The Solid State Drives (SSD) might be all the hype right now, but if you want a huge amount of storage capacity at an affordable price then traditional mechanical hard drives are still the best way to go for. Sure the SSDs are a whole lot faster than hard drives but only few can offer the reliability and storage efficiency of a SATA drive.
However, if you really care about the speed first, you can always pair up an HDD with an SSD to use it as a secondary storage device. This will give you a plenty of space to work with and wouldn’t break your bank either.
We would recommend you to get an HDD with a speed of at least 7200RPM and 1TB of storage space. So with that being said, let’s take a look at the best Hard Drives to buy in 2018.
Seagate Barracuda 2TB
The Seagate is one of the most well-known brands in the hard drive industry, they offer really great performance and storage capacity for the price. Their Barracuda line up is the best option if you are on a really tight budget, it offers a great ratio of gigabyte to dollar and performance perks to top it off. This 3.5 inch SATA drive performs up to five times faster than traditional a 7200RPM desktop drives and is perfect for storing 80 25GB-sized games. It has the potential of reading and writing with a speed of 200MB/s. The 2TB variant hits a particular sweet spot by balancing high performance and affordability. You can purchase it from Amazon here.
Western Digital WD Blue 1TB
The next hard drive on our list is the Western Digital WD Blue 1TB which was released back in 2012 and is still one of the best selling hard drives. It offers 1TB of space which is decent considering its low price, it still provides enough space or 200,000 songs or more than 17 hours of music. The performance is pretty impressive and you also get features like IntelliSeek, which analyzes the optimum speed to lower both power consumption, as well as noise and vibration to prevent any data loss. The read and write speed is not the best and you get around 170MB/s but it gets the job done. Buy it from Amazon here.
Toshiba X300
Toshiba is another well-known brand in the industry which offers great quality hard drives for the price. The Toshiba X300 comes in a variety of storage options from 4 to 8TB which makes it a high-capacity, high-performance champ worth taking a look at. The product itself sits in a 3.5 inch footprint and it offers 7,200RPM and includes 128MB of cache for fast operation, which are all standard specs for a top-level SATA drive. You get 2 years of warranty with it which is pretty short considering other drives on the list but overall it is a really great option to go. Get it from Amazon here.
WD Gold 8TB Datacenter
If you are looking for a really large capacity hard drive for running your small business then the WD Gold 8TB Datacenter would be the best choice for you. The company has especially designed this drive for enterprise services or for use in data centers, this means it will allow you to run data transfers 24 hours a day, every day of the year transferring up to 550TB per year and it won’t fail on you. The drive hits a sweet spot by balancing the quality performance and affordability. You even get 5 years of warranty with this product assuring you to protect you against certain levels of factory faults. You can buy it from Amazon here.
WD VelociRaptor 250GB SATA Drive
The WD VelociRaptor 250GB SATA Drive is the best performer on our list as it has a speed of 10,000 RPM. This device is a king when it comes to app load times giving you 6GB/s of speed and 64MB of cache. This performance level is perfect for gamers as the VelociRaptor drives are ready to store large game libraries, and the super fast platters will help those games launch and load quickly. The capacity might not be enough considering its price but if performance is what you want then you should go with it. There is even a Preemptive Wear Leveling tech (PWL) built in which optimizes the performance even more and helps to keep things running smooth and cool, even at those blistering speeds. You can find it on Amazon here.
Seagate Firecuda Desktop
If you are looking for a hybrid hard drive which comes with a little capacity of solid-state storage then the Seagate Firecuda Desktop would be the best choice for you. It will provide you with 8 Gigs of solid-storage which stores your frequently used data to make accessing it a lot faster. This drive has a speed of 7200 RPM and has 64 MB cache which is pretty decent considering this drives low price. It can store up to 2TB of data and comes with 5 years warranty which makes this device worth taking a look at. You can get it from Amazon here.
Seagate IronWolf NAS
The Seagate IronWolf NAS is one of the best drives that you can get your hands on as it offers premium specs at a price similar to that of a standard hard drive. It comes equipped with NAS optimization which greatly improves the performance and the spinning at a fresh 7200 RPM makes it even sweeter. It comes with 256 MB cache and can run 24/7 at max speed without failing on you. This drive is available in a range of 6 to 12TB and comes with 5 years warranty which makes it perfect for small business. Buy it from Amazon here.
WD Black 6TB
The WD Black 6TB is one of the fastest hard drives that you can get, it especially designed to boost up the performance making it perfect choice for producers and gamers. It sports a dual-core processor that greatly increases the processing capability. It also houses 128 MB cache DRAM and offers 218 MB/s rate data transfer. The drive is equipped with WD’s Dynamic Cache Technology that helps to increase caching algorithm in real time. This is a slightly expensive SATA hard drive compared to other ones on the list but if speed is what you crave then this drive would be perfect for you. It also comes with 5 years of limited warranty so you can feel good about the purchase on that level as well. Get it from Amazon here.
So this was our list of best HDD that you can get your hands on, I hope you enjoyed our roundup. If you know some other hard drives that you think should be featured in our list then make sure to drop down a comment below.