Wow, that's odd. That could not be less true - Spinning drives are plentiful, reasonably priced, and usually perfectly reliable. Most people will have a portable HDD for storage, but it's mostly serious nerds who use cloud storage on any sort of regular basis, with the exception of putting photos on Facebook.
Look at Newegg reviews. There are all the 2, 3 and 4TB desktop magnetic drives with a 5-egg rating sorted by most reviews. The most has 14 reviews.
Chill out, man. I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm saying that as far as I've seen, it's not the same here. Where, I might add, very few people use Newegg, and most use local distributors like Umart and MSI - unsurprising, considering Newegg only started shipping here at all last year, april I think, and the Parts+currency conversion and shipping will often set you back more than it costs just buying local. I have no doubt it's that way in the US.
I also know that my local Umart, HDDs are one of their least RMA'd or returned items, according to my mate on staff. So either they're not fucking up as much, or people are just keeping broken drives.
On a modern computer, never use a single spinning disk. Pair them. Windows 10's disk management makes that super easy and plenty performant for the uses of spinning disks.
Pair them with mirroring or parity or how? I need all this space, I don't want to waste a bunch on parity/mirroring. The important backups are in the cloud/NAS which are safe.
SSDs for apps and performance DAS for creative media (video from cons, photo dumps, etc...) NAS for consumption media (torrents, movies, whatever) and local backups Glacier for periodic backup
But, DAS isn't cheap. For way less money, you can take advantage of those ultra cheap spinning disks. Even buying double is cheaper than a DAS.
If you go down to 4-egg territory you will see plenty of perfectly reasonable drives. However, even the ones with hundreds of reviews and four eggs still have like 20%+ 1-egg reviews from people who had the drive crash on them. 1/5 failure rate is not good.
You're assuming reviewers are a representative sample though. I imagine people are way more likely to leave a negative for a DOA than a positive review for a drive that performs as it should.
Also, it seems like the spinning disk manufacturers are really trying to label them to milk people for more money. They are classifying drives as surveillance, desktop, NAS, enterprise, gamer, green, black, blue, etc. The low ends ones are cheap, and the enterprise ones are hundreds extra.
My understanding is that at least surveillance drives are actually different, because there designed to survive being written to 24/7.
If you go down to 4-egg territory you will see plenty of perfectly reasonable drives. However, even the ones with hundreds of reviews and four eggs still have like 20%+ 1-egg reviews from people who had the drive crash on them. 1/5 failure rate is not good.
You're assuming reviewers are a representative sample though. I imagine people are way more likely to leave a negative for a DOA than a positive review for a drive that performs as it should.
Also, it seems like the spinning disk manufacturers are really trying to label them to milk people for more money. They are classifying drives as surveillance, desktop, NAS, enterprise, gamer, green, black, blue, etc. The low ends ones are cheap, and the enterprise ones are hundreds extra.
My understanding is that at least surveillance drives are actually different, because there designed to survive being written to 24/7.
My impression was that surveillance drives are the crappy ones. You generally don't keep a huge archive of your security camera video. You throw away old data when you run out of space and start overwriting it. You also don't care as much if it crashes since the likelihood of that happening right after a security incident is low. If there is an incident, you go into your security software and click on some stuff to permanently export and the relevant video section to another device.
I can only fit so many drives in this box. What's the point of NAS if I'm going to waste space mirroring inside my desktop?
I tend to get mid-towers, so I have space for 6 or so large drives.
I might go DAS this time around. A Drobo Thunderbolt for local external storage, my NAS for remote external storage, and 2 SSDs just for apps and active video editing.
I just had a Western Digital 1 TB go bad on me so I replaced it with a 3TB Seagate and a Sandisk SSD. Here's hoping all goes well. This is for my desktop, which is now, unfortunately, old, it's about 5 years old now and was sitting for a couple of years. I cleaned it out, put the new hard drives in, put Windows 8 on it just in time to catch 10, and the one problem I am running into is that my video card is old and apparently can't do Direct X 11, so I am looking to pop a new video card in. I am looking at the Geforce 960 as it's relatively cheap but still not completely out of date. The computer currently has an i7 930 @ 2.80 GHz(that's what Windows says, if I'm describing this wrong, I apologize) and 6 gigs of RAM. I do want to play Arkham Knight at some point but I know I'm going to be waiting for the GOTY edition to be dirt cheap on Steam before I dive into that, and by then this computer may be a goner. For now, I want to run stuff like Project CARS and Assetto Corsa and Golf Club and have them look good. Will the 960 do what I want to do, or do I really need to step it up to a 970 or 980? If I get the 960, will it make a big deal if I get the 4 gig RAM version instead of the 2 gig version? EDIT: One other thing, which manufacturer should I buy from? There's so many editions of this card from MSI, Asus, Gigabyte, and EVGA, and probably others I'm not thinking of.
Your video card question has been answered multiple times since the 900 series was released. I would recommend a 970 if you're playing on 1920x1080, 980 if higher resolutions however if cost is a constraint just go with the 960 4gb. Wait for Batman. I have the same CPU except overclocked and the same amount of RAM I'm upgrading those 2 plus the motherboard when Skylake is released by Intel later this year. Not heard the best about Sandisk SSDs but they shouldn't be too bad, I prefer the Samsung drives due to the speed and reliability (warranties longer than most magnetic drives).
What's up with all these M.2 drives that are SATA III only though? There's not a speed improvement there.
Edit: Extra question: is a 980 really worth it over a 970?
