They’re considered archive drives because they’re meant to have data written infrequently. They’re not really specialty drives, you can use them for daily use where write speed is not a factor. For example using it for saving backups during off peak hours. You can use an SMR drive for daily use as long as you don’t mind the slower write speed. Reads are just as fast any 5400 RPM drive.
NERD ALERT
A few weeks ago, I created a ~6TB backup of files to one of my Seagate Archive drives. I got a constant ~130 MB/s transfer speed with peaks up to 180 MB/s with both drives in a multi-drive USB 3.0 enclosure. Same as with any other drive I’ve used. Note that I formatted the drive before the transfer, so there was thing nothing to overwrite. If I had to to overwrite existing files, it would be much slower, as slow as half the speed.
I would hope to god if I paid more money for a harddrive (one which happens to be in a laptop), then it is higher quality and/or has better specs. Are you saying that is not the case?
While it’s true that higher quality demands a higher price, the assumption that a higher price guarantees higher quality is often not a valid assumption. Appeals to God not withstanding.
With the probable exception of super high end laptop manufacturers like Alienware, most manufacturers install whatever’s cheapest at the time. Anything not specifically listed by product/model number is subject to change. Makes sense since models may be out of stock or discontinued at the time the laptop is built.
Checking Alienware’s site, even they don’t specify a SSD/HDD product/model, but you could probably ask and specify exactly what you want.
What the higher price buys is better build components, firmware and longer warranty. Definitely better, yes and no. It may survive a 3’ drop better, but most likely will still die immediately if it’s spinning at the time.
Yup, the WD Elements range is like that, IIRC - open it up and there is no separate drive and interface, and the drive has no standard SATA or IDE pins; the PCB on the bottom of the board is a custom job and has the USB socket right on it.
Trouble is with that, if anything goes wrong with the electronics, the only hope of recovery is to try to find a matching device and swap out the whole PCB on the underside of the drive, which is not a fun job for the amateur
I had a WD portable drive that was like that. It died and I was planning to try the bare drive in another case but couldn’t. Had to toss it.
Since external drives are so cheap now, look up the drive you’re planning to buy and there’s probably someone talking about whether the USB interface is permanent or not.
Another potential issue is that some, especially NAS drives utilize the the 3.3V connection on the SATA power connector which some older or cheap power supplies or third party USB enclosures don’t support. Its function is explained here:
“Speaking of the PWDIS feature in the 3.3 and 3.2+ SATA specifications, its purpose is to allow users to manage the power consumption of SATA devices remotely and also provides the ability to hard-reset the drive from a distance in case you need to power cycle it. This feature is mainly designed with business environments in mind, where the HDDs are installed in storage enclosures located in remote facilities.”
Interesting about the use of 2.5" drives. I remember cloud storage provider BackBlaze* planning or possibly actually testing 2.5" drives in their servers because of less heat, vibration and power consumption.
*Backblaze is one of the few, possibly only provider that reports on what drives they’re using and failure rates. I’ve posted their quarterly reports to another forum for general information, but always get someone saying, “That’s not real life info, because they’re in a server environment!” To which I answer and still get shot down, “True, but their drives are subjected to harsher conditions that anything at home and is the only (to my knowledge) data on large amounts of particular drives.”
Just read this on their blog post from 12/10/19:
Backblaze: Of the drives we’re purchasing, are they all 7200 RPM and 3.5” form factor? Is there any reason we’d consider slower drives or 2.5” drives?
Ariel: We use drives with varying speeds, though some power-conserving drives don’t disclose their drive speed. Power draw is a very important metric for us and the high speed enterprise drives are expensive in terms of power cost. We now total around 1.5 megawatts in power consumption in our centers, and I can tell you that every watt matters for reducing costs.
As far as 2.5″ drives, I’ve run the math and they’re not more cost effective than 3.5″ drives, so there’s no incentive for us to use them."