Best Internal Hard Drives: Holiday 2022

In our series of Hard Disk Drive guides, here’s the latest update to our list of recommended HDDs. All numbers in the text are updated to reflect pricing at the time of writing.

Best Consumer Hard Drives: November 2022

Data storage requirements have kept increasing over the last several years. While SSDs have taken over the role of the primary drive in most computing systems, hard drives continue to be the storage media of choice in areas dealing with large amount of relatively cold data. Hard drives are also suitable for workloads that are largely sequential and not performance sensitive. The $/GB metric for SSDs (particularly with QLC in the picture) is showing a downward trend, but it is still not low enough to match HDDs in that market segment.

In terms of recent product introductions, the retail availability of Western Digital's OptiNAND-equipped 22TB drives has improved. Pricing for Toshiba's 18TB drives using FC-MAMR, as well as Seagate's Exos 20TB and IronWolf Pro 20TB have shown a downward trend. With the HDD supply chain having pretty much recovered, and the short-lived Chia craze a thing of the past, prices have largely stabilized. Many high-capacity models such as the Seagate IronWolf Pro line are currently running 15-20% lower than launch MSRPs, and the Exos lineup continues to offer great capacity for money.

Synology has introduced 8, 12, and 16TB enterprise hard drives (rebranded Toshiba Enterprise HDDs with custom firmware), but they are meant specifically for Synology NAS units (no warranties if used in other systems) and are not part of this buyer's guide. Toshiba's MG09 18TB HDDs based on FC-MAMR are quite new in the market, and will be added in a future update to this buyer's guide

2022 – New 22TB HDDs from Western Digital

From a gaming perspective, install sizes of hundreds of GBs are not uncommon for modern games. Long-term backup storage and high-capacity NAS units for consumer use are also ideal use-cases for hard drives. The challenge in picking any hard drive, of course, is balancing workload needs with total drive costs. Most consumers in a non-business settings also require low-power and low-noise, yet, high capacity drives, which we're including as an explicit category as well.

In the current market, the WD Gold and WD Red Pro are the only available 22TB options, when the surveillance-focused WD Purple Pro is not considered. However, for consumers needing absolute lowest cost at other capacities, the Seagate Exos series fits the bill, with unbelievably low prices compared to other 'consumer' HDDs at similar capacity points. At other capacity points, the most cost-effective drives vary even when similar workload ratings are considered. It must be noted that the Exos series drives are relatively noisy and consume much more power compared to other drives tuned for specific use cases – such as the Barracuda Pro and Toshiba X300 for desktop usage, or the WD Red SMR drives for read-heavy / sparing writes scenarios.

There are three active vendors in the consumer hard drive space – Seagate, Toshiba, and Western Digital. Their retail offerings currently top out at 20TB, 18TB, and 22TB respectively.

Consumers looking to purchase hard-drives need to have a rough idea of the use-cases they are going to subject the drives to. Based on that, a specific set of metrics needs to be considered. We first take a look at the different metrics that matter, and how various hard drives stack up against each other. Since many hard drive families from different vendors can satisfy the requirements, it may all come down to the pricing. We will present a pricing matrix for various hard drive families against the available capacities.

For our guide, we're narrowing down the vast field of hard drives to the following models/families. In particular, we are excluding surveillance-focused drives such as the WD Purple or Seagate SkyHawk, since these drives are based on the same technology, but often carry a price premium. Meanwhile, we're also making sure to include some of the enterprise / datacenter SATA drives that are available for purchase from e-tailers, as these sometimes offer some great deals in terms of capacity-per-dollar. We have stopped considering the SMR-based WD Red in the guide – with capacities topping out at 6TB and being ill-suited for most NAS use-cases, it is a drive family that is best avoided for general usage.

1. Seagate BarraCuda Pro
2. Seagate IronWolf NAS
3. Seagate IronWolf Pro NAS
4. Seagate Exos Enterprise
5. Toshiba N300
6. Toshiba N300 Pro
7. Toshiba X300
8. Toshiba X300 Pro
9. Western Digital Gold
10. Western Digital Red Plus
11. Western Digital Red Pro

A few notes are in order – the WD Ultrastar DC lineup which used to be in our earlier guides is not widely available in the North American retail market. We have replaced it with the WD Gold series. Toshiba's MG08 series includes a 9-platter 16TB CMR model. However, it is again enterprise-focused, and the retail market has to make do with the N300 and X300 drives for NAS and desktop systems. That said, the specifications are very similar, as we noted in the launch article.

Metrics that Matter

One of the easiest ways to narrow down the search for a suitable hard drive is to look at the target market of each family. The table below lists the suggested target market for each hard drive family we are considering today.

After filtering out models that don't apply to your use-case (as an example, for usage in a 4-bay NAS enclosure, one could rule out the Toshiba X300 straight away), we can then take a look at how the specifications of various drive families compare.

Based on these metrics, it is clear that the enterprise drives (Seagate Exos Enterprise and WD Gold) are rated to be more reliable in the long run over a big sample set. However, most consumer use-cases do not need a 550 TB/yr workload rating. 180 – 300 TB/yr workload rating is plenty reasonable for most users when the drives are going to be used as part of RAID arrays.

The BarraCuda Pro strikes a nice balance across many metrics, but it is rated only for 300K load / unload cycles. It also doesn't have the RV sensors present in the rest of the drives (other than the Toshiba X300 / X300 Pro).

