The 18TB drives using FC-MAMR are also scheduled to make a retail appearance later this year. In terms of new product introductions since the release of the last HDD guide, we have retail availability of Toshiba's 16TB N300 and X300 drives.

The $/GB metric for SSDs (particularly with QLC in the picture) is showing a downward trend, but it is still not low enough to match HDDs in that market segment. Hard drives are also suitable for workloads that are largely sequential and not performance sensitive. While SSDs have taken over the role of the primary drive in most computing systems, hard drives continue to be the storage media of choice in areas dealing with large amount of relatively cold data. Best Consumer Hard Drives: September 2021ĭata storage requirements have kept increasing over the last several years. All numbers in the text are updated to reflect pricing at the time of writing. In our series of Hard Disk Drive guides, here’s the latest update to our list of recommended HDDs.