Hard drives with 5 to 8 TB in the test: 33 TB from HGST, Seagate, Toshiba and Western Digital

Hard drives with 5 to 8 TB in the test: 33 TB from HGST, Seagate, Toshiba and Western Digital – SSDs are the future, but if you need a lot of storage space for your own data collection, you will still find a much cheaper solution in high-capacity HDDs. And as a data warehouse for larger files, the disadvantage of significantly higher latency when accessing files compared to SSDs is not particularly severe. HDDs are also slower when reading and writing sequentially, but they can achieve transfer rates of 200 MB / s and more.

ComputerBase has tested five current HDDs of the higher performance class in the classic 3.5-inch format. The focus was on as much storage space as possible; the five test candidates together have 33 terabytes of storage space. All four manufacturers HGST, Seagate, Toshiba and Western Digital (WD) are represented.

The test subjects

All test subjects correspond to the form factor of 3.5 inches and have a height of around 2.6 centimeters. The interface is also identical to SATA 6 Gb / s. Other similarities lie in perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) and the rotational speed of the magnetic disks of 7,200 rpm. Furthermore, all models use the so-called Advanced Format (PDF) with a sector size of 4,096 bytes (4 KB, more precisely 4 KiB). For reasons of compatibility, the previously used 512-byte sectors are emulated.

There are differences with the platters

The differences can be seen, among other things, in the number of magnetic disks (platter) installed and the resulting storage capacity. However, the storage volume is also determined by the data density per platter. The HGST Ultrastar He8 stands out due to the helium filling and is also an enterprise HDD that is designed for continuous operation in servers. The other models are mainly intended for private systems. The WD Red Pro is designed for both private and corporate NAS systems.

Pictures and more details about the respective candidates can be found in the following sections.

On the next page: HGST Ultrastar He8 8TB