On Tue, 14 Aug 2018 18:55:03 -0700, mike wrote:

On 8/14/2018 3:24 PM, Mark Perkins wrote:
On Tue, 14 Aug 2018 13:58:00 -0500, Lynn McGuire
wrote:

On 8/12/2018 12:58 AM, Mark Perkins wrote:
On Wed, 8 Aug 2018 20:37:01 -0500, Lynn McGuire
wrote:

"Why I Will Never Buy a Hard Drive Again"

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/ch...ves,37563.html

"It’s been years since I was willing to work on any PC that boots from a
mechanical hard drive. Once you get used to the snappy response times
and speedier gameload times of an SSD, going back to a hard drive feels
like computing through a thick layer of molasses."

Lynn

If you were buying a 'large' drive now, what would you buy? SMR seems
like something to be avoided, so if I want a drive in the 8-10-12+
range, what's available?

Not just asking Lynn, anyone can chime in.

I buy 8 TB WD externals for backups drives for our LAN. We have three
spinning and seven externals. I replace one external drive every six
months and archive the old one. It may be time to jump to the 10 TB,
our LAN backup is now 4 TB.

https://www.amazon.com/Book-Desktop-...dp/B01LQQHLGC/

Your situation is obviously business-related while my situation is just
a home LAN with a handful of PCs, three of which I actually care about,
so the part about archiving a drive every six months and replacing it
wouldn't apply, but the rest is very helpful.

I see the 8TB on Amazon for $160 ($20/GB) and the 10TB for $270
($27/GB), both of which are pretty darn amazing. The higher per-GB price
of the 10TB is offset by the fact that fewer drives are needed, if
USB/SATA ports or desktop/bay space are a limiting factor.

In my case, if I were to buy external drives, I would open the cases and
strip the drives out to mount them internally. I don't have much use for
external drives, but I know they're popular with others.

Make sure you know what you're getting.
I bought a 2.5" external USB drive.
Took it apart to discover that the USB is on the drive controller
board and there's no option to use it otherwise.
No idea if this happens with 3.5".

Good point. I always read reviews, especially the Q&A section, since
people tend to ask what's inside an external case.