SomeGuy
Veteran Member
Needed a bit more hard drive space for some stupidly large stuff, so I picked up a 2TB WD Black drive at Microcenter. That is their top of the line consumer performance model with longer warranty. In the past they were just branded as a professional drive, the same as the other drives, but now the box fancifully calls it a "Gaming" drive. What?
I guess desktop computers are almost always called "gaming rigs" now. Because, you know, nobody actually does real work any more. They just play with their toy cell phones all day.
The entire lineup of drives is rather confusing. They also had a slower spinning 4TB drive that uses "Shingled Magnetic Recording", that is intended just for storage. I had tired an SMR drive for something once and it was mind boggling slow.
Then they had a sort of middle-ground drive, a slower spinning "Conventional Magnetic Recording" drive but it was branded as "Western Digital Purple" specifically for "surveillance system" use. I find it hard to believe it would really have anything special about it that would be used only by a "surveillance system".
Of course, then there are the Western Digital Red drives that are for use in hardware RAID systems. I assume they support RAID specific features such as spindle syncing.
I'm guessing all currently produced drives probably use 4K sectors internally, but they don't say anything about that any more. It looks like all the consumer-oriented drives at least still support emulating 512 byte sectors. It would be nice if there were an easy way to tell, but I guess it doesn't hurt to 4k align an MBR partition even if a drive does not need it. At least I guess alignment is still a speed issue. Not that anyone else uses MBR any more.
I'd heard some talk that Microsoft wanted to forbid people from installing Windows 11 or whatever version they are up to on spinning hard drives, in favor of selling more solid state drives. Not really my thing.
It is all so confusing now.
But hell, I've still got one of those IMI 5 megabyte full height hard drives.
I guess desktop computers are almost always called "gaming rigs" now. Because, you know, nobody actually does real work any more. They just play with their toy cell phones all day.
The entire lineup of drives is rather confusing. They also had a slower spinning 4TB drive that uses "Shingled Magnetic Recording", that is intended just for storage. I had tired an SMR drive for something once and it was mind boggling slow.
Then they had a sort of middle-ground drive, a slower spinning "Conventional Magnetic Recording" drive but it was branded as "Western Digital Purple" specifically for "surveillance system" use. I find it hard to believe it would really have anything special about it that would be used only by a "surveillance system".
Of course, then there are the Western Digital Red drives that are for use in hardware RAID systems. I assume they support RAID specific features such as spindle syncing.
I'm guessing all currently produced drives probably use 4K sectors internally, but they don't say anything about that any more. It looks like all the consumer-oriented drives at least still support emulating 512 byte sectors. It would be nice if there were an easy way to tell, but I guess it doesn't hurt to 4k align an MBR partition even if a drive does not need it. At least I guess alignment is still a speed issue. Not that anyone else uses MBR any more.
I'd heard some talk that Microsoft wanted to forbid people from installing Windows 11 or whatever version they are up to on spinning hard drives, in favor of selling more solid state drives. Not really my thing.
It is all so confusing now.
But hell, I've still got one of those IMI 5 megabyte full height hard drives.
