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WD Black 6TB HD

Agent Orange

Agent Orange

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Newegg has Western Digital Black 6TB hard drives on sale today for $169. This one is good for gamers and the reviews are positive. I bought one as my main gamer's storage is very crowded and my old 2TB cradle mounted HD and portable Sony USB 4TB just don't cut the mustard. I also have a 8TB attached to the home entertainment system bit that's dedicated to movie storage.

https://www.newegg.com/black-wd6003fzbx-6tb/p/234-000G-000W5
 
Chuck(G) said:
What's the track record for reliability on these drives?
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This, the black, is a good one and comes with a 5 year warranty. The deal with any of these is that when you first get it and it spins up without bearing noise and squeaks, you're most likely to be good to go. I like the 256MB cache and at 7200 RPM as it makes it ideal for gaming. I would not go with Seagate as their reliability is down considerably.
 
Newegg has the Seagate IronWolf 8TB NAS Hard Drive 7200 RPM 256MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s CMR 3.5" Internal HDD for RAID Network Attached Storage ST8000VN0022 for $184.99 shipped. 3 year warrenty.

Gamers want NVME these days don't they? I seen a 2TB model for 197.99 shipped from Newegg.
 
That's what I put in my gaming machine (2TB NVME). Also has a 1TB drive to hold movies as I rip them to send to my NAS for use with Plex.
 
Unknown_K said:
Newegg has the Seagate IronWolf 8TB NAS Hard Drive 7200 RPM 256MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s CMR 3.5" Internal HDD for RAID Network Attached Storage ST8000VN0022 for $184.99 shipped. 3 year warrenty.

Gamers want NVME these days don't they? I seen a 2TB model for 197.99 shipped from Newegg.
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Seagate has had a bad performance record lately and this series is an attempt to make up for the past (read Tom's). I'll go with 6TB for $169 and it's fast enough. Any game that I have which absolutely craves more speed I can always slide it down to my 1TB Samsung 980. I like the 5 year warranty.
 
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Unknown_K said:
...Gamers want NVME these days don't they? I seen a 2TB model for 197.99 shipped from Newegg.
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I've gone hilt deep on the NVME. Even going so far as to get a nvme raid card and 4x 2tb drives.

I can say, with relative certainty, it makes a MASSIVE difference. Not so much in the loading time department*, but if your game ever touches the hard drive during play, nvme responds instantly. spinning rust tends to cause micro stuttering.

*- games & apps that have been designed to work on ssd/nvme have massive gains over programs that don't. Case in point, Cyberpunk 2077. Looking at only loading times, I load into the world in 6-8 seconds, and I have zero loading stutters in game. This includes fast travel. It's literally a 3-4 second wait between fast travels.

Previous to nvme, I was using 4x 640gb WD black drives. they have damn near 100,000 hours on them and still work fine. They were fast, but going from those drives to nvme was beyond comparison.
 
Bob is correct about the NVME speed and I have the same. However, here's the thing; I have 13 games in particular (there's more - lots more) that take up over 500GB of my big gamer's Samsung 1TB 980. That along with my other personal files just about eats up my 1TB. Some of the games can remain on the 980 such as Cyberpunk 2077, Witcher, and a few others, but the rest are going the 6TB route. No one is standing over my shoulder with a stop watch, and I could care less about loading speed as my 3700X & RTX 2070 more than pick up the slack.
 
luckybob said:
I've gone hilt deep on the NVME. Even going so far as to get a nvme raid card and 4x 2tb drives.

I can say, with relative certainty, it makes a MASSIVE difference. Not so much in the loading time department*, but if your game ever touches the hard drive during play, nvme responds instantly. spinning rust tends to cause micro stuttering.

*- games & apps that have been designed to work on ssd/nvme have massive gains over programs that don't. Case in point, Cyberpunk 2077. Looking at only loading times, I load into the world in 6-8 seconds, and I have zero loading stutters in game. This includes fast travel. It's literally a 3-4 second wait between fast travels.

Previous to nvme, I was using 4x 640gb WD black drives. they have damn near 100,000 hours on them and still work fine. They were fast, but going from those drives to nvme was beyond comparison.
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That's all well and good but this thread is about storage not speed. When a 6TB NVME shows up at a reasonable price I'll probably opt for it.
 
and I'm saying, you can have both, granted at much greater cost, but I wanted to convey the cost was worth it. At least to me. The cost of the drives fall more each year, and I might have gotten aboard the nvme train a bit early, but I'd do it again in a heartbeat.

For the record, I spent my upgrade budget on that nvme setup, because I couldn't get a video card. And i'll be damned to pay more than msrp.

I also mentioned having old WD black drives. and upgrading from a quartet of those drives. I had hoped to illustrate, at least anecdotally, wd black drives were quality drives.
 
luckybob said:
and I'm saying, you can have both, granted at much greater cost, but I wanted to convey the cost was worth it. At least to me. The cost of the drives fall more each year, and I might have gotten aboard the nvme train a bit early, but I'd do it again in a heartbeat.

