For buying hard-drives, there are a few factors to consider:
- How much hard-drive size do you actually need right now? Do you need, as a minimum, 1 TB, or 2, or 10? Do note that for hard drive 1 GB = 1000 MB (as opposed to 1024), 1 TB = 1000 GB (as opposed to 1024), so if you buy a 1 TB hard drive, it will be around 10% smaller than you expect it to be. If you buy a large hard drive, even if you plan to buy a 10 TB hard drive, you might notice you got a 900+ GB hard drive.
- How much capacity you’ll need in the next period of time until you’ll buy another drive? Will you need another 1 TB, or 2, or 3?
- What’s the cost per GB/TB for a specific drive? This is one good way of comparing drives?
- Which drives are most reliable? You can Google “hard drive reliability statistics” and find recent data such as this one ».
- How fast do you need the drive to be? Do you need 5400 RPM (rotations per minute; 5400 is slower) or 7200 RPM (a bit faster)?
- How will you back-up the data? It might be a good idea to save the day-to-day, very important files and projects you work on a Cloud Drive syncing solution (Dropbox, Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive are fine solutions). For extra data, you might need yet another hard drive, internal, external, or in a NAS solution.
- Are you willing to wait for promotions to appear? Currently, Western Digital does from time to time (once every few months) discounts on Amazon.com. Currently, the 10 TB, 5400 RPM, internal, NAS hard drive from Western Digital is a good deal that appears on Amazon.com from time to time. Prime Day will be in October 2020 this year, as opposed to July, in previous years.
- Generally, I prefer to buy hard drives from Amazon.com, delivered from the US, rather than buying them from Romania, for price discounts.
