Disk Price/Performance Analysis Buying Information

Disk Price/Performance Analysis Buying Information 01-May-2019

Attached is an EXCEL spreadsheet that contains information on NAS/Desktop disk drives providing a lot of information to help you choose the best disk drive for your RAID configuration.

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Various tables are in the worksheet Tables. This allows you to modify the specifications to match what you are looking for. Below are what a few of the tables in graphical form.

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The prices come primarily from www.newegg.com and a few from www.ebay.com. They are valid at the time I entered them but are subject to change -- in some cases I have seen them change fairly quickly. Use the prices listed as a rough rule of thumb. Prices outside of the USA can vary widely, so be prepared to do a little homework, if need be.
  • The fact and figures come from the manufacturers website.
  • In cases where there is a high and low value listed, at the manufacturers site, I have tried to us the worst case value.
  • If a cell is empty, that means I could not find the value and left it blank. If you can find the value from a manufactures documentation/spec sheet, please send me a pointer and I will update it.
  • The yearly energy usage (power consumption) is not all that much different between a 5x00 RPM drive and 7200 RPM drive. The biggest difference between the two is heat generated. If you have a choice between 5x00 or 7200, I would go for 7200 RPM drives.
  • Using larger disk drives is better for power consumption per TB of disk space. With a large disk drive, you can get the energy price lower per dollar per TB of disk space per year.
  • The performance comparison is fairly course (i.e. RPM only). It should include other items such as, seek time to be more realistic. Maybe in the future, but don't hold your breath.
I will update this file every now and then. Hopefully at least once a month.
Author
farmerpling2
Downloads
95,181
Views
160,946
First release
Last update
Rating
4.90 star(s) 10 ratings

Latest updates

  1. 01-May-2019

    OK all. The latest version is now up and ready to download. See the previous email for what...
  2. 26-Apr-2019

    Updated bunch of specs on various drives Updated prices on a bunch of drives HGST has been...
  3. 07-Nov-2018

    Updated pricing, fixed a few problems.
  4. 11-Sep-2018

    - Updated pricing - Cleaned up some of the tables - Seeing some very good deals (best prices...
  5. 23-Aug-2018

    - Updating data from drives with missing info - Working on updating the $ per TB per year +...

Latest reviews

Interesting and very useful; however, I would recommend removing Desktop and Laptop drives since it is not recommended using them with Free/True NAS. Also, I'm surprised to not see any SSD or NVM. At the end it might worth it to make this collective such as using a Google Drive, so we could help you to maintain it.
Awesome! Thank you for doing this.
Really helpful. Especially since you give access to the raw data and I can input energy costs in my area as well as a sale price for a specific drive and see the updated results live and make an informed decision.

The next step would be to create a script to scrape a few dozen ecommerce sites with all the relevant model numbers and have the sheet get updated in near realtime... (Please don't ask me for help,, I'm a big talker.. I mean thinker.. but that would be beyond me).
Great resource, definitely allows me to do some comparison shopping once I save enough for 6 drives XD
Excellent! thanks for sharing!
was helpful..thank you
farmerpling2
farmerpling2
If it helped you choose the best drive for the $$$, then it is worth it!
Brilliant.
farmerpling2
farmerpling2
Glad it has been of use for you!
Awesome and thank you for maintaining!
farmerpling2
farmerpling2
Thank you! So glad it is helping people.
handy!
farmerpling2
farmerpling2
Well, Thank You kindly! Just trying to have some fun and share some good information!
This is a handy resource that I have used many times. Thanks for creating and updating this.
farmerpling2
farmerpling2
Glad to hear it is being useful I get about 20-30 downloads per update, so I hope people have used it to make better decisions about buying/using disk drives. If you have any more ideas on how to improve I am open to suggestions.
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