top 10 rating. Which hard drive is better to buy

*A review of the best accord­ing to the edi­tors of expertology.ru. About selec­tion cri­te­ria. This mate­r­i­al is sub­jec­tive, is not an adver­tise­ment and does not serve as a guide to the pur­chase. Before buy­ing, you need to con­sult with a spe­cial­ist.

Despite the fact that there are only a few real hard dri­ve man­u­fac­tur­ers in the world (at least in 2021), even the same com­pa­ny has suc­cess­ful mod­els, and there are fail­ures. Some­times this hap­pens even with­in the same mod­el line. This applies to both mechan­i­cal HDDs and sol­id-state SSDs. That is why before buy­ing it is worth care­ful­ly study­ing the infor­ma­tion about the avail­able assort­ment.

The edi­tors of Exper­tol­ogy mag­a­zine specif­i­cal­ly con­duct­ed mar­ket research, test results from inde­pen­dent testers and user feed­back on the largest trad­ing plat­forms. Based on the results of this study, as well as on the basis of a num­ber of our own bench tests, we have pre­pared for you an overview of the best hard dri­ves in 2021.

Which hard drive is better to buy

Depend­ing on the type of work, hard dri­ves are divid­ed into:

• HDD — rel­a­tive­ly slow by mod­ern stan­dards, but inex­pen­sive and capa­cious;
• SSHD — hybrids, sup­ple­ment­ed with flash mem­o­ry cells (as in SSD);
• Exter­nal ones are like very large flash dri­ves, only with a mag­net­ic disk design.

The dimen­sions of the disk (form fac­tor) depend on the mount­ing pro­vid­ed in the sys­tem unit. Lap­tops always have 2.5‑inch hard dri­ves installed.

The spin­dle speed of the HDD should be high enough. Today it is worth con­sid­er­ing mod­els with a speed of 7200 rpm, espe­cial­ly if they have a large capac­i­ty. Hard read and write speed is a defin­ing char­ac­ter­is­tic for work­ing with infor­ma­tion. For HDD, the opti­mal rate is from 150 Mb / s. Pay atten­tion also to delays (access time). If they are less than 15 ms, that’s great.

Most hard dri­ves con­nect via a Sata 3 inter­face with a through­put of 600 Mb/s.

Depend­ing on the pur­pose or usage sce­nario, the amount of hard mem­o­ry will also vary. For exam­ple, for an HDD, a nor­mal capac­i­ty indi­ca­tor starts from 500‑1000 GB. Well, do not for­get about the size of the buffer zone. On any disk, it should be about 10 times less than the declared val­ue of the hard dri­ve itself.

Rec­om­men­da­tions: The 12 Best SSD Dri­ves

9 Best SSDs for Com­put­ers

9 Best Net­work Dri­ves

Suggested drive speeds

Below is a table show­ing test results based on 3 com­par­i­son tools:

• ATTO Disk Bench­mark
• Crys­tal DiskMark
• HD Tune Pro

We have reduced the results to 5 hard dri­ves to save you time and make it con­ve­nient for every­one.

Best HDDs for PC

The most capa­cious, though not always fast, hard dri­ves for stor­ing a large amount of infor­ma­tion.

Western Digital WD Gold 14TB (WD141KRYZ)

This hard dri­ve pro­vides high per­for­mance for any machine and can be installed as a serv­er device. And all thanks to its vol­ume of 14 TB. At the same time, he finds infor­ma­tion quick­ly enough, due to the increased spin­dle speed (7200 rpm).

Improves the work of the hard dri­ve and NCQ, which addi­tion­al­ly speeds up data exchange, their writ­ing and read­ing. The mod­ern Sata 3 inter­face also con­tributes, with a data exchange rate of 600 Mb / s.

Pros:

• Huge amount of mem­o­ry.
• Shock resis­tance 300G.
• Built-in vibra­tion pro­tec­tion.
• High speed of find­ing files.
• Per­fect build qual­i­ty and guar­an­teed 2.5 mil­lion hours of oper­a­tion.
• Fast data trans­fer to exter­nal media.
• Low laten­cy (aver­age 12ms).

Minus­es:

• The cost is 30,000 rubles.
• Quite noisy — 36 dB.

The main advan­tage of this disk is its vol­ume, which is per­fect­ly com­bined with the dura­bil­i­ty of the dri­ve and the speed of work. But such plea­sure is very expen­sive.

