HDD’s in a nutshell
Saturday, 29 Mar 2025
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I guess somewhat ironically it’s actually SSDs that do degrade over time, but it’s pretty wild that we’re still acting like something that has been the default for the past nearly 20 years is some closely guarded secret.
Just got a flash back about turning on the PC and going to have lunch so that it might have booted up by the time I came back and then I could proceed to grind woodcutting and firemaking skills off of maple trees in Daemonheim.
Good times.
HDDs don’t “degrade brutally” but that’s the gross simplification I’ve come to expect from reddit.
this is like a poem for reddit. a post thats just flat out wrong to a correction to a burn lol
I work in the security camera industry. It is not uncommon for us to find systems recording to a HDD with over 10 years of power on time
since when do hdds get slower over time
I have a WD Purple drive that is still kicking.
Lost two black drives in that time.
My OG sata SSD from 2013 is still alive, though
And my 4 tb nvme from 2023 is still doing its work
We’ll see what dies first
/Shrug
Edit: that purple drive is from 2015
I remember that old physics joke saying a full HD weighted more than an empty HD, which was actually true and proved later LOL
Sorry it’s taking too long to find the answer, it’s split into 100’s of pieces.
Please let me defrag first.
yes thats why my 2013 5400 rpm HDD is still holding all the data impeccably but 2017 SDD crashed wiping out my precious tour pictures . Plus HDDs don’t degrade unless there’s a literal solar flair/EM event or you decide to drop it from two storey . It’s the software that gets complicated and heavy.
Hardware doesn’t get slower, only software more advanced.
HDDs don’t degrade, they only become slower as they get full.
Because the relative speed on the outside of the platter is much faster than on the inside.
Wipe it at it will be as good as new.
SSDs also get slower when filled up, because their speed is also dependent on cache, which is greatly limited.
It’s out of question that a SSD as boot drive should be standard bx 2025 standards.
But HDDs still offer extremely high capacities and ate very cost effective.
I just bought a 16TB HDD at the price you would pay for a high end 2TB NVMe SSD.
Why would I store my movies, documents and downloaded contents in SSDs?
For games, applications yes. But documents, files and archives?
Waste of money.
Using a hard drive for stuff other than storage is crazy work ngl
Seek time?
Seek religion.
HDDs do degrade! That’s how bad sectors show up over the years on crappy disks (Toshibas, occasionally Seagate).
I had a WD Black run for 10 years continuously before it started experiencing signs of failure. Sequential write speeds dropped to 1MB/s but reads were at 70MB/s. The drive used to be faster than that. Finally retired it, but it never encountered a sector it couldn’t read.
So much misinformation in this thread….
HDD performance is dependent on how close the read-write head is to the outer edge of the platter. The further out from the center, the faster the effective speed. This is not unique to HDDs, it affects any rotating storage medium, so CDs, DVDs and Blu-Rays.
Fragmentation is also a factor, but that’s fixable.
50k+ power on hour 2TB WD Black from 2013 is still my main storage device for games and stuff that don’t absolutely need it, it has not slowed down far as I can tell and it’s health status is still good
Do what any regular person would do, OS on SSD, currently played games on SSD, everything else on HDD
HDD barely degrade, but they need to be defragmented from time to time.
HDDs do not “brutally degrade over time”, you fill them with shit and never defrag/trim them.
60K? Sweet summer child. 😀
>HDD’s in a nutshell
You’ll probably get more use out of HDD’s if you put them in a computer case.
7200 RPM really isn’t slow except for newer gaming (last 5 years) and transferring large amounts of data. And obviously start up. For everything else there’s little difference vs SSD.
HDDs are hard to beat for mass data storage, but yeah, I would never run an OS or any kind of performance application from one ever again.
they shouldn’T degrade too much but damn hdds are low iops high latency
I have a 89,000 hour single platter Seagate drive with 0 bad sectors on it.
It’s still pretty quick, it lived 97% of it’s life in a RAID0 with it’s matching twin. Same hours, just 6 bad sectors.
I had a lot of bad HDDs and some amazingly resilient ones. Never a “brutal degradation” though.
Ssds for boot and gaming. HDDS for storing things.
I saw someone complaining on Facebook last night, about Assassin’s Creed Shadows being unoptimized as hell. He posted a video of him playing the game, and the game would get stuck every few seconds. He was on 4060ti and amd CPU or something, not the top of the line but pretty decent rig.
Turns out, he was running the game on HDD. People made fun of him and he was mad stubborn about the whole HDD vs SSD thing and said Elden Ring and ~~CP77~~ Cyberpunk2077 didn’t get him any issue.
SDDs degrade, too lol. And why is he mentioning Blue when he should be mentioning Red or even Black or Gold? And what is this “brutally” thing? I have a HDD that’s still running from the 80s.