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Anybody still using spinning hard disks on their newer machines?

I use a mix as well. My Fedora/Windows 10 laptop is NVMe. My IBM X3300 M4 server running Fedora is SSD for boot/os and NL-SAS for RAID/data. Same goes for my Skulltrail PC running FreeBSD. For my vintage P6 running Windows 98 and UnixWare, I use Ultra2 SCSI. While I haven't abandoned spinning rust entirely, I have rid myself of IDE.
 
I only have spinning drives but in the two newest machines I have (which are quite a number of years old), one is used solely for the internet and the other is basically for spreadsheets, documents, etc. So of course they work fine for me.
 
Windows is on SSDs, FreeBSD root on NVMe and a ZFS zmirror pool between two 4GB WD drives.
 
Agent Orange said:
WD now labels are of their shingled drive as "Red".
Click to expand...

Nope. They have SMR drives in almost every color brand they sell.

Here's a four year old slide showing SMR drives in Red, Blue and Black lines.

They also have SMR drives in their Passport, MyBook and Elements portable drives, among others.

Whenever you buy a drive, make sure to look up the data on the exact part number of the drive. Drive manufacturers are notorious for making tiny alterations to model numbers to differentiate between CMR and SMR versions of the same drive. Large caches like 256M used to be a dead giveaway of a SMR drive when CMR drives had 64M of cache, but most modern drives have at least 128 or 256M of cache now, if not more.
 
GiGaBiTe said:
Nope. They have SMR drives in almost every color brand they sell.

Here's a four year old slide showing SMR drives in Red, Blue and Black lines.

They also have SMR drives in their Passport, MyBook and Elements portable drives, among others.

Whenever you buy a drive, make sure to look up the data on the exact part number of the drive. Drive manufacturers are notorious for making tiny alterations to model numbers to differentiate between CMR and SMR versions of the same drive. Large caches like 256M used to be a dead giveaway of a SMR drive when CMR drives had 64M of cache, but most modern drives have at least 128 or 256M of cache now, if not more.
Click to expand...
Screenshot 2024-10-17 215649.png
 
SomeGuy said:
I was using a spinning hard drive on my Windows 10 system - until I was forced to use Microsoft Teams (barf!) and it literally took five minutes to start up, during which I could not do anything else. Stuffed in an SSD and at least it is vaguely usable now.
Click to expand...
In my experience, installing Windows 10 directly onto a HDD is a big no-no. It's burned up more HDD's than any OS I've ever seen, and I wish I was joking.

Fortunately, W10 takes to mechanical drives far kinder when the OS itself is installed onto an SSD, and the machine has a secondary mechanical drive to store game folders, data backups and other crap - the way my Windows 10 box is currently set up.
 
The only situation I ever had was a power surge through weak PSU of a mini-ITX "server", that blew the mainboard and one WD green. The other survived. Kind of drives would not matter in this case.

Windows is far too intrusive for any kind of detailed, fine access to disks. It can be achieved with *nix, it is an usual thing to have a read-only root and a ramdisk /tmp that commits on reboot. Like when you want to run the system off USB but don't want to wear it out.
On Windows, disks that Windows do not understand are being occasionally read. I find this beyond annoying. A Windows Server, not an intrusive 10/11 system, and not a Defender activity. Why?

On the other side, with FreeBSD, there are security-diagnostic scripts in cron running at 3AM default. On FreeBSD if a sporadic disk activity happens, I know it's 3 AM. And I expect absolutely 0 disk I/O towards drives that do not have a partition mounted on the OS.
 
They came in today and I did a quick benchmark using my USB 3 dock:
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CrystalDiskMark 7.0.0 x64 (C) 2007-2019 hiyohiyo
Crystal Dew World: https://crystalmark.info/
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
* MB/s = 1,000,000 bytes/s [SATA/600 = 600,000,000 bytes/s]
* KB = 1000 bytes, KiB = 1024 bytes

[Read]
Sequential 1MiB (Q= 8, T= 1): 210.360 MB/s [ 200.6 IOPS] < 39711.19 us>
Sequential 1MiB (Q= 1, T= 1): 210.355 MB/s [ 200.6 IOPS] < 4979.52 us>
Random 4KiB (Q= 32, T=16): 1.201 MB/s [ 293.2 IOPS] <373256.57 us>
Random 4KiB (Q= 1, T= 1): 0.789 MB/s [ 192.6 IOPS] < 5177.64 us>

[Write]
Sequential 1MiB (Q= 8, T= 1): 210.685 MB/s [ 200.9 IOPS] < 39631.15 us>
Sequential 1MiB (Q= 1, T= 1): 210.764 MB/s [ 201.0 IOPS] < 4966.12 us>
Random 4KiB (Q= 32, T=16): 2.213 MB/s [ 540.3 IOPS] <316965.04 us>
Random 4KiB (Q= 1, T= 1): 1.662 MB/s [ 405.8 IOPS] < 2457.61 us>

Profile: Default
Test: 1 GiB (x5) [Interval: 5 sec] <DefaultAffinity=DISABLED>
Date: 2024/10/18 13:01:37
OS: Windows 7 Professional SP1 [6.1 Build 7601] (x64)
 
Newest Wintel I have has 500ish GB and 1TB platter disks, former for OS, latter for video game overflow. I probably boot the thing up once every couple of months to play a game online with a friend, but it is an old media PC from a house I was sharing with folks years ago. I wound up with it in the move out, now it just gets some game time every now and then, and occasional use for Windows programming experiments.
 
I still use spinning disks as the boot drives on most of my win10 systems(5 I think? Too many computers to be sure). Only my main workstation boots off NVME. And presumably the laptop work gave me, though I don't look much at that things hardware specs.

It is in fact plenty fast enough, I notice little if any speed difference. At least on SATA. iDE is definitely slower.

the trick is you have to disable windows update. And I haven't gotten around to working out exactly which update does this. But one update introduces some sort of bug which creates a hidden background process that generates huge disk I/O. This hits all forms of storage(spinning, SSD, NVMe), and will destroy an NVMe drive within a few months if you get it. This is in fact why I only have one machine that boots of NVMe and a stack of dead NVMe drives. Spinning disks seem to handle the bug better.

I have been slowly converting systems away from windows 10 as a result. Server 2022 doesn't seem to have the bug. And 7 obviously don't.
 
I've been using mSATA to IDE adapters in the old (1990s) laptops. I haven't really done any speed test, I just like that they're silent. But the supply of <2GB mSATA's might be dwindling? (larger capacity might still be in production).

For astronomy and bulk archive - yeah, 30TB of mechanical drives, mostly 2TB size, a few 4TB's. Am using 4TB NVM in the modern laptops - so far without issue after a couple years now. But I do worry - that SSD (mSATA or NVM) is a sudden death/all data loss when they go out. While mechanicals will start giving a little bit of warning and maybe lose a few files. I haven't had a full on head-into-platter hard drive crash since the mid 1990s.

Is CompactFlash still in production? I still make use of those in the XT-IDE controller card.
 
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