DELL 400-ALEI

The clas­sic ter­abyte desk­top machine spins at 7,200 rpm to ensure you quick­ly find the files you need. Pleased with its min­i­mum delay of 11 ms. The hard disk has a write and read speed of 180 Mb / s, and the Sata 3 inter­face, capa­ble of trans­fer­ring data at a speed of 6 Gb / s, com­ple­ments the disk’s abil­i­ty to work with third-par­ty media. The dimen­sions of the device are 147x101.6x26.1 mm — it fits per­fect­ly into a case of any size.

Pros:

• High speed.
• Reli­a­bil­i­ty.
• Fast data move­ment.
• Min­i­mum delays.
• Good vol­ume.
• Com­pact­ness.

Minus­es:

• The cost is 5,700 rubles.
• Dif­fi­cult to find for sale.

If you man­age to find an orig­i­nal Dell-400, then you don’t need to wish for a bet­ter dri­ve, as you will get a guar­an­teed high-qual­i­ty and durable mod­el with strong char­ac­ter­is­tics.

Toshiba MG06ACA10TE

One of the best rep­re­sen­ta­tives of clas­sic hard dri­ves with a 3.5‑inch form fac­tor. Its main fea­ture is a large vol­ume (10 TB), which is more than enough for a com­put­er for any pur­pose. The speed of the disk is also impres­sive, achieved thanks to the 7200 rpm spin­dle and the mod­ern Sata 3 inter­face.

High-qual­i­ty assem­bly deserves spe­cial atten­tion — there are no halo­gens here, which addi­tion­al­ly increas­es the ener­gy effi­cien­cy of the device by 16%. And 256 GB of buffer mem­o­ry addi­tion­al­ly accel­er­ate hard. This mod­el guar­an­tees sta­ble and fast work with files, but it is also not cheap.

Pros:

• Qual­i­ty build.
• Ener­gy effi­cien­cy.
• Large vol­ume, includ­ing buffers.
• The abil­i­ty to quick­ly find the files you need.
• Mod­ern high-speed inter­face.
• The aver­age delay time is 5 ms.

Minus­es:

• Sen­si­tive to volt­age drops.
• High cost (17 thou­sand).

One of the best rep­re­sen­ta­tives of its class is suit­able for both PCs and servers. Fast, capa­cious and ener­gy effi­cient — what you need for a pow­er­ful com­put­er.

HGST HUS722T2TALA604

This hard dri­ve has very low laten­cy — only 4.2 ms. With a spin­dle speed of 7200 rpm and a buffer mem­o­ry of 128 GB, this makes it one of the fastest on the mar­ket. The device turned out to be quite capa­cious (2 TB), under load its tem­per­a­ture does not rise above 60 degrees.

The dri­ve is com­ple­ment­ed by a mod­ern Sata 3 inter­face, which guar­an­tees fast skip­ping of even heavy files, with­out speed drops. With such indi­ca­tors, the hard dri­ve turned out to be sur­pris­ing­ly qui­et (25 dB), and it con­sumes only 8.1 W of ener­gy, which makes it also eco­nom­i­cal.

Pros:

• Ener­gy effi­cien­cy.
• Noise­less­ness.
• Does not heat up.
• Low laten­cy.
• Large vol­ume.
• High speed file pro­cess­ing.
• Shock resis­tance min­i­mum 65G.

Minus­es:

• The cost is 6000 rubles.
• There is an unusu­al tap­ping sound dur­ing oper­a­tion.

As for the mys­te­ri­ous sound of work, it is notice­able only if you lis­ten specif­i­cal­ly. How­ev­er, this does not inter­fere, and you can quick­ly get used to it.

Seagate ST3000VM002

The hard dri­ve is intend­ed for instal­la­tion in PCs con­nect­ed to video record­ing sys­tems. It has sup­port for 4 kb divid­ed sec­tors, which allows it to quick­ly find the infor­ma­tion you need. The spin­dle speed is 5900 rpm, the vol­ume of the device is 3 TB.

The dri­ve sup­ports NCQ, which speeds up data pro­cess­ing, and is con­nect­ed via a high-speed Sata 3 inter­face. Laten­cy is about 12 ms, and the hard dri­ve is almost silent (24 dB).