In considering the non-enterprise drives, we note that the 'Unrecoverable Read Errors' metric is 10x worse for the WD and Toshiba drives compared to the Seagate ones. The MTTF metric for the IronWolf Pro is slightly better than the other drives (at 1.2M vs. 1M hours).

One of the aspects not mentioned in the above table is that the WD Red SMR drive is in the 5400 RPM class, while the other drives (including the Red Plus) are all 7200 RPM. Despite similar spindle speeds, the Red Plus firmware is optimized for a low noise profile across most capacity points. It might not win out on benchmarks, but possesses qualities that are important for some consumer use-cases. Another aspect to be kept in mind is that the WD Red line is now exclusively SMR-based, with the CMR drives moving to the WD Red Plus line. Unless the consumer is technically savvy enough to understand the pitfalls of SMR and its applicability to the desired use-case, the SMR-based WD Red line is best avoided. Hence, we do not include the WD Red lineup in our recommendatios.

Pricing Matrix and Concluding Remarks

The matrix below shows the current pricing for each available capacity point in all the considered hard drive families.

The desktop storage market is a straight shoot-out between the Seagate BarraCuda Pro and the Toshiba X300 Pro. Seagate opted to stop releasing BarraCuda Pro drives above the 14TB capacity point, but Toshiba has a 16TB X300 and 18TB X300 Pro available for purchase. The Toshiba X300 is consistently priced a bit higher than the Seagate BarraCuda Pro. The higher capacity versions of the Toshiba X300 use 9 platters, and consume more power compared to the corresponding BarraCuda Pro. The Seagate pricing also includes data recovery service during the warranty period. For very similar pricing, we get a much higher workload rating, better reliability, and three extra years of warranty. That said, the Seagate Exos Enterprise at the 18TB capacity point presents the lowest $/TB metric, and wins our recommendation for this market segment despite the high power usage and noise factor. If a silent drive with relatively low power consumption is needed, the low price of the Seagate Barracuda Pro series could be an attractive alternative at lower capacity points, while the X300 Pro can fit the bill at higher ones.

Prior to commenting on the other possible use-cases, one thing is clear from the above pricing matrix – if you absolutely require 22TB per disk, the WD Gold and WD Red Pro are your only choices for purchase in the retail market currently.

On the SOHO / SMB NAS front, the Seagate Exos series and WD Gold, despite their enterprise background, continue to make a good case across multiple capacity points. The only places where the WD Red series (Pro and Plus) could edge out as a better choice are scenarios where the power consumption and noise need to be kept low. After poring over the datasheets, we have come to realize that the idle power consumption delta for the NAS-focused drives against the enterprise drives (Exos and Gold) is quite significant – sub-3W compared to 5W+. The acoustics across multiple capacity points are also much better. We have updated our recommendations accordingly.

The IronWolf NAS models deliver slightly better performance compared to the WD Red / WD Red Plus, but, have correspondingly higher power consumption numbers. On the SMB / SME NAS front, the WD Red Pro has started reaching better price points compared to previous quarters, managing to undercut the IronWolf Pro across almost all capacities. However, a plus point for the IronWolf Pro is the inclusion of the Data Rescue Service for a 3-year period in addition to the usual warranty.

It must also be kept in mind that the Segate Exos Enterprise and WD Gold are enterprise drives meant to be used in server rooms where noise and power consumption (to a large extent) are not as important as performance. As per the Exos 16TB and 18TB Exos Enterprise product manuals, the acoustics specifications are around 28-30 dB at idle, and 32-34 dB for performance seeks. Power consumption ranges from 1.31W at standby to 9.45W for high queue-depth random writes, with idling average being around 5.26W. The numbers for WD Gold are very similar. On the other hand, a drive like WD Red Pro has idle acoustics around 20 dB for the high-capacity models, though performance seeks are around 36 dB. Unless one is buying for a datacenter storage array, it is fair to expect that the drives are going to be idle for more time than doing performance seeks in SMB or SOHO NAS units. While WD doesn't break down power consumption by access trace type, the specifications indicate power numbers between 0.6W and 6.2W – considerably lower than the Exos / Gold. Price can be a key factor (which is the reason for shifting a number of our recommendations to the Exos series), but data hoarders with multi-bay NAS units or those in a SOHO setting may prefer thte NAS to be not as noisy or consume more power than needed.

Based on the above analysis, the recommendations for the NAS drives are clear – for the absolute highest capacity drive currently in the market (if you have to compulsorily get one) – WD Gold. The WD Red Pro and Seagate IronWolf Pro are excellent alternatives when performance is not as important as overall power consumption and low noise profile. This is assuming that the user has adopted the 3-2-1 backup rule and doesn't foresee the need for a data recovery service (DRS). The IronWolf Pro NAS and the BarraCuda Pro both bundle the DRS. This needs to be taken into account while considering the pricing difference against other drives in the same capacity class.

Finally, a note on shucking – Drive prices have come down to such an extent that taking out the HDD from an external DAS, and losing the warranty in the process, is no longer worthwhile. Compelling prices often hide reliability issues and lowered workload ratings (HDDs are essentially binned, and allocated to different market segments based on their expected reliaability). In light of this, users should treat money spent on shucked drives as a sunk cost, and ensure that such drives are used only in non-critical scenarios.