That said, the designers love of shiny black plastic that comes with clear plastic to be peeled off isn’t without its issues. Being online means that sharing content is easy, too, but on the flip side, you can create separate private spaces on the drive for each person in your household. Western Digital could have improved the performance by using SSD caching, but it chose to keep the My Book simple and probably more reliable as a result. The 8TB model is currently the best and offers the best bang for your buck without many compromises.

John (He/Him) is the Components Editor here at TechRadar and he is also a programmer, gamer, activist, and Brooklyn College alum currently living in Brooklyn, NY. One of the aspects not mentioned in the above table is that the WD Red SMR drive is in the 5400 RPM class, while the other drives (including the Red Plus) are all 7200 RPM. This is combined with a robust warranty, including a high workload rate and Seagate’s three-year data recovery service.Or, if you're working on a major project that requires a certain degree of portability, the Western Digital My Book is also a great work storage device in a pinch thanks to its large capacity. It's shock, dust, and water-resistant and comes with a vivid orange bumper along its sides, so you don't have to worry about drops. What’s great about the My Book is that it is remarkably easy to configure and use, being the definition of a plug-in-and-go scenario. The My Cloud Home plugs directly into your Wi-Fi router through a Gigabit Ethernet port, so you don’t worry about losing your wireless connection.

Many high-capacity models such as the Seagate IronWolf Pro line are currently running 15-20% lower than launch MSRPs, and the Exos lineup continues to offer great capacity for money. As per the Exos 16TB and 18TB Exos Enterprise product manuals, the acoustics specifications are around 28-30 dB at idle, and 32-34 dB for performance seeks.

Long-term backup storage and high-capacity NAS units for consumer use are also ideal use-cases for hard drives.

Despite similar spindle speeds, the Red Plus firmware is optimized for a low noise profile across most capacity points.As with any HDD, an SSD is going to offer you better speed, so your best bet here is to definitely go for capacity and value, which is the real strength of these drives. You will want specialized drives for NAS, surveillance/DVR/NVR, raw storage for media and backups, or for heavier workloads.