Pros:

• Large vol­ume.
• Silent oper­a­tion.
• Low laten­cy.
• Qual­i­ty build.
• Speedy inter­face.
• NCQ sup­port.
• Pow­er con­sump­tion is only 7.5W.

Minus­es:

• Not the high­est spin­dle speed.
• Only 64 GB of buffer mem­o­ry.

The main advan­tage of this mod­el is that the disk can work day and night, con­sum­ing very lit­tle ener­gy.

READ ALSO

13 Best Exter­nal Hard Dri­ves

How do we choose

As most peo­ple know, today’s games are becom­ing more and more demand­ing, so we decid­ed to do exten­sive research on the Inter­net to make sure that the prod­ucts we rec­om­mend are the best types of hard dri­ves for gam­ing.

Since SSDs are king when it comes to speed, we decid­ed to lim­it our­selves to HDD and SSHD. We did­n’t sole­ly rely on what we found on our end, but instead we also checked out what our fel­low pro­fes­sion­als had to say about hard dri­ves to get a deep­er under­stand­ing of the fea­tures.

Instead of just ran­dom­ly choos­ing the col­or­ful and cool hard dri­ves we could find online, we spent a whole week check­ing reviews, forums, bench­marks, and reviews from man­u­fac­tur­er web­sites like Sea­gate, Toshi­ba, and West­ern Dig­i­tal. .

Best laptop HDDs

Not all disks fit into com­pact lap­top cas­es. In addi­tion, they must be suf­fi­cient­ly reli­able and ener­gy effi­cient, since the lap­tops them­selves often have to be car­ried around and used away from an out­let.

DELL 400-AKXQ

The device is a ter­abyte hard dri­ve with a spin­dle speed of 7200 rpm. Due to this, he quick­ly finds the nec­es­sary infor­ma­tion on the lap­top, and just as quick­ly exchanges it via Sata 3. But its main fea­ture lies in its mea­ger delays (3.12 ms). The assem­bly also turned out to be on top — each of the parts is made to last, which guar­an­tees a long oper­a­tion of the device.

Pros:

• Min­i­mum delays.
• Trans­fer data at speeds up to 6 Gbps.
• Find the files you need instant­ly.
• Good amount of mem­o­ry.
• Qual­i­ty build.
• The kit comes with a spe­cial adapter for a 3.5″ form fac­tor.

Minus­es:

• High cost — 21 thou­sand.
• Dif­fi­cult to find for sale.

One of the best rep­re­sen­ta­tives of 2.5‑inch hard dri­ves that can work both in lap­tops and servers.

Fujitsu S26361-F3956-L200

The disk is dis­tin­guished not only by high-qual­i­ty Japan­ese assem­bly. 512n sec­tor for­mats, equipped with a 50-byte ECC cor­rec­tion code, are almost 100% error-free. At the same time, the device has quite pow­er­ful char­ac­ter­is­tics. This is a large vol­ume of 2 TB, and a high spin­dle speed (7200 rpm), and min­i­mal delays of 2.17 ms. The dri­ve is con­nect­ed via the super-fast Sata 3 inter­face.

Pros:

• Good assem­bly.
• Speedy inter­face.
• Com­pact dimen­sions.
• Min­i­mum delays.
• High rota­tion speed.
• Silent oper­a­tion.
• Large vol­ume.

Minus­es:

• Expen­sive.
• Requires a good ven­ti­la­tion sys­tem.

Although this hard dri­ve is demand­ing enough, for a gam­ing lap­top, you won’t find a bet­ter device. Pow­er­ful, fast and durable — it will be an ide­al acqui­si­tion for any car. The cost of the device is ful­ly con­sis­tent with its capa­bil­i­ties and qual­i­ty.

Western Digital WD Blue Mobile 2TB (WD20SPZX)

This mod­el has been spe­cial­ly designed for pow­er­ful lap­tops and is one of the best in its class. The series itself is designed for fre­quent trans­porta­tion, as evi­denced by durable alu­minum hous­ings and engines with a lock­ing shaft. This also affects the silent oper­a­tion of the disk (up to 24 dB).

Hard dri­ve capac­i­ty is 2 TB, which is a bit too much for a lap­top. At the same time, the aver­age delay time is 5.5 ms, and the pow­er con­sump­tion is only 1.7 W. Acro­nis True Image WD Edi­tion is includ­ed with the hard dri­ve — one of the best back­up sys­tems that will fur­ther secure your data.

