#NAS STORAGE FOR MAC INSTALL#
#NAS STORAGE FOR MAC UPDATE#
#NAS STORAGE FOR MAC PRO#

Seagate and Western Digital offerings top out at 18TB for the SMB market, while Toshiba has capacities of up to 16TB.Ĭonsumers looking to purchase hard-drives need to have a rough idea of the use-cases they are going to subject the drives to. There are three active vendors in the consumer hard drive space - Seagate, Toshiba, and Western Digital.

#NAS STORAGE FOR MAC PRO#

It must be noted that the Exos series drives are relatively noisy and consume much more power compared to other drives tuned for specific use cases - such as the Barracuda Pro and Toshiba X300 for desktop usage, or the WD Red SMR drives for read-heavy / sparing writes scenarios. At other capacity points, the most cost-effective drives vary even when similar workload ratings are considered. Overall, if absolute lowest cost and highest capacity are the only requirements irrespective of the use-case, then the Seagate Exos X18 fits the bill, with unbelievably low prices compared to other 'consumer' HDDs at similar capacity points. Most consumers in a non-business settings also require low-power and low-noise, yet, high capacity drives, which we're including as an explicit category as well. The challenge in picking any hard drive, of course, is balancing workload needs with total drive costs. Long-term backup storage and high-capacity NAS units for consumer use are also ideal use-cases for hard drives.

#NAS STORAGE FOR MAC INSTALL#

Seagate and Western Digital's 18TB Hard Drives - Q3 2020 Introductionsįrom a gaming perspective, install sizes of hundreds of GBs are not uncommon for modern games. Toshiba's MG09 18TB HDDs based on FC-MAMR are yet to get retail availability, and are also not part of this buyer's guide

Synology has introduced 8, 12, and 16TB enterprise hard drives (rebranded Toshiba Enterprise HDDs with custom firmware), but they are meant specifically for Synology NAS units (no warranties if used in other systems) and are not part of this buyer's guide. With the HDD supply chain seeing some improvements, prices have largely stabilized. The company did make the OptiNAND announcement in August 2021 - promising the integration of UFS storage in their 20TB+ HDDs in order to improve performance and reliability. The same is the case with Western Digital - The 16TB and 18TB WD Red Pro models were introduced last September.

Seagate had launched the Ironwolf Pro and Exos 18TB drives last year, and no new capacity updates have been announced for this season yet. 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.

#NAS STORAGE FOR MAC UPDATE#

In our series of Hard Disk Drive guides, here’s the latest update to our list of recommended HDDs.

Nas storage for mac