r/HDD

I am not very tech savvy, just your average joe with basic computer skills for school and the workplace. My laptop is running out of storage, and I would like to have an external hard drive to store most if not all the personal videos and photos to free up my laptop. I would also like to go as paperless as possible, and I have been thinking of scanning paper documents that are important to keep, but take up a lot of physical storage room. I don't believe that I need much more than a terabyte of storage. I also understand that it is recommended to have many backups just in case. I would like to start with simply finding a good, reliable hard drive. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Context: I have data scattered around 1-2TB hard drives, and some of it is starting to get full. Now I want to buy an empty space.

Should I buy one big drive, store everything there, and sell my small capacity drives,
or buy more small drives and distribute my data around to free up space?

Hello. I need your help.

I have a WD Elements 4TB 2621. I've had it for about two years and I use it to back up my personal files (thousands of small files each) and movies and TV series (larger files).

Of the 4TB, I have about 138GB free.

A few days ago, while transferring movies from my Windows 11 to the drive, it started malfunctioning. File transfers were slow, and sometimes the transfer speed dropped to 0 MB/s and the transfer would stall.

After a few days, it stopped working altogether.

Every time I connected it, it slowed down Windows 11 completely. File Explorer is a nightmare; everything freezes, nothing works when it's connected. The system stopped detecting it in File Explorer, but it does appear in other places, for example, in Device Manager.

I've attached screenshots that might be helpful.

Using HDDscan, almost miraculously, I managed to get it to run a SMART scan. If I double-click on the drive, it's no longer detected; it's grayed out at best. Then I entered `chkdsk F: /scan` in CMD, and after almost 3 hours, it said there was an error (surprise, surprise), and then File Explorer recognized the drive. I double-clicked it, and everything froze again.

I decided to do everything again, and when it was detected after `chkdsk F: /scan` in CMD, I tried to expand the drive from the left sidebar, the shortcuts.

I tried using TeraCopy and dragging my personal files folder, which, while large (over 100 GB), isn't much larger than the videos. It spent almost two days slowly loading files, but at one point the program crashed and never progressed again.

I shut everything down so my PC wouldn't suffer any more damage.

I'm not an expert; I need your help to recover my data FIRST and then try to fix the drive. I CAN'T LOSE MY PERSONAL FILES.

I hope you can help me without giving me solutions in "professional" language. Thank you very much.

I was trying to match a storage upgrade and wondered whether the price difference between SATA and NVMe SSDs on most of the online shops wasn't that high as a few years ago. A couple of years ago the prices for NVMe drives were enormous and now I see them with different size capacities and different brands. I searched through a number of listings while shopping for an upgrade for my own laptop, some retailers on Alibaba mostly to verify the price list for bulk purchase and specifications. Based on what I have researched, for most of your basic storage and for older systems, a SATA SSD is generally the cheaper choice if you are not too bothered about speed. Still if you look at the latest NVMe drives then with better read and write speeds then the higher cost becomes more manageable. Even during sales I observed that some NVMe drives were coming very close to mid-range SATA drives and that really made my decision that slightly easier. For those who have just purchased one, do you think that most day-to-day use is worth the additional investment into an NVMe or do you think that SATA will suffice mostly?

After cleaning my PC and replacing the thermal paste, I accidentally bent a few CPU pins. I assembled the computer again, and it displayed a CMOS reset error and turned off. Now, despite performing a reset and correctly re-inserting the M.2 SSD, the system does not detect it at all. It shows that I have no drive installed.

https://preview.redd.it/hqv68fhemc0h1.png?width=2508&format=png&auto=webp&s=a749329d68c015bd990fda1c86949021929f4738

I bought 2x IronWolf Pro 28 TB drives last week from the official Seagate website, for £799 each. I felt stupid for doing this given how high the price was due to the AI craze...

Today I was contemplating getting a third one for my 3-2-1 backup strategy. I go and check, and lo and behold - it's almost double the price now. wtf

https://www.seagate.com/gb/en/products/nas-drives/ironwolf-pro-hard-drive/

Current prices for their available drives direct from their store:

28TB - £1,259.99
24TB - £1,089.99
20TB - £899.99

The price I paid for 28TB a week ago: £799

https://preview.redd.it/frxnhkhbpc0h1.png?width=1772&format=png&auto=webp&s=926a7f5a264e324d12b791eedae8d40ae0679864

I bought a Seagate Momentus Thin. It showed up fine at first, I was using a SATA to Usb adapter to flash it with chromeos recovery with rufus. The flash failed and now it does not show up properly, It shows in device manager as ST320LT012-1DG14C but in disk management it shows needs initialization and that gives IO error. Its not making weird noises but it does not show in any program as a storage device. In bios it shows as 0gb and 2tb in disk management when its 320gb. Is it fucked ? ( same result with SATA)

For the purposes of storing data that does not need to accessed often, what is the better option between SSD and HDD? Or another option, if something else is better or worth considering. (Such as tapes, if cost effective.)

Does data stored on HDD last longer than data stored on SSD? Does data on SSD have a much greater risk of being lost than data on HDD?

And would external drives or internal drives or some other option be the best approach?

What is the total cost that can be expected with each option (on a comparative basis)?

I decided to set up a homelab, got a nice little pc for it, with the only caveat being that it's hdd/ssd mounts in the case are positioned horrendously and has the majority of space occupied by a slot in-out hdd bay in which I put a 4 tb hdd. As it turns out I have sent this hdd into hell as it sits idling at 61 degrees(Celsius). I only realised this as the rest of the pc never went above 35-40 degrees Celsius. the pc case is a Medion case with proprietary mounts and sadness so do I need to construct my own hdd rack and get everything out the case and replace with normal sata, power cables for the HDDs?