer
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OP
14.6k on amazon.
Nice! I was initially planning to get a 4TB portable usb drive for ~6.2k(seen 4TB seagate backup plus for 7200 at some times during the month of Mar/Apr so hoping to see same price in oct sale & with 10% hdfc instant discount & 5% hdfc smartbuy discount) but if I can get this 8TB drive for ~10-11k then I might change my mind.
OP
The price has gone up to 18.5k so I doubt it will fall that much. Maybe if you have friends or buddies who are also in the market for storage, then you could possibly haggle a decent price with a distributor.
OP
@whitestar_999 It's back at 14,699.
*www.amazon.in/gp/product/B01MZ6OB44/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1
Thanks! Yeah I also saw it Yesterday. Comments suggest that it went for 13000 in Oct sale last year so hoping for similar price this time too & at this price it will cost me 11115k(1300 hdfc instant discount & 585 hdfc smartbuy discount). Now I will have to compare 4TB seagate portable & WD portable prices on flipkart & amazon in the sale to see which one to get considering there is a good chance to get 4TB portable one for ~6.2k.
OP
I wouldn't get WD portables 6TB and lower. Those are always SMR drives.
For seagate, look at this: CMR and SMR Hard Drives | Seagate India and find out what is inside the external drive you choose.
Of course if you get 2.5" drives then all models from both WD and Seagate are SMR and you don't have much of a choice.
Thanks! Never knew skyhawk series was all CMR(avoided it in favour of Barracuda as skyhawk is marketed as surveillance drives so thought maybe firmware not optimized for typical operations).
Yes the plan was always to get 2.5" 4TB portable which I got for 5.5k in previous 2 years oct sales but more flexible now to consider shucking the drive.
OP
Skyhawk series is CMR but don't discount the firmware or other parts of the disk. The skyhawk will be optimised for continuous write operations with infrequent/rare reads.
You mean skyhawk is fine for continuous write operations but also alright as a typical storage device?
Found this official answer:
OP
What this means is that the firmware may throttle reads to prevent write throttle. A minimum guaranteed write speed is required after all.
I guess this doesn't matter much for a storage drive then because once the data is there it will be used only for watching videos or torrent upload & at those times there will be no writing going on.
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OP
Actually, it does matter. Reading a video is likely a sequential read operation, which may, in the worst case, be as slow as random reads, which as you know are abysmal (i.e. ~100 iops) in all spinning rust.
I have yet to see a healthy hdd which can display sequential read speeds of 1MB/s order similar to random read speeds. IPOS only matters for specific tasks & not sequential operations I believe.
OP
I have absolutely seen laptop HDDs do awfully slow reads, but that may be because SMR.
For surveillance drives this is why firmware becomes important:
Suppose you have a write operation ongoing, say transferring 1TB of data at ~100MB/s and suddenly there's a read demand for a 500MB file. Note that this file will be in a different sector from your read file.
Suppose the drive is an ordinary desktop drive. Then as the disk spins, it will read, skip or write to a sector depending on what requests are pending with it. Depending on the firmware the head may move around to reduce the time spent on skipped sectors, as well as any other on-drive optimisations.
However if it's a surveillance drive then it may skip ongoing reads to prioritize writing, and come back to the read later, effectively turning your sequential read into a random read.
Surveillance drive firmware also allows the drive to write erroneous data to disk in order to meet certain read/write time guarantees.
More likely than not you'll be fine, but in the off chance you get bad data, you have no way of fixing it.
I was planning on not doing any read operation while writing data to disk & vice versa to avoid the situation you mentioned.
This is the reason I haven't yet bought skyhawk model even when it was available at similar price as barracuda but with 1 year additional warranty(3 vs 2). In any case I buy internal hdd only offline though this time I may get a wd laptop internal hdd online from mdcomputers(I also never buy internal hdd online from amazon/flipkart) as it is not available offline in Delhi last time I checked.