this post was submitted on 17 Dec 2025
12 points (92.9% liked)
PC Master Race
19352 readers
1 users here now
A community for PC Master Race.
Rules:
- No bigotry: Including racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, or xenophobia. Code of Conduct.
- Be respectful. Everyone should feel welcome here.
- No NSFW content.
- No Ads / Spamming.
- Be thoughtful and helpful: even with ‘stupid’ questions. The world won’t be made better or worse by snarky comments schooling naive newcomers on Lemmy.
Notes:
- PCMR Community Name - Our Response and the Survey
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Mechanical hard drives are a one and done. When they fail that is it, do not pass go, do not collect $200. There is no repair. Replace the drive as fast as you can, because it may stop spinning up at any time with no warning. Once you have your data saved, bin it, don't use it for anything else.
If you are waiting on a new drive try to make a backup of critical irreplacable data on literally any media, USB sticks, DVDs, Google drive. Game installs not so much, but documents, pictures, videos, etc. A failing drive WILL leave you stranded at the worst time.
Ensure you are buying a CMR style hard drive. Basically there are two different methods of recording data on a magnetic platter. CMR is the traditional method and is fast but less dense (more $). SMR allows denser data and normal read speeds (good for media) but is extremely, extremely slow to write to, and will have bad performance for installed programs or general OS use. HDD manufacturers have sneakily replaced most of their lineups with SMR drives to increase profit margins (drive costs never dropped, big surprise) so you have to be careful which you buy as a general use drive. Any drive by Seagate or WD are going to be fine in this day and age. See which models are safe here:
https://www.seagate.com/products/cmr-smr-list/
https://nascompares.com/answer/list-of-wd-cmr-and-smr-hard-drives-hdd/
Buy more than you think, extra storage never hurt anyone. The price per gb drops precipitously between the 1tb to 6tb mark then levels off, so the best bang for buck drives typically are around 6-12tb these days.
Yes as long as your new drive is same or larger capacity you should be able to plug in both drives and directly clone from the old to the new. Any Linux distro or live boot environment should allow you to do this via the
ddcommand- tons of tutorials on the Google.I do recommend doing this from outside your windows install as windows will often deny access to program files actively in use, and the only way to ensure theres no issues is boot from an external OS and copy the drive bit by bit.
thank you for your detailed answer! Quick questions -
I agree that more storage is better than less. I have an external drive that's 14 TB and I couldn't be happier with it!
Barracuda is Seagate's basic value line so makes sense everything is SMR. Especially since you're shopping for 2.5" laptop drives.
The ironwolf drives are more enterprise focused so they're noisier, might be why it's cheaper. But they're a good option all around. (Frankly day to day hard drive prices are random anyway...)
No they don't typically come with any hardware to hook up, it's assumed you plug it into your computer. However you can get USB to SATA adapters, with an external 12v power brick for mechanical drives, fairly cheap on amazon et al. I have one from U-Green that works fine and is also a USB hub and SD card reader. They're great to have around just in case.
I have a U-Green SSD reader that I needed to test an SSD in the past. The drive was a bust but the tool was neat! I’ll go looking for the HDD version too. Does… it supply power too?
Those adapters supply 5v power from the USB port, but SATA adapters capable of running hard drives usually have an external 12v power brick, as most full size hard drives need 12v for the drive motor.
Now, that said, I think a lot of 2.5inch hard drives do use 5 volt only and might boot up fine from an SSD SATA adapter. It's worth trying your existing adapter as is and seeing if it starts and recognizes the drive.