With the popularity of home theater and the gradual increase in demand for ultra-high definition**, the storage problem of film sources has become a topic with a lot of voice.
According to the current market inertia, the source storage solution of home theater is usually through a mechanical hard disk or a matrix built by a mechanical hard disk to carry the storage work of the film.
Then there has to be a question: Do you have to choose a mechanical hard disk for home theater source storage? This involves the storage advantages and disadvantages of HDDs and SSDs in the home theater scenario. This article makes a comparison between the two in view of this phenomenon, so that you can choose according to your own needs.
Difference 1: **The gap is large
*Disparity is a very real problem, and it depends on the budget cap of a home theater enthusiast when building an entire environment. HDDs are relatively inexpensive and cost less per g, making them often an economical choice for high-capacity storage needs. Even if the SSD continues to pick up, it still can't compare with the mechanical hard disk to have obvious advantages.
Difference 2: Read speed
This is the same as the phenomenon of traditional mobile phones and computers, and the read and write speed of SSDs is higher because they are carried out electronically without mechanical movement. HDDs need to wait for the head to position and the platter to rotate, which is correspondingly slower.
The same is true for movies that require random access to large files, and SSDs are faster at quickly locating and reading clips.
Mass storage requirements
Hard disk drives are preferred
HDDs are recommended for high capacity because they are cheaper to build. The "big" here refers to the need for more than 10 or 20 terabytes of storage space or even higher. The general size of a true 4K movie resource is around 50GB-100GB, if you are a movie lover or *** collector, you can't complete this move if you don't have enough storage space.
In the construction of large-capacity storage, home theater is not a single to add hard disks to computers and other equipment, but also to use NAS private cloud or array cabinet solutions. Here we have to mention the difference between mechanical hard disks that many people tend to ignore.
Buy an HDD
Take a closer look at its categories
There are two types of mechanical hard disks: "shingled" and "vertical", and if consumers have not researched this, most of them may buy "shingled" mechanical hard disks.
Vertical HDDs, also known as PMRs, use vertical orientation to store data, with no overlap between each data track. This layout makes reading and writing data easier and more efficient. Generally speaking, the maximum capacity of a single disc of a vertical hard disk does not exceed 2G, if you want to increase the capacity of the hard disk, there is a technical bottleneck in terms of capacity, so stacking more disks in the limited disk space has become the direction chosen by more manufacturers.
Similarly, due to the limited disk space, when there was a technical bottleneck in vertical stacking, shingled HDDs that changed the stacking method were developed. Also known as SMR, it uses a shingle-like data track layout where there is partial overlap between adjacent data tracks. This layout can increase data storage density, but it can lead to degraded write performance by requiring overlapping data to be rearranged when new data is written.
In general, shingled drives can have more storage space than vertical drives at the same size, but shingled technology to trade their capacity advantages at the expense of stability and performance. When frequently reading data or writing fragmented, it is easy to cause speed droppage and jamming. In general, vertical hard drives for home environments are a more suitable choice.
How do you tell the difference? In the same configuration, shingled HDDs will be cheaper and thinner than vertical HDDs. The shingled cache is generally around 128MB-256MB, and the vertical cache is generally 32MB-64MB. Of course, for the sake of insurance, you can also consult the store's customer service directly.
Small capacity requirements
SSDs are preferred
Small capacity requirements mean that home theater enthusiasts only choose to store their favorite movies, not classic movies. This way, the storage space requirements are not so huge, and usually 1TB-4TB SSDs can meet this situation.
Using an SSD as a storage solution for a home theater is usually through a hard drive enclosure as the storage medium. Compared with NAS or disk array cabinets, the hard disk enclosure is lighter in size, and in addition to home use, it also supports the expansion of flexible devices such as mobile phones, tablets, and laptops.
In the choice of SSD, you can match the compatible size of the hard disk enclosure, such as Greenlink USB4 M2 The NVMe SSD enclosure (CM642) supports four different sizes of M2 NVMe SSD. With a running rate of up to 40Gbps and a sustained read rate of up to 3600+ MB s, a file equivalent to 3G can be transferred in just 1 second under theoretical performance.
In general, for home theater source storage, the choice of HDD or SSD depends on capacity needs, personal budget, and usage scenarios. If you're looking for affordable high-capacity storage and don't mind slower loading speeds, a vertical HDD is a good choice. If you're looking for read and write speeds, being light and quiet, and you're on a budget, SSDs are more in line with expectations.
Home theater