Pros:

• Suf­fi­cient­ly capa­cious buffer zone (128 GB).
• Large vol­ume.
• Noise­less­ness.
• Com­plete soft­ware.
• Ener­gy effi­cien­cy.
• Low laten­cy.
• Spe­cial design that pre­vents the disc from over­heat­ing.

Minus­es:

• In the mid­dle of a write cycle, the speed can drop from the stan­dard 150 Mb / s to 98.

2TB of mem­o­ry is a lot even for a gam­ing lap­top. And then there are such high speed per­for­mance, ener­gy effi­cien­cy and noise­less­ness as a bonus.

Toshiba HDWL120UZSVA

In this mod­el, I would like to note its well-thought-out equip­ment. The device is assem­bled using ramp load­ing tech­nol­o­gy, which, when the lap­top is turned off, dis­con­nects the head from the disk, mak­ing trans­porta­tion com­plete­ly safe. Anoth­er fea­ture of the hard dri­ve is the Dynam­ic Cache tech­nol­o­gy, which inde­pen­dent­ly opti­mizes the cache in order to max­i­mize the speed of the hard dri­ve.

The hard dri­ve capac­i­ty is 2 TB, the buffer capac­i­ty is 128 GB. The rota­tion speed is a lit­tle low — 5400 rpm, but the pres­ence of NCQ and low delays ful­ly com­pen­sate for it. Again, all this is imple­ment­ed in a com­pact form fac­tor (2.5″) with low pow­er con­sump­tion and high shock resis­tance.

Pros:

• Impact resis­tance 400–1000G.
• NCQ sup­port.
• Low laten­cy — 5.56 ms.
• Large amount of mem­o­ry and rather big buffer.
• Smart tech­nolo­gies “on board”.

Minus­es:

• Not all mem­o­ry is avail­able, but only 1.84 TB.
• It heats up a lit­tle, but not more than 65 degrees.

This hard dri­ve offers an excel­lent com­bi­na­tion of per­for­mance and rea­son­able price (about 4600 rubles).

Samsung ST1500LM006

The 1.5 TB hard dri­ve with a 5400 rpm spin­dle speed is dis­tin­guished by its design. The device reads infor­ma­tion from 3 plates, which allows it to quick­ly find the files you need. Laten­cy does not exceed 5.6 ms, and 32 MB buffer speeds up the dri­ve along with NCQ tech­nol­o­gy.

The device is con­nect­ed via the SATA 3 inter­face. At the same time, its impact resis­tance is in no way infe­ri­or to SSD-type disks, and it con­sumes only 2.3 watts of pow­er. Sep­a­rate­ly, I want to note his qui­et work. Even dur­ing full load, the noise does not go beyond 25 dB.

Pros:

• Opti­mal capac­i­ty.
• Low laten­cy.
• Ener­gy effi­cien­cy.
• Silent oper­a­tion.
• Impact resis­tance.

Minus­es:

• Not the high­est spin­dle speed.

An excel­lent hard dri­ve that can quick­ly find the files you need thanks to its spe­cial design, good buffer and NCQ sup­port.

READ ALSO

12 Best Portable Hard Dri­ves

What to Consider

As with any piece of hard­ware, there are always things to con­sid­er to make sure you’re buy­ing the right hard dri­ve for your gam­ing PC. In this sec­tion, we’ll go over a few key fac­tors you need to be aware of and pro­vide you with all the help you need to make that all-impor­tant final pur­chase.

Storage needs

First of all, pay atten­tion to your stor­age needs.

If you’re a PC enthu­si­ast and have a large library of games that you play reg­u­lar­ly, a large hard dri­ve won’t be a prob­lem. This becomes even more impor­tant when you start using game record­ing soft­ware like Shad­ow­play, which gen­er­ates large raw video files on your hard dri­ve that you can work with.

As of 2021, games are get­ting heav­ier and heav­ier, which means it’s impor­tant to get a stor­age device with at least 1TB of stor­age when­ev­er pos­si­ble.

How­ev­er, if you’re a gamer who does­n’t try to play every game under the sun, a small­er dri­ve might be bet­ter for you. Con­sole play­ers will like­ly be able to take full advan­tage of the 1TB SSHD option we’ve pro­vid­ed, as your stor­age will most­ly only be used for games and not media files.

