It depends on what you use it for. If you browse the web, watch online videos, do e-mail, etc. then I suppose someone could live indefinitely with a smaller drive. I know a guy that's a photographer/videographer and his projects are huge, often gigabytes in size, and he can hardly delete them when they're finished. Someone that needs access to multiple OS versions like a developer could also easily need much more storage. This isn't necessarily an indication of being a pack rat...their work may require long term storage of large data.
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Lifespan of a spinning hard drive
- Thread starter garyleecn
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
It depends on what you use it for. If you browse the web, watch online videos, do e-mail, etc. then I suppose someone could live indefinitely with a smaller drive. I know a guy that's a photographer/videographer and his projects are huge, often gigabytes in size, and he can hardly delete them when they're finished. Someone that needs access to multiple OS versions like a developer could also easily need much more storage. This isn't necessarily an indication of being a pack rat...their work may require long term storage of large data.
I regularly shoot 200GB per *day* of 4k video, and it's easy to shoot 100GB per day of raw stills using newer cameras. The need to handle this space is *not* due to failure to clean up old files.
For many users, needing lots of storage may be an exception -- or is it? Shooting 4k video with the iPhone 6S or new iPhone SE takes about 375MB per minute or 22.5GB per hour. That is H264 4k, so many users will have to transcode this for smooth editing, which increases the size by about 8x.
Let's say a parent shoots just one hour of 4k video using an iPhone of a child's music program or hockey game. To edit that smoothly could easily require 180GB -- just for that one video. We are not talking about high end professional production, just using the iPhone in your pocket and iMovie or Premiere Elements.
exactly what I do. This is essentially what I use my computer for.
I don't edit 4K video, shoot photos, or create music.
I download and collect a bunch of stuff and save it. It's why I enjoy having a personal computer.
And yet, not having to digitally clean up or look after yourself and just download what you want, when you want, where you want, is a luxury I'd much rather not be without. It's why I enjoy having a computer.
I didn't know so many people were against that. That might say a little about the whole fusion vs 256 SSD argument.
Last edited:
True, but then they weren't dealing with files that were several gigabytes at a whack, or an office suite that takes several gigabytes.
Everything is relative, my images from my camera are an order of magnitude larger today then they were when when 30MB HDDs were the norm. Photoshop creates some rather large files as well. iTunes didn't ahve HD movies back in the day when 30MB was used. So yes, we survived back then with 30MB hard drives, because back then data, programs and our usage fit that hard drive. Today, that's not the case.
I know this is a bit off topic but….
Decades ago I bought a 32MB (that's an "M" not a "G") full height 5.25" Quantum 32MB drive for $80. I got it at an auction. It had the "true" MFM interface and was a boat anchor (literally…it was so heavy you could have attached a rope to it and used it as a boat anchor). I went back to the office and bragged about the good deal I just got. People were like "Wow! 32MB for only $80! What a steal!"
Quality has certainly changed. Whether your talking SSD or HDD, they last and they're reliable. If the old Quantum went 1 month without losing yet some more sectors it was a lucky month. Backups were mandatory - using the state-of-the art 5.25" floppy, of course!
Decades ago I bought a 32MB (that's an "M" not a "G") full height 5.25" Quantum 32MB drive for $80. I got it at an auction. It had the "true" MFM interface and was a boat anchor (literally…it was so heavy you could have attached a rope to it and used it as a boat anchor). I went back to the office and bragged about the good deal I just got. People were like "Wow! 32MB for only $80! What a steal!"
Quality has certainly changed. Whether your talking SSD or HDD, they last and they're reliable. If the old Quantum went 1 month without losing yet some more sectors it was a lucky month. Backups were mandatory - using the state-of-the art 5.25" floppy, of course!
My 2015 iMac 27 is 1TB SSD, the 2013 iMac 27 has 3TB Fusion Drive, I use three RAID arrays: an 8TB Thunderbolt Promise Pegasus RAID-5, an 8TB G-Tech G-RAID, and a 6TB WD MyBook Duo. I have about 150 TB of other off-line storage on a variety of hard drives. I am near the space limit on the Thunderbolt RAIDs and am considering two OWC 24TB Thunderbay 4 arrays: http://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/TB2IVT24.0S/
As a guess, which subjectively seems faster to you: A thunderbolt RAID or a Fusion drive?
There are several ways to answer that:
(1) It doesn't matter what *seems* faster, rather only what actually *is* faster by objective tests.
(2) In back-to-back testing using FCPX, Lightroom, and measuring application boot times with a stopwatch, I can't see a major difference attributable to I/O between my 2013 iMac 27 with 3TB Fusion Drive vs the 2015 iMac 27 with 1TB SSD. They were both on my desk simultaneously running the same tests.
(3) For major amounts of video work, both 1TB SSD or even 3TB Fusion Drive just are not big enough. In a sense the theoretical performance differences of the boot drive doesn't matter since most of the I/O is taking place on an external media drive.
