Harddrive purchase problem

Hardware HDD's & SSD's
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—ok, after I wrote this out I realised it’s a bit on the tldr side, so tldr anyone know where I can get the cheapest 8tb+hdd that is new, im looking at 140$, if you want more context, read below for why—

Ok, My 4tb hdd has basically kicked the bucket but does not know it yet
Nothing I do will get it to flag bad sectors and it keeps running into them on the very last bits of the writeable space.
this hdd is mostly a game drive, so I have little issue with it being able to read data and let me play, its why I have been putting this problem off for a while.

I am also encountering another hdd issue, but this is a not enough space one, not a dying hdd one, that has more or less solved itself, if in a bit of a time intensive way.

Now that I know what drive I can focus my attention on, I chose the game drive.
Now, one of my major issues is I’m coming up on running out of space on my mass storage drive too, which, I can possibly extend the life of by parsing files, but I was planning on later this year biting a bullet and getting a 10-12+tb drive, but if I go the game drive, this may push that upgrade back a year.

right now im looking at an external 8tb drive for the game drive, and I want to stop you there before anything else is said, I am fully aware that a ssd is faster, I know a 7200 internal would be faster, I know 5200 are mostly for mass media and that’s it, I personally don’t care, if I run into a game where the loads are unbearable I can put it on my nvme for a few days while I beat it, and move it back to my game drive for when I get that itch to play it again, I am covered on all sides for any downfall of the usb external drive may have.

the reason it’s a 8tb external, i’m able to get it for 140$ from costco, the closest thing to this price I can find online is 190$ for an internal drive.
My main thing I want to know, is there anywhere I may not be looking that I could find a 8tb drive for cheaper, possibly a larger hdd with the same price per gb.

the 8tb drive will hold all the data of the 4tb, around 400gb that never got transfered over for some reason, freeing up main drive space, allowing me to go another year without upgrading, with the only down side being its an external 5200/5900 drive.

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The 8tb external at costoc isnt a good drive (if its the one im thinking about)

Honestly shuck WD externals, the 10tb is down to like $160 now or the 8tb is like $130 these days

things to be concerned about with 8TB+ drives is the helium leaks so not sure how many years they will last compared to traditional (idk if hardware or the loss of helium will effect the drive first on average) Also putting all your data on 1 huge drive is just more risk as well.

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Agree, shuck a WD external. Don’t buy seagate crap.

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the worst hdd I had was a 1.5tb seagate, and anyone who knows anything about hdds knows the more or less industry wide 1.5tb problem. to date though my I want to say nearing 25 years of owning computers, those were the only drives to fail me.

I have owned toshiba, maxtor (during their ‘these fail all the time’ era) seagate and wd drives, the main thing that I come across is drives either fail hard up front or last for years, my drive I believe had issues toward the final 100gb of space from the get go due to the issue being more or less contained there… lesson learned, scan the entire drive first then use it, and let it burn in for 3 months before you trust it.

On the wd side, I have had more friends with issues with theirs then I have people have issues with seagate with the only stats I can find being places like backblaze that takes used (i believe) drives and uses them till they fail and reports them. form 2019 stats, what wd they have in their systems, 6tb drives, have a 4% failure rate, while seagates worst drives, the 4tb, is 3% everything else is in the 1% range to sub 1% range for failures.

as for removing the external, i’ll probably do that once its outside of warranty, exturnals in my experience don’t last nearly as long as the drives inside of them, but I want to make sure whatever I get they have no reason to dick me on the warranty. I don’t anticipate having major problems, but having a fallback is nice. That said, is there any usb overhead that i need to be concerned with in terms of reading and randoms that come with usb3 that aren’t obvious? remember this is a game drive that will largely be used just for the stuff that barely benefits from ssd storage. personally the games I play load fast off my current zombie drive, but some of them are in that 130-200gb range so ssd storage is a no go there. I also started building at a time where every change made to my computer would kill the bios and make it unbootable, every little change, completely unrecoverable, things have changed significantly, but I still absolutely hate screwing with the inturnals without it being required. usb3 on a hdd, I can’t find anything that tells me it’s going to bottleneck it so bad that its advised to rip the enclosure apart.

The main Issue that I can come up with for the hdd is that its a shingled drive most likely, and while writes to it will be a bit painful, its not a constant use drive and the most that will get written to it in a short time span is going to be the initial drive clone job.

with that said, 10tb for 160 is definitely something I would be willing to get, as its 16 a tb apposed to 17.5, and an extra 20$ in total is within my replacement budget, but I cant find 10tb anywhere for under 250$ and that’s still a seagate drive. the cheapest wd comes in at 265$ and is a purple inturnal, external is coming in at 300$