WD 1TB 3.5" 7200RPM SATA Desktop Internal Hard Drive (WDBH2D0010HNC-NRSN)

7200 rpm is still pretty fast and dependable. This WD 1TB Blue has been a buy for every system I've built over the passed six years. What used to sell for around $200, you can get now for $60 is a huge selling point. These drives are great as a master or slave storage drive. Never had any of these fail on me. I don't recommend WD green drives (due to their very slow performance and non-stressful intended use and if you force them to run hard for gaming which will wear those drives down to corruption). My WD blues are still running after six years with no signs of slow downs or sector read/write errors. Will buy again! Kudos Western Digital.

I cannot recall ever having a Western Digital drive just outright fail on me in my 20 years of using them. Can't say the same for others (I'll name no names here). I really like the WD Blue drives because they offer great performance per dollar. The Blues are what I use as my go to mass storage and backup drives in my main system which has an SSD OS drive. I am also currently using the Blue drive I bought here (thus prompting my review of it) to hold all of my game installs. It's plenty fast enough for my gaming needs. I'll admit I'm spoiled to SSD's for productivity uses, but these are not slow drives. I very much recommend them.

I'd been loyal to Seagate for years, but they hit a real rough spot in terms of reliability starting in 2014 thanks to environmental problems in their Thailand factory. Last month, both of my Seagate 1TB drives in my RAID1 array failed within a few weeks of each other and that was enough for me to say never again and go with a different brand. Note that I did put this in a Synology NAS. Western Digital recommends the "Red" line for this, which I assume has a longer MTBF. So while this drive may fail a bit sooner than ideal, thanks to having RAID1 w/ cheap cloud backup to Amazon S3 I'm not too concerned about that. At $40 for a TB, the price is right.