The ever-decreasing price of SSDs means that traditional hard disks are less universal than they once were. However, as media libraries grow larger, and 4K video becomes commonplace, there’s still very much a role for affordable, high-capacity storage.

The question is, which hard drive should you buy?
Does performance matter, or should you just go for the cheapest model?
Here’s our verdict on the five major hard disk models from the two industry giants (namely Western Digital and Seagate).

How to buy the best hard disk

Should buy an HDD or an SSD?

Nowadays, if you’re buying a hard disk it’s most likely as secondary storage for a desktop system. Under all circumstances we’d recommend using an SSD as your system drive: the performance difference is simply too good to miss out on.