(4) A 3TB Fusion Drive is big enough to put a modest-size video project on it. Despite the typical advice about don't put your media on the boot drive, I have tested that vs putting media on a 7200 rpm USB 3.0 bus-powered boot drive, and just putting everything on the Fusion Drive gave better editing performance.
(5) In general you want significant amounts of data on a Thunderbolt RAID. That is a bigger issue than whether the boot drive is Fusion vs SSD. The $100 million feature film "Focus" starring Will Smith was mostly edited on iMac 27s with a 3TB Fusion Drive and the media on a 32TB Thunderbolt RAID.
(6) If you're going to have most of the media on a Thunderbolt RAID you may as well get an SSD iMac -- it will help a bit in some things.
(7) If you blow your budget on an expensive SSD iMac and then must "cheap out" using a slow USB 3 external HDD, this can produce worse overall performance than just putting everything on a 3TB Fusion Drive.
That comment would apply to anyone that doesn't do anything more than web surfing, storing some photos and music, writing reports, and doing e-mail.
On most of my base systems the bare minimum required is almost 70GB. Add in music and photos and there goes another 40GB. Now, start adding in movies that I need to edit for tutorials - even the shortest of these are often AT LEAST 10GB each. Each clip has it's own length and has to be edited, moved around, recopied, etc etc. Then there's Xcode projects, with each one needing about 1-2GB, not to mention a fully expanded Xcode with all tools being another 10GB. How about tons of product manuals, with each being about 1GB.
There's no way I could even begin to live on 175GB. No way!
I think this is why the Fusion drive was invented. Apple was smart enough to know that some people needed large storage but they still wanted at least some SSD speed without needing the user to start manually re-arranging what's on an SSD and what's on an HDD. The latter may be fine for me, but it's too much of a pain for others.
IMHO SSDs are almost a must have in a laptop. I'm not convinced that's really true of HDDs in desktops. Once the OS and applications load almost everything is cached or pre-cached and from a user perspective, the HDD will appear almost as fast as an SSD. A friend of mine has one of the latest MacBook Pro's with the PCIe SSD in it and admittedly it boots lightning quick, but once up and running, it just doesn't seem that much faster than a laptop I have with one of the newer high speed HGST drive's in it. Sure, if I was constantly doing work that requires tina and tons of reads and writes it would be obvious, but for me, that doesn't happen. I'm not editing large films or doing database work.
The reason you feel that way is because you DO have one of the higher speed drives. The HGST you mentioned pushes a media to system data rate close to SATA I. Some of the even newer drives can (supposedly) push SATA II. When you originally put the newer HGST drive in you probably thought, "Wow! This is fast." Am I right? Apple didn't even start using any of these types of drives until recently. Most people who are interested in swapping an HDD for an SSD have the original OEM drives installed. These came with caches on the order of 8MB, low areal density, and a spin rate of 5400 RPM, leading to a fairly low media to system transfer rate. When these guys replace the old OEM style HDD with an SSD, they end up going, "Wow! This is Fast!"
Let me put it this way: Going from an old OEM drive to an SSD is like going from an old VW Rabbit to a Ferrari. Going from one of the newer high speed drives to an SSD is more like going from a Corvette to a Ferrari. The speed difference is there, it just isn't necessarily all that noticeable in day to day use.
You may be right. I forgot about my initial impressions of the HGST. When it was new I wanted to make sure it was OK so I ran a scan on it using Scannerz and thought something was wrong because the HGST was going through the scan so fast. A quick speed check with BlackMagic showed that indeed the HGST was just that much faster.
Another point to remember is that some of the older Mac's, that aren't really all that old, use SATA II instead of SATA III. A SATA II interface will be almost half as fast as a SATA III for an SSD, but for a hard drive will remain the same for the SATA II because the higher speed hods can't keep up with the interface.
It may be kind of a moot point, but it is worth considering. I've seen more than a few people that have been less impressed with SSDs after installation and once they're in use. The fact is unless you do disk intensive stuff, you'll probably only see the difference at boot up. Plus the HDDs are just too cheap. Just this week a local store is selling a 1TB drive for just over $30. The cheapest SSD they have is about $70 for a 240GB. A 1TB SSD costs more than my system is selling for used on ebay!!
Nope. It's a SATA III. System Profiler shows a negotiated link speed for SATA III as well. About data rates on the newer HDDs, I looked at the specs on a new Toshiba last night and it had a media to buffer data rate even faster than my HGST.
none. I restarted the computer after some updates and it never came back up.
Put it in another computer, in an external, back in the original computer. Notta.
This is the first that I never had a clue what was about to happen. Previously I have heard clickings, or excessive slowdown when accessing something. This one just decided after a restart. That's all folks I'm done working for this guy. No two week notice or anything.
I had an SSD fail on me right out of the box. I kept getting I/O errors every time I'd re-install the OS and start running it. I returned it to the vendor and it seems one of the flash chips was flakey. The replacement has worked fine. Anyone can get that one oddball that's just bad.
With hard drives, Seagate seems to be having more problems than most.
With hard drives, Seagate seems to be having more problems than most.