Western Digital recertified 4TB drive £61

ancient_mariner

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That's a crazy high price considering these were around there a good few years ago.... Sounds like the noisy spinners froze in time and so did the prices... It won't be long until nvmes actually get cheaper per tb. We are probably just 11 months away .....
 
That's a crazy high price considering these were around there a good few years ago.... Sounds like the noisy spinners froze in time and so did the prices... It won't be long until nvmes actually get cheaper per tb. We are probably just 11 months away .....
It's nowhere near that close. Currently a 24TB hard drive can be bought for under £500 but you can't even get an 8TB NVME drive offering just a sixth of the capacity for that price, you'd need to spend hundreds more. The expectation was that hard drives were at the end of the line technology wise but they didn't 'freeze in time', capacities were increased past the 18TB mark up to 24TB which was then expected to be their limit until Seagate released a 30TB drive and other companies have also released new higher capacity drives. For bulk storage that would mean £480 for a hard drive or a staggering £4,200 for NVME storage and that gap isn't necessarily going to reduce quickly given HDD technology is still improving and SSDs are subject to volatile market conditions.

Also the current trend for SSD prices has been to go up as well. At one point it was possible to buy a brand new Samsung 8TB QVO SSD (very low performance but still flash) for just £250, now they are difficult to find for under £500. 4TB NVME looked to be the new sweetspot for SSD storage as they dropped to the £150 mark but they've climbed back up to over £200 now.
 
I have an old Toshiba 4Tb external USB spinner going up in the adds soon if anyone interested.
 
A hard drive is still an excellent backup medium, long lasting and inexpensive, though I wouldn't recommend one as the main data store in a computer.
 
That's actually a very attractive price, will get a couple for extra back up for the new laptop, where the main data drive is 4TB, and the system and system data 2TB


Edit. None in stock, and when you click notify me, the price is £110. con
 
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Edit. None in stock, and when you click notify me, the price is £110. con

When I posted they were available, but as you said, it's a good price. Sorry for the disappointment.
 
It's nowhere near that close. Currently a 24TB hard drive can be bought for under £500 but you can't even get an 8TB NVME drive offering just a sixth of the capacity for that price, you'd need to spend hundreds more. The expectation was that hard drives were at the end of the line technology wise but they didn't 'freeze in time', capacities were increased past the 18TB mark up to 24TB which was then expected to be their limit until Seagate released a 30TB drive and other companies have also released new higher capacity drives. For bulk storage that would mean £480 for a hard drive or a staggering £4,200 for NVME storage and that gap isn't necessarily going to reduce quickly given HDD technology is still improving and SSDs are subject to volatile market conditions.

Also the current trend for SSD prices has been to go up as well. At one point it was possible to buy a brand new Samsung 8TB QVO SSD (very low performance but still flash) for just £250, now they are difficult to find for under £500. 4TB NVME looked to be the new sweetspot for SSD storage as they dropped to the £150 mark but they've climbed back up to over £200 now.
yes, the big ones are still better value... I was actually referring to the 1-6TB desktop drive range, which frankly stalled in size and price over last 5 years, and with sub £200 4TB NVME offerings now, you can reasonably expect price to half in around 12 months as they have been doing every year. For example premium 1TB I bought for £120 not so long ago is now like £50, and 2TB is mainstream for just under that price.

I wouldn't pay much attention to the outdated SSDs either. It is dead technology, they will not advance. You might get a clearance sale at some point and that will be then end of them for good.

enterprises are stacking up nvmes... until there is the next big thing
 
I had to google what NVME is, if I understand correctly it’s an SSD drive but with a faster data transfer system
Agree with Toni a spinning hard drive is still perfect for long term storage of images, I recently bought another 8TB Seagate one was £140
The larger capacity ones at least seem to be getting cheaper
For working on images I use a San Disk 2 TB SSD , will have a look at NVME when I need another one
 
I had to google what NVME is, if I understand correctly it’s an SSD drive but with a faster data transfer system
Agree with Toni a spinning hard drive is still perfect for long term storage of images, I recently bought another 8TB Seagate one was £140
The larger capacity ones at least seem to be getting cheaper
For working on images I use a San Disk 2 TB SSD , will have a look at NVME when I need another one
Yes it's a faster standard that allows the drive to directly use the PCI-Express connection rather than a slower SATA standard which older SSDs used. Most non-soldered SSDs are now NVME.

As much as I'd like to move away from hard drives, there is no choice for reasonably priced bulk storage. Just bought a new 24TB drive for backing up data after increasing my main PC to 22TB storage, SSD prices are nowhere near viable for that.

yes, the big ones are still better value... I was actually referring to the 1-6TB desktop drive range, which frankly stalled in size and price over last 5 years, and with sub £200 4TB NVME offerings now, you can reasonably expect price to half in around 12 months as they have been doing every year. For example premium 1TB I bought for £120 not so long ago is now like £50, and 2TB is mainstream for just under that price.

I wouldn't pay much attention to the outdated SSDs either. It is dead technology, they will not advance. You might get a clearance sale at some point and that will be then end of them for good.

enterprises are stacking up nvmes... until there is the next big thing
The big hard drives are the only point of using hard drives these days so there's no point developing small drives and as I pointed out, you cannot expect prices to halve every 12 months given they've been going up substantially in some cases. I bought a 4TB NVME drive for £110 a couple of years ago, you won't find that for under £200 now, I bought a number of decent brand name 2TB drives for £90 and under which are all over the £100 mark and the 8TB drive I was going to buy for £250 (normal price around £300) now sells for over £500. Even if the prices were halving, it would still take many years for SSDs to get close to hard drive pricing...and that's assuming hard drive technology stays still which it doesn't, they've already announced the next generation of drives with a better price per TB.
 
