The Hard Disk Drives market is full of diversity and oversaturated, mostly with low-quality products. Hard drives are available in a huge variety of storage capacities. While the best HDD does not come with as many benefits as the best Solid-State Drive, it is mostly for those who need vast storage or those who want to keep the budget low. Even the best HDDs are less reliable and are more fragile. If you work on your laptop and you store important company data or documents on your laptop — you must consider an SSD over even the best HDD. If you are unfamiliar with SSD, you can check out my review of the best SSDs for your laptop right here.
Why should I consider an SSD rather than the best HDD?
There are many factors that make SSDs superiors than even the best HDD out there. HDDs usually take about 5 000 to 10 000 microseconds to read data written on them. SSDs, on the other hand, can reach the same information in up to 35 – 100 microseconds. This difference is nearly 100 times faster and this significantly impacts the performance of your laptop. Faster access to saved data on a drive results in a faster application launch and operation.
HDDs come with moving parts in them and thus are more fragile than SSDs. If you are not familiar with how HDDs work exactly, I explain his part in my best SSDs review (read here). Having the best HDD will not protect it well enough from vibrations, heat or anything else that might corrupt your files. HDDs make use of platters and magnets which wear down after a lot of use.
Even the best HDD is much less power-efficient than the worst SSD because of all parts required to spin the platter. Spinning also can create vibrations and noise on its own, which most of us probably find annoying. SSDs come with a wide variety of sizes, down to the 1-Inch ones. HDDs are usually 2.5-Inch or more. And lastly… Since SSDs do not use magnetism — they are not affected by magnets. If you get a magnet too close to the best HDD — you will end up losing some, if not all of your saved data.
On the other hand…
Some people, especially photographers and people who work with multimedia, have the need for huge data storage. If you’re a vlogger then you probably know the drill. Buying an SSD with the capacity of 1 TB might cost you a fortune. Most SSDs with this big storage capacity are way outside most people’s budget. On the other hand, HDDs are significantly cheaper. If you think that buying an HDD with a few terabytes of storage might cost you a lot — you’re in a great mistake. Even the best HDD comes with a reasonable price, the only problem is finding it.
So how do I go about finding the best HDD for my laptop?
Before choosing the best HDD for your laptop, you need to consider a few things. Are you looking for performance or is storage capacity your main concern? If you are ready to pay a bit more for higher performance and higher storage capacity — you wouldn’t have to compensate on important characteristics. Performance is determined by the Interface, rotational speed, access time and the buffer size of the HDD.
After you have decided on the performance — you can go to capacity. While the maximum possible capacity on an HDD is about 12 GB — you might not be able to fit that into your laptop. 2.5-inch HDDs usually come with a maximum capacity of 4 TBs, which is way more than enough to satisfy heavy users. If this is still not enough for you — an external HDD or SSD/HDD hybrid may serve you better than the best HDD.
Given the huge product diversity on the market right now — you might still struggle a bit with finding the best HDD for your laptop. Some manufacturers provide misleading information or claim to have tested their products while in fact, they haven’t. To help with easing the time-consuming task of finding it, I’ve made a list of my top five best HDDs that I have tested in the near past. These devices stand out from the others with small, but very important features.
| # | Image | Brand | Price | Capacity |
| 1 |                             |
Seagate | $225 | 8 TB |
| 2 |                               |
WD Black | $70 | 1 TB |
| 3 |                              |
WD Blue | $44 | 1 TB |
| 4 |                                 |
Generic | $36 | 500 GB |
| 5 |                                 |
HGST | $56 | 1 TB |
1. Seagate BarraCuda Pro HDD
- 8 TB Storage
- 7200 RPM
- 256 MB Cache
- SATA 6 GB/s
- 3.5 Inch
- With speacial
- Perfect for game, home, business and creative professional computing
2. WD Black WD10JPLX HDD
- 1 TB Storage
- 7200 RPM
- 32 MB Cache
- SATA 6GB/s
- 2.5 Inch
- Perfect for home and business computing
3. WD Blue WD10EZEX HDD
- 1 TB Storage
- 720 RPM
- 64 MB Cache
- SATA 6GB/s
- 3.5 Inch
- Perfect for home and business computing
4. Generic 500 GB HDD
- 500 GB Storage
- 5400 RPM
- 8 MB Cache
- SATA III – 6GB/s
- 2.5 Inch
- Perfect for home and business computing
5. HGST 0J22423 HDD
- 1 TB Storage
- 7200 RPM
- 32 MB Cache
- SATA 6GB/s
- 2.5 Inch
- Perfect for home and business computing
I hope that by now, you are feeling confident enough in your choice when looking for the best HDD for your laptop. I will still recommend you to check out whether you cannot find an SSD. It is true that they are expensive, but there is a reason for that and it is more than justified. If you want to check out my “best SSD for your laptop” review, you can do so right here. If you are still in need of help with finding the best HDD for your laptop or you have a question, feel free to let me know in the comments section below — I will make sure to get back to you.
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