Are Hard Drives Still Worth It?

We tested modern software running on older storage to see if it can still keep up with ever-increasing file sizes and demand

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MUSIC CREDIT
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Intro: Laszlo - Supernova

Outro: Approaching Nirvana - Sugar High

[Nostalgia_Realm]

4:49 I love little touches like that 😂

[filipbartos]

Anthony is slowly taking over LTT, he started with being amazing and loved by everyone and now he started to drop things and LTT store references are more often than ever

[JordanSugarman]

"When I was a kid, SSDs barely existed."

Welp. Thanks for making me feel old today. When I was a kid, HDDs barely existed. In fact, they didn't exist at all for personal computers. The storage media of choice was a cassette tape.

[charleshines]

Hey, I am old enough that when I was a child there were no SSDs at all. I am in my 40s and so you can imagine all of the computer tech that did not exist yet when I was born. Some of the computers back then didn't have 100 MB or more hard drive space. Back then terabyte hard drives were unheard of and were still a thing of science fiction.

[aravindvissamsetty]

4:52 was an excellent touch. Had to rewind multiple times to make sure that my phone wasn't acting up..

[_Idolin]

Wow those stutterings at 4:52 are such a nice editing touch.

[Physics]

Try this: Put a mechanical HD and a SSD with no power on a shelf for 5+ years. I have done it for 10+years. All my mechanical HDs worked even ones from 1995. The 3-5 SSDs did not. They could be reformatted and used but left with no power they degrade. So for long term storage don't put a SSD on a shelf with no power, they don't hold data as well as old fashion but more reliable spinning Hard drives.

[alabasterscarf]

It was worth it in my case. My mom's workplace threw out some old pcs, and I salvaged two 750GB Seagate Barracudas to use in my new build. I have an nvme for my boot drive and art software, but my games are on one HDD and my files and random crap are on the other HDD. Quite a cost-saver, and they work fast enough for my purposes.

[darkpotato]

I still have a pc in my house with a mf CD drive and they’re talking about if HDDs are still worth it

[seppoharkkonen]

Anthony is like that 1 cool guy in your friend circle, who helps you no matter what.

[mishniak]

Anthony should have mentioned that HDDs are better for long term data storage (like photos and videos), despite having a shorter working life. That's because SSD memory can slooowly "leak" over time, leading to data loss, whereas HDDs don't have that problem.

Of course, don't put all your file eggs into only one HDD basket, make sure you have at least one other copy of your files on another HDD, preferably separate from your main system!

[chrisoverson]

I'd love to see the reliability issue discussed in more depth. Obviously HDDs are more prone to damage from shock and drops, but sat securely in a desktop or a server environment, I always personally feel safer using HDDs for backing up files because they tend to fail in a mechanical fashion whereas SSDs fail instantaneously, at least in my experience.

By this, I mean that if a HDD starts to die, it generally gets slower, throws SMART errors, clicks, refuses to spin up but eventually does after some praying and coaxing, but in my experience a dead SSD just... dies. I always feel somehow safer in knowing that in a fire, flood, or normal failure, there's at least some mechanical repairs that can be done to a HDD that might get my data back, but I don't feel so secure about SSDs. If I'm wrong, I'd love to know, but it's for this reason I always use SSDs as primary storage and HDDs for backups. It'd be nice to know if my thought process is actually justified or just superstitious.

[RedditStorytime]

Wouldn't be an LTT video without something being dropped 😂

[danwhite]

The fact that hard drives are so incredibly cheap now for a TB or so makes it kinda worth it for storing stuff such as games or documents or music

[Toumasu]

What I like about hdds vs ssds is that with ssd's you know that everytime you write to the flash, you decrease the lifespan.

[akriant]

Anthony is literally growing in front of our eyes in terms of presentation quality if you look at his first videos and now. Legit enjoying his videos. Go Anthony!

[captainbeans]

This man’s so clear, the captions catch every word

[mitchy]

Oh Anthony. Thank you for being you during times like this

[jamieknight]

Much love for Anthony as a host. He’s calm, warm, clearly spoken and clearly has a wealth of knowledge beyond the levels he’s talking about.

I loved the ‘Not an SSD’ as writer and producer in the credits. That’s a nice Easter egg :)

[SJ-conk]

I really like the hybrid SSDHDs, but they haven't been progressing. The idea is that you have a large spinning hard drive with a smaller SSD cache, so you get the benefits of both SSDs and HDDs because an algorithm is making sure the most often used files are in SSD cache, while the older files are on the cheaper HDD platter. These drives can also completely spin down when idle unlike pure HDDs.