I don't know. What I do know is that my 680 is so strong it still runs everything I play at max settings full frames, and outperformed the 770. Paying more for it was the right choice since it's had such a long life. I don't know if the same can be said for 980.
I think the 970 is supposed to be the "2 steps down" of optimal price to performance. 980(ti)'s are the most expensive card a person should ever actually buy. If you're going for a 980 I recommend watching r/buildapcsales for a while to find something cheap. Easily knock $100 off the $500 retail price.
I would recommend a 980 (or higher) if you want to play anything on resolutions higher than 1920 x 1080 (e.g. most VR solutions recommend high resolution plus high frame rate). The 970 is fine for 1080p but anything higher will degrade frame rate based on the game.
I would get a card which turns it's fans off when not required, since the 900 series is so efficient you will have virtually zero sound other than case or CPU fans.
Not 100% sure on the power supply, the Stallion series was pretty unreliable (made by Solytech), not sure if they make the Lightning or Capstone series any more, they were rebranded Superflower PSUs which are quite good.
I would recommend going with anything that is a re-branded or originally branded Seasonic or Super Flower.
Also I would recommend going up to 700 / 750W in case you want to add more to your computer.
I would go with the Samsung 950 and seems to be cheaper than the one you've listed, yet is faster.
I'm skeptical about needing anything more than 600W - the website is thinking I need less than 400 with the current build. Hard Drive-wise, the SM651 series saves forty bucks or so over Samsung's 950 series, and all you really lose is the 950's ability to do ridiculously-parallelized random access.
Unless you're running multiple graphics cards or something similarly crazy you won't need more than 600 W. Just make sure your theoretical power need isn't more than 80% of your max output.
Personally, I'd wait if you're going to be buying cards and the like - Both AMD and Nvidia have some new stuff coming out around mid-year, which should nudge the price down a bit. Or, y'know, you can just buy the new one if you want.
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I also know that my local Umart, HDDs are one of their least RMA'd or returned items, according to my mate on staff. So either they're not fucking up as much, or people are just keeping broken drives.
My workflow for video is basically:
1. Dump all the raw stuff to mirrored spinning disks
2. Export masters to Youtube/Flickr/NAS
3. Delete all the raw sources
I like to know that the dumping ground for not-yet-processed stuff is reliable. I'm not putting 100+GB of raw video on my NAS for every con.
SSDs for apps and performance
DAS for creative media (video from cons, photo dumps, etc...)
NAS for consumption media (torrents, movies, whatever) and local backups
Glacier for periodic backup
But, DAS isn't cheap. For way less money, you can take advantage of those ultra cheap spinning disks. Even buying double is cheaper than a DAS.
Moral: Don't buy Seagate
I might go DAS this time around. A Drobo Thunderbolt for local external storage, my NAS for remote external storage, and 2 SSDs just for apps and active video editing.
My latest WD drive 3TB is RED, the others are Green. WD's branding make it easy to choose.
This is for my desktop, which is now, unfortunately, old, it's about 5 years old now and was sitting for a couple of years. I cleaned it out, put the new hard drives in, put Windows 8 on it just in time to catch 10, and the one problem I am running into is that my video card is old and apparently can't do Direct X 11, so I am looking to pop a new video card in. I am looking at the Geforce 960 as it's relatively cheap but still not completely out of date. The computer currently has an i7 930 @ 2.80 GHz(that's what Windows says, if I'm describing this wrong, I apologize) and 6 gigs of RAM. I do want to play Arkham Knight at some point but I know I'm going to be waiting for the GOTY edition to be dirt cheap on Steam before I dive into that, and by then this computer may be a goner. For now, I want to run stuff like Project CARS and Assetto Corsa and Golf Club and have them look good. Will the 960 do what I want to do, or do I really need to step it up to a 970 or 980? If I get the 960, will it make a big deal if I get the 4 gig RAM version instead of the 2 gig version?
EDIT: One other thing, which manufacturer should I buy from? There's so many editions of this card from MSI, Asus, Gigabyte, and EVGA, and probably others I'm not thinking of.
I would recommend a 970 if you're playing on 1920x1080, 980 if higher resolutions however if cost is a constraint just go with the 960 4gb.
Wait for Batman.
I have the same CPU except overclocked and the same amount of RAM I'm upgrading those 2 plus the motherboard when Skylake is released by Intel later this year.
Not heard the best about Sandisk SSDs but they shouldn't be too bad, I prefer the Samsung drives due to the speed and reliability (warranties longer than most magnetic drives).
But, they don't come with stock coolers anymore (or at least, don't yet come with them...
Edit: Extra question: is a 980 really worth it over a 970?
The 970 is fine for 1080p but anything higher will degrade frame rate based on the game.
I would get a card which turns it's fans off when not required, since the 900 series is so efficient you will have virtually zero sound other than case or CPU fans.
Not 100% sure on the power supply, the Stallion series was pretty unreliable (made by Solytech), not sure if they make the Lightning or Capstone series any more, they were rebranded Superflower PSUs which are quite good.
I would recommend going with anything that is a re-branded or originally branded Seasonic or Super Flower.
Also I would recommend going up to 700 / 750W in case you want to add more to your computer.
I would go with the Samsung 950 and seems to be cheaper than the one you've listed, yet is faster.
Hard Drive-wise, the SM651 series saves forty bucks or so over Samsung's 950 series, and all you really lose is the 950's ability to do ridiculously-parallelized random access.