Update - Important, that price $A58.50 INCLUDES EXPRESS POST DELIVERY.

I can get Seagate Barracuda 2tb 7200rpm for $49.99 LOCALLY, or

WD Black Performance 1TB 7200RPM SATA III 6Gb/s 3.5" Internal CMR Hard Drive for the same price.

If 7200rpm is not required, see:

Toshiba L200 1TB 5400RPM SATA III 6Gb/s 2.5" Internal SMR Hard Drive for same price.

By the same token one can go SSD:

Inland Platinum 1TB SSD 3D TLC NAND SATA III 6Gb/s 2.5" Internal Solid State Drive for $54.99

As regards boot drives, do you need a full terabyte? Most times a 512mb SSD will give far greater performance and "enough room" to install the important apps that don't create a lot of rubbish (cache, retained files, logs, etc). In that case one can get "brand names" into the Under Fifty range.

If free shipping is required ... well ... might look at that eBay stuff (I have been burned