If you’re on a bud­get, our West­ern Dig­i­tal dri­ve might be your best bet. While we high­ly rec­om­mend upgrad­ing your stor­age at some point in the future, buy­ing a PC for $300 or less often means sac­ri­fic­ing stor­age for per­for­mance.

Does the hybrid really matter?

Hybrid hard dri­ves are an amaz­ing com­pro­mise between SSD speed and raw hard dri­ve stor­age, and are often just the trade-off peo­ple want.

If you’re look­ing for absolute max­i­mum per­for­mance in all your games and appli­ca­tions, a 2TB SSD will do the job and then some. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, SSDs cost a lot more per GB than HDDs, and it’s sim­ply impos­si­ble for most to have room for all your games on an SSD.

Mean­while, the 2TB hard dri­ve has more than enough space to store games and media. I’ve been using a 2TB hard dri­ve for years now and still haven’t filled it up despite all the down­loads and video record­ings I’ve made on my PC!

How­ev­er, some­times the hard dri­ve may boot more slow­ly. As my hard dri­ve aged, I noticed that its per­for­mance dropped, mean­ing that I sat on load­ing screens for a lot longer than my con­tem­po­raries.

A hybrid hard dri­ve bal­ances the ben­e­fits of both types of stor­age, but does not com­plete­ly replace either.

brand

When it comes to hard dri­ves, the brand is extreme­ly impor­tant.

Luck­i­ly, West­ern Dig­i­tal and Sea­gate are some of the best hard dri­ve man­u­fac­tur­ers out there, with con­sis­tent­ly high reviews and high build qual­i­ty.

If for some rea­son you decide to buy a hard dri­ve that isn’t on this list, make sure you buy it from a rep­utable man­u­fac­tur­er. A few oth­er good man­u­fac­tur­ers include Toshi­ba and Sam­sung.

A note about solid state drives

How­ev­er, we need to address the ele­phant in the room: SSDs do exist.

With an SSD, you can install your OS, pro­grams, and a few of your favorite games to speed up load­ing and response times. Sol­id state dri­ves are one of the most rec­om­mend­ed upgrades you can get on your PC.

If you are will­ing to sac­ri­fice stor­age space for speed, we high­ly rec­om­mend that you pur­chase an SSD instead. It’s also worth not­ing that if you have mon­ey, it’s not nec­es­sar­i­ly an either-or sit­u­a­tion.

You can buy a small SSD to take advan­tage of with your OS and a few of your favorite games, then buy a hard dri­ve for oth­er games and media stor­age. At least you can do it with desk­top com­put­ers.

This is usu­al­ly not pos­si­ble on lap­tops and game con­soles.

The best hybrid hard drives

Hard dri­ves with SSD sup­port form a suc­cess­ful sym­bio­sis. They become much faster and at the same time still con­tain a lot of infor­ma­tion.

Seagate ST2400MM0129

The ST2400 is ide­al for com­put­ers, lap­tops and even servers. All thanks to the com­bi­na­tion of a 2.5‑inch form fac­tor and a high-speed SAS inter­face (1200 Mb / s). Sea­gate per­fect­ly bal­anced the disk space by split­ting 2.4TB, after which they added 256GB of buffer zone and 16GB of flash mem­o­ry.

Very impres­sive spin­dle speed — 10,000 rpm. But the coolest thing is the aver­age laten­cy of 2.9 ms, which incred­i­bly speeds up the device. Spe­cial men­tion deserves the Pro­tec­tion Infor­ma­tion tech­nol­o­gy, which pre­vents data loss, even if they end up on a dam­aged disk area.

Pros:

• Large amount of main, buffer and SSD mem­o­ry.
• Data pro­tec­tion.
• High speed inter­face.
• Increased spin­dle speed.
• Suit­able for all types of tech­nol­o­gy.
• Does­n’t get hot­ter than 50 degrees.
• Shock resis­tant (40G and 400G).
• Auto­mat­ic pow­er con­sump­tion con­trol.

Minus­es:

• The price is 25 thou­sand and expen­sive repairs.

This disc was cre­at­ed specif­i­cal­ly for high-speed cars. Four plates and 8 write heads, super-fast inter­face and min­i­mal laten­cy are the hall­mark of the Sea­gate device.

