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Comment by nyanpasu64 | Hacker News Reader

For music collection and playback (low-bandwidth low-parallelism sequential reads), a mechanical drive would probably be substantially cheaper than SSD for large capacities without a substantial performance hit (though I don't know if you even need terabytes to store music). Anyway I have a 256GB Samsung 850 PRO SSD from a 2016 laptop, which I've used on and off and swapped between devices, and hasn't failed yet.

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Not sure what OP's specific use case is, but for me, the one big downside of spinning drives is noise. And even if the drive itself may be fairly quiet, you have to make sure its vibrations don't propagate to furniture where they can get amplified.

2.5 inch drives spinning at 5400 RPM are nearly silent (and that can be improved further if you tell the drive you want it to be silent).

I suppose it depends on the drive. I have a cheap external WD "passport" drive I use for backups. I sometimes sit it on a wooden end-table at my parents' house, and you can absolutely hear the vibrations.

Good point for especially storing music files. I'd like to use SSD every time for < 2TB data. Unfortunately, I'm a data hoarder so still spinning rusts.

SSD 1Tb Crucial BX500 - $70

WD Blue 1TB Desktop Hard Disk Drive - 5400 RPM SATA 6Gb/s 64MB Cache 3.5 Inch - WD10EZRZ - $50

I can't say what $20 is 'substantially cheaper'. Sure, if you need dozens of TBs...

And currently you have a big chance of getting an SMR HDD, which is... quite a gamble.

That's a very expensive HDD. Amazon got the 4 TB WD Blue for $65

I've been averaging about $19 per 4tb SAS drive on ebay (refurbs), though sata tends to cost a little more being the more common format.

I've had great luck with surplus HGST drives, they tend to be more reliable than Seagate.

That's very dependent on Amazon actually shipping you the drive, which between my recent experience and tales from a few friends in the industry, is much more of a coin toss these days.

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