As the title states, I am picking out a drive to watch mainly movies off of for my mom. We have a huge collection of movie files mainly in 720 and 1080p and she needs a drive to watch them off of. I’ve had a bad experience with my own Barracuda drive, as the movies can legitimately just freeze at random points so I won’t pick that.
I’ve pretty much decided to go with WD blue 4TB as it’s cheaper than Gold, but also slower RPM, though I don’t know how much does it actually affect something like media in real world.
The specific models I’ve picked out are:
WD40EZRZ
WD4003FRYZ
The price difference between the two is about 50€. I’ve chosen 4TB specifically as she can’t be bothered to deal with external drives and the PC has only a handful of SATA ports. I didn’t see a topic posted about something like that here before and I hope it’s no bother.
The WD Blue should be absolutely fine for your needs. Playing a single video at 1080p uses just a couple of MBps, and these drives are capable of ~100MBps or more. The WD blue will be quieter than the Gold, which is another thing to consider.
Sorry to hear you have had issues but consider whether it is something else causing this. If you are using a physical hard drive as the boot drive it may be Windows or a virus scanner that caused the glitch, not the hardware itself.
One important point to consider is backups. Having all your data on one disk is high risk. Having a spare that you periodically copy everything to is a good way to avoid disaster. This spare drive may need to be external so you can remove it from the PC and keep the data in a safe place. I learned this lesson the hard way when my mum’s computer had a power supply fail and it damaged the hard drive, she lost all her music and was not pleased. Since then I regularly back it up to a second removable drive.
Another option to consider is to buy a NAS drive, move the storage off the computer and onto the network. You can put the drive in a closet or out of the way and she will never have to plug anything in. You can get one with two drives and set up a mirror as protection against disk failure. I’d still recommend a separate backup as well. This is an expensive option though. It depends how much you want to spend. For example:
I hope that helps. Ask any other questions if you need more support.
I’m glad to hear that. She has a Blue as a boot drive right now and I owned one before as well so I do trust them generally.
I considered it could be a issue with Windows power options or something but i doubt it as my SSD has no problems with movies whatsoever. That’s actually how I watch them these days. I just drag them to my SSD for the mean time.
We do have a quite sizable external drive actually for backups. I haven’t had to experience the big data loss myself yet thankfully, but I’m also very vary of it being a possibility at this day and age. I did think of getting some NAS storage but that’s for later date.
I’ll leave the thread open for a solution but right now I’m leaning towards the 5400RPM blue drive. Thank you for your help!
Not that it should be, but I have noticed my self Win10 spins down drives and it takes a second to get back to speed.
I have a mix drives 1 barracuda, 1 WD Green, 1 Toshiba (before they were bought by WD) and barring the Green none should spin down by default but my music collection was on the Barracuda which was pretty much all it was used for. If I started up foobar from the boot SSD it would not spin the Barracuda holding the music until I clicked play and there was a noticeable pause where I would hear the drive spin up, seek and then play.
All this is to suggest that maybe windows is reading ahead enough of the movie to then spin down the drive and spin it back up before the movie is finished to read more of it.
You can see in the power settings advanced tab if it is set to sin them down.
It could be buffering in the media player. With MPV it usually buffers around 2 seconds, but when I’m using my NAS (i.e. over the network) it is buffering 500 MB I think, which is several minutes or even up to most of a movie in 720p. Plenty of time for the drive to power down. (EDIT: I don’t think my MPV settings are standard.)
That would easily explain why the SSD works fine as it doesn’t have the spin-up delay. It could also just be that the SSD can handle the extra load from some other application or Windows and the HDD can’t. If a HDD can’t stream a 720p file properly and the cause is actually the drive, the drive is likely failing but I doubt that is the case.
@Zibob I’m not sure what part do you exactly refer to in power settings but I have set my HDD to turn off after 20 minutes like on the picture:
I could be doing something wrong though for all I know.
@Spiller I just set my buffer on streaming and codecs to 3000ms as opposed to default 300, hopefully this is enough to help. I’d have to check, thought I don’t know when will I do it.
It did freeze quite a bit more while I was downloading an update from steam for example so I can see it being a thing. Also the drive is SMR, though I don’t know if it matters.
I’ll mark the first reply as a solution and I can make a post later when I get into testing whether or not the buffers help etc if it’s fine for you guys, since we’re going off topic a bit.
Yeah thats the setting. Does the freezing happen after 20 minutes? Or roughly every 20 minutes?
Those two might be connected. SMR can’t just write anywhere it wants or change small parts in existing blocks it has to rewrite a set entire block and for that has to read it, copy it modify it and then write it back to where it was, not an exact explanation at all.
So when it is downloading it will be writing and that entails quite a bit more for SMR and also reading so a lot busier than just reading.
300 ms sounds very low, a value like that sounds like it is directly linked to latency. For example, if you are watching a live network stream, you can’t read ahead but you usually still have a small amount of buffering to smooth out network hiccups. 3 seconds sounds bother line to smooth out a hard drive spinning up, but it is probably fine if your freezes are smaller than that. I’m just mentioning it because it is probably unwise to set that setting to something higher like 10 or 30 seconds, and if you are experiencing a bit of delay when opening files and seeking after changing this to 3 seconds, you might want to change it back. Buffering can mean many things… (I checked MPV again as it apparently has changed, they call what I referred to as ‘cache’ and the default appears to be around 150 MiB.)
But thinking about it a bit, you can usually hear or otherwise tell when a HDD is spinning up and you would probably have noticed if this was happening each time the video froze. If the freezes are not frequent, messing with your buffering settings might hide the issue, but all it is doing is to improve playback with inconsistent performance.
SMR drives should be fine for bulk storage where you are only rarely writing to them as I understand it, i.e. write once, read many. Movie files really shouldn’t be an issue. (Downloading them with P2P programs might be.) Many small random writes (i.e. not sequential) is what is causing poor performance compared to a PMR drive. So maybe it is your steam library that would benefit more? Most of my drives are older generation though, so I don’t have much experience with SMR.
Wouldn’t that just refer to USB drives specifically?
300ms is what was already in by default in VLC for file caching, I could still set it much higher than the 3000ms if need be. I wish they just used RAM in megabytes or whatever other size unit, as it makes more sense to me. I couldn’t really hear the spinning though as I always have my earphones on and they’re closed back so it’s a little early to tell.
I do have a general idea of how SMR works but it baffles me how writing to it while reading something else causes the thing to freeze, unless it has something to do with the download program checking what it downloaded so far, but even then it sounds like such an extreme case. Granted I don’t know enough about the topic most likely.
When writing SMR drives take forever. That’s why there was a big thing about them being sold as NAS drives as the software would see the time it was taking to format and figured the drive was bad and would kick the disk out of the array.
But DM-SMR should be okay for reading media; large contiguous writes and sequential reads should be fine for SMR. Seeking/scrubbing in a timeline should not be noticeably worse than regular HDD’s
But what about trying to do both at once. Do they get locked into writing a block? During which it can’t move it read another? That would potentially explain why this happens if games are being downloaded to the drive while watching a movie.
I was presuming the drive would be mostly less frequent writes (might be long, because DM-SMR) and then long/more frequent reads?
DM-SMR is bad in a lot of cases, especially for write amplification, but if drive not in raid, and for large contiguous files, pretty sure it’ll be okay
This is getting a bit too complicated for me to comprehend. I already got my answer for the name of the topic though. Should I mark the post as solved?