From my point of view, the choice between spinning disks (HDD) and solid state memory (SSD) comes down to which, in my experience, has failed more often.

So far, I've never had a SSD fail in the almost fourteen years I've been using the technology (my oldest example being a 2011 MacBook Air). In that time, I've had half a dozen HDDs fail, all of which were replaced by SSDs, none of which have, so far, failed in turn.

As the HDDs fail, I now automatically replace them with SSDs, which typically have 2X or more capacity for little difference in price.

Acer Travelmate N15Q1 circuit board hard disk and SSD P1240181.jpg
 
For working on images I use a San Disk 2 TB SSD
extra careful with that one! I lost all my data on it and these specifically are very well known to go bust. Basically daily backups or get rid of it.
 
Basically daily backups or get rid of it.
That's the best advice you can give anyone.

Never have less than 2 copies of important data. 3 is better and 4 is better still. Make the backups automatic, so you don't forget to do them. I use Carbon Copy Cloner, which allows you to set up frequent and fully automatic backups. There are similar programmes available for Windows and Linux.
 
extra careful with that one! I lost all my data on it and these specifically are very well known to go bust. Basically daily backups or get rid of it.

That's the best advice you can give anyone.

Never have less than 2 copies of important data. 3 is better and 4 is better still. Make the backups automatic, so you don't forget to do them. I use Carbon Copy Cloner, which allows you to set up frequent and fully automatic backups. There are similar programmes available for Windows and Linux.

Thanks for the heads up. I didn’t know that about the san disk SSD
I do always have several backup’s, i use the SSD to dump all the images onto after a day out with the camera then backup then work on the images on the SSD , i dont keep anything on there long term
 
I would never buy large capacity drives for pics etc. I would rather have several smaller drives going on the principle of not putting all of your eggs in one basket!
 
I am a relatively newbie but my backup solution seems relatively basic but I think is ok

Phone photos: All my phone photos (raw+jpg) automatically backup to Google photos (which I export once a year to my computer hard drive and then my backup solution (see below). In addition, any phone photos I want to edit get manually transferred to lightroom mobile (backing up into lightroom cloud too).

Camera photos: I copy from the SD card to my computer hard drive, then select which photos to import into lightroom (which then get backed up into cloud.

Once a month I backup everything on hard drive onto an external SSD and take it into work. That day I bring back a second SSD from work and backup everything onto that SSD and leave that at home.

So my camera photos are always stored on my hard drive and lightroom cloud, and with a max of one month lag stored on two external hard drives (one not in house)

My phone photos are always stored in Google cloud, with decent ones in lightroom cloud, and once a year also on the harddrive and SSDs
 
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I would never buy large capacity drives for pics etc. I would rather have several smaller drives going on the principle of not putting all of your eggs in one basket!
Data should never exist in one place so if a drive fails, there's no data lost. Smaller drives make it potentially more difficult to manage the backups and I wouldn't accept losing any of my photos. I currently have a 10TB and 12TB for my main data drives, an additional 20TB drive for the first backup and a separate 24TB drive for the second backup plus a 14TB drive with a smaller data set I keep out of the house for cold backups. That keeps it simple but that's already five drives, it would be an absolute pain in the neck trying to manage that with a number of smaller drives.
 
I'm only starting out with non phone photos, but I guess the other thing is that I'm quite surprised by the extent of photos people save that are taken on camera

On my very limited experience to date if I take say 150 photos when I go out, and transfer them to hard drive, I then open lightroom in local mode first to review them, and I might only import 10 to 20(max) as I think the others aren't good. But I then delete the other 130-140 from the harddrive too as I've already decided they are junk ones

It might be that others get a much higher hit rate of good photos than my 10% (and that's 10% worth keeping, not saying they are all good!)
 
I'm only starting out with non phone photos, but I guess the other thing is that I'm quite surprised by the extent of photos people save that are taken on camera

On my very limited experience to date if I take say 150 photos when I go out, and transfer them to hard drive, I then open lightroom in local mode first to review them, and I might only import 10 to 20(max) as I think the others aren't good. But I then delete the other 130-140 from the harddrive too as I've already decided they are junk ones

It might be that others get a much higher hit rate of good photos than my 10% (and that's 10% worth keeping, not saying they are all good!)


I keep all photos. I have digital photos going back over 25 years, and quite often I look for something I want to check on, and if I deleted all photos not worth keeping, I wouldn't have what I need.
 
I've just out a notify me on a 6TB drive, my 4TBs are getting full. It has taken a while to fill the 4s to 80% so no need for me to splash out for anything much bigger than a 6.
 
I'm only starting out with non phone photos, but I guess the other thing is that I'm quite surprised by the extent of photos people save that are taken on camera

On my very limited experience to date if I take say 150 photos when I go out, and transfer them to hard drive, I then open lightroom in local mode first to review them, and I might only import 10 to 20(max) as I think the others aren't good. But I then delete the other 130-140 from the harddrive too as I've already decided they are junk ones

It might be that others get a much higher hit rate of good photos than my 10% (and that's 10% worth keeping, not saying they are all good!)
I used to do that when a while back but I don't now for a number of reasons. Primarily storage is pretty cheap these days and photos don't take up that much space whereas video takes up disproportionately more space and more difficult to cull since they're in a smaller amount of large files. It can take a lot of time to cull photos but I also find after I've done an initial pass through photos sometimes I come back later and choose other photos I like. After my first dog passed away I was surprised how many 'bad' photos I was glad to have of him, I used to take a lot of test photos with new equipment or cameras just of him around the house in his normal day to day positions which I now missed seeing him in.

No right or wrong way to do it but for me photos are mainly for memories so I like to keep them all.
 
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