For the record, I spent my upgrade budget on that nvme setup, because I couldn't get a video card. And i'll be damned to pay more than msrp.

I also mentioned having old WD black drives. and upgrading from a quartet of those drives. I had hoped to illustrate, at least anecdotally, wd black drives were quality drives.
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Bob, I'm not trying to jerk your chain. I have a pair of WD Velociraptor 600GB (10K) that refuse to die. The Samsung 7.68TB NVME currently goes for about $1330 (that would be a new Zen 5900X & a down payment on a 3080), and that's a lot more than I'm willing to put into a storage device just for bragging rights to an ever so slight performance edge. My 1TB Samsung 980 Pro is fairly new, bought last summer, and I've got $228 in that from MicroCenter. It is blazingly fast but the way I play games is akin to Aunt Millie typing a letter with her toes. I've got so many games that I really have set back and try to figure what the heck is going on. I should have this new WD 6T thing in and running by the end of next week, and I'll post a "User Benchmark". IIRC, my 980 Pro now gets about 118% on my rig in that test. BTW the only thing that will be on the new WD is my game archive.
 
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GiGaBiTe said:
If you can find a drive without SMR, it's fine. With SMR, it's a dumpster fire.
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Note: WD Black 3.5" 6TB drives are CMR. SMR HD's seem to be a problem with large NAS setups as they 'fall out' of the RAID during their inherent 'clean-up cycle'.
 
SMR drives cause any RAID setup to fail.

RAID controllers have no concept of what SMR is, and when a drive starts doing SMR housekeeping, the RAID controller falls flat on its face because the drive stops responding to I/O requests in predictable periods of time. Even a single SMR drive used normally as an OS boot drive by itself will cause the OS to go insane because the OS can't figure out why the drive isn't responding predictably.

I found out the hard way a couple of years ago what SMR is. Bought myself two new 2 TB drives to put in a RAID. I figured the 256 MB of cache meant more performance over the 64 MB variants, man was I wrong. It took me until near the end of the return period to figure out why the drives refused to work in any RAID setup I put them in, and why both Linux and Windows were going insane using them even in single drive setups.
 
GiGaBiTe said:
SMR drives cause any RAID setup to fail.

RAID controllers have no concept of what SMR is, and when a drive starts doing SMR housekeeping, the RAID controller falls flat on its face because the drive stops responding to I/O requests in predictable periods of time. Even a single SMR drive used normally as an OS boot drive by itself will cause the OS to go insane because the OS can't figure out why the drive isn't responding predictably.

I found out the hard way a couple of years ago what SMR is. Bought myself two new 2 TB drives to put in a RAID. I figured the 256 MB of cache meant more performance over the 64 MB variants, man was I wrong. It took me until near the end of the return period to figure out why the drives refused to work in any RAID setup I put them in, and why both Linux and Windows were going insane using them even in single drive setups.
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Understand about the controller, but that's not the problem with large SMR's when used in a RAID. It seems that they take an extraordinarily long timeout period while doing internal housekeeping, and then they tend to fall out of the RAID. Now that's what I understand, but you being in the business may have a different take. From what I gather, it's mostly in the the larger 18-20TB or so drives. Both Seagate and WD acknowledge the problem and are working on a fix.
 
I'm confused about an SMR drive failing in a RAID set, don't these drives also have large caches, can't they just queue requests while they are wrapping up internal house keeping?
 
lyonadmiral said:
I'm confused about an SMR drive failing in a RAID set, don't these drives also have large caches, can't they just queue requests while they are wrapping up internal house keeping?
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I'm with you and have no clue. You can Google SMR and maybe that will put some light on it. Like you, I'm a user and I only care what works best for me and leave the engineering to someone else. I don't see myself running a herd of 20TB drives anytime soon as I have an 8TB on my home entertainment system and it seems to be doing okay. But you know, with sloppy programming in the video game industry these days, 20 or so GB is nothing for just the installation files.
 
lyonadmiral said:
I'm confused about an SMR drive failing in a RAID set, don't these drives also have large caches, can't they just queue requests while they are wrapping up internal house keeping?
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The large caches are needed for the SMR housekeeping itself, it doesn't help at all with backed up I/O requests from the disk controller. To buffer even a couple of seconds of I/O from the host system, you'd need a buffer of dozens of gigabytes with the speed of modern drives. Remember that modern mechanical drives can move around hundreds of megabytes per second, it wouldn't be economically feasible to include a dozen gigabytes of RAM on the drive PCB since it'd double the cost of the drive.

How hard drive manufacturers get around not having a huge buffer off-disk is that there are CMR zones on the SMR platters. The drive copies most frequently used data to the CMR area and less frequently used data to the SMR area. The problem is that the CMR area fills up and needs to be offloaded to the SMR area. During this time is when the drive tells the host system that it is busy and won't accept any I/O requests until the operation is complete.

SMR just needs to die, because it's being misused and abused by drive manufacturers. The only use of SMR is on archival storage, it has no business being in any other role, ever.
 
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