Western Digital WD Blue SSHD 4TB (WD40E31X)

This hard was spe­cial­ly designed for pow­er­ful gam­ing com­put­ers. Its vol­ume of 4 TB is sup­ple­ment­ed by 64 MB of buffer and 8 gigs of flash mem­o­ry. SSDs in it are MLC-type cells that can with­stand up to 3000 rewrite cycles. The device guar­an­tees a high speed of oper­a­tion, both dur­ing intradisk data search (150 Mb/s) and when trans­fer­ring them via the Sata 3 inter­face.

The vol­ume of the hard dri­ve does not exceed 25–26 dB even under heavy loads, and it con­sumes only 6 watts of ener­gy. It is worth not­ing the shock resis­tance of the device, which reach­es 30 G in oper­a­tion and 350 G dur­ing trans­porta­tion.

Pros:

• Very large capac­i­ty.
• Qual­i­ty build.
• Three types of mem­o­ry.
• Mod­ern inter­face.
• Silent oper­a­tion.
• Low ener­gy con­sump­tion.
• Impact resis­tance.

Minus­es:

• The price is 20 thou­sand rubles.
• When record­ing, the speed can jump from 120 to 180 Mb / s.

Durable SSD cells, huge HDD capac­i­ty, com­ple­ment­ed by high speed and build qual­i­ty — all this is SSHD WD Blue.

Seagate ST2000DX002

One of the best exam­ples of hybrid tech­nol­o­gy has a total mem­o­ry capac­i­ty of 2 TB. The device uses MLC type mem­o­ry cells, which has a pos­i­tive effect on the dura­bil­i­ty of the device. On aver­age, write and read speeds fluc­tu­ate around 210 MB / s, and laten­cy indi­ca­tors are only 9.16 ms.

The media here are rep­re­sent­ed by 2 plates and 4 writ­ing heads that instant­ly find the nec­es­sary files. There is also a 64 MB buffer mem­o­ry in the hard dri­ve, as well as an 8 GB flash mem­o­ry. Sup­ports the device and NCQ, and with such char­ac­ter­is­tics, the pow­er con­sump­tion of 6.7 W can be called small.

Pros:

• Low cost — 5300r.
• High read and write speed.
• A good design that speeds up the work of the disk.
• 3 types of mem­o­ry.
• NCQ sup­port.
• Low ener­gy con­sump­tion.
• Large total vol­ume.

Minus­es:

• Lim­it­ed num­ber of write cycles for the SSD part.
• A bit noisy.

The hybrid device com­bines the speed capa­bil­i­ties of an SSD and the low cost of an HDD, mak­ing this mod­el one of the best on the mar­ket.

HP E1C62AA

The HP E1C62AA is best suit­ed for instal­la­tion in a lap­top, since it has only 500 GB of mem­o­ry. But the device notice­ably wins in speed, show­ing delays up to 5.6 ms. In addi­tion, the hard dri­ve has flash mem­o­ry (8 GB) and a buffer zone of 64. All this will allow you to quick­ly find and process the files you need.

The spin­dle speed sags a lit­tle, but it is great­ly com­pen­sat­ed by NCQ sup­port. The device is installed in a 2.5‑inch slot, and is con­nect­ed via a high-speed Sata 3 inter­face, which guar­an­tees a through­put of 600 Mb / s.

Pros:

• Fast file find­ing and low tim­ings.
• Speedy inter­face.
• NCQ sup­port.
• Triple mem­o­ry type.
• Qual­i­ty build.
• High write / read speed (210 Mb / s).

Minus­es:

• There are few lap­top mod­els com­pat­i­ble with the dri­ve.
• The amount of mem­o­ry is not impres­sive.

Few lap­tops can boast a hybrid hard dri­ve, and this mod­el is just the thing to com­plete a pow­er­ful machine. There is both speed and qual­i­ty, and there is enough mem­o­ry for a lap­top.

READ ALSO

15 Best PC Hard Dri­ves

Best Performance — Seagate FireCuda (2TB)

After many hours of test­ing, we have come to the con­clu­sion that the Fire­cu­da 2TB is the best stor­age solu­tion for gam­ing data. It may look like a reg­u­lar mechan­i­cal hard dri­ve, but it’s actu­al­ly a hybrid stor­age device that com­bines the speed of an SSD with the capac­i­ty of a hard dri­ve. All thanks to 8 GB NAND sol­id-state mem­o­ry, which expo­nen­tial­ly increas­es load times.