Originally Posted by
tpi2007
I upgraded from a 1 TB WD Black (from 2010) to a 2 TB Black just recently and was wondering just that - why hasn't this been done earlier? They cite costs, but I wonder how much it would have added.
Anyway, this is great, it's like internal RAID, after all. The performance of the new 2 TB drive at first seemed much better (and way more silent), but as soon as I filled it up halfway the sequential speed dropped from 200 MB/s to around 175 MB/s and drops below 170 MB/s with a web browser open with several tabs open and the more it fills up, the slower it gets. The noise while doing random operations also increased practically to the level of the one I was using before (this will probably get worse with multiple actuators unless they use some more sound insulation).
The random performance is also still the big limitation which could be greatly alleviated with multiple actuators - but in that respect, and seeing how capacities are set to increase a lot in coming ears, I would go as far as suggest that for desktops they bring back a long dead form factor (for HDD's) - the 5.25' one. That way they would potentially have space to put up to three sets of double actuators in there. We have the desktop cases (well, excluding some fancy new ones), make it happen!
As has been said, I also don't trust SSDs with important data. And the price per GB on an SSD is still too high to replace all HDDs. If I wanted a 2 TB SSD, I'd have to pay at least 600 € for one, but it can go above 700 € for better models. A normal 2 TB HDD costs below 80 € and the WD Black does cost a premium over 100 €, but it's faster and has been a very reliable series for me. And this is for 2 TB capacities, which is nothing extraordinary. You can't even buy higher capacities consumer SSDs anyway.