“While people were devouring boxsets, their NAS drives were at work, whirring merrily away”

This doesn’t happen often, but it may be that I owe some people an apology. Back in the summer, I wrote a piece on doing the wrong thing with a great big spinning hard disk. Storage can be a puzzling business and, given a surfeit of time at home courtesy of the lockdown, I tried to do some bad things with the drives I’d been sent. Much to my amazement, the 18TB Seagate Ironwolf drive sat happily in a regular PC drive cage, seen by Windows 10, and threw around files at some nicely elevated speeds. It wasn’t even terribly wasteful in terms of cluster sizes and mixtures of large and small files.

This led me to take a somewhat foolish step with the next pair of disks to arrive. I assumed that everything I had “learned” with the Ironwolf could be applied to all other modern drives. “A pair of Western Digital 12TB drives ought to do just as well as the single 18TB in the next PC to arrive in the recycling basement here,” I told myself.

I knew, in the back of my mind, that “ought to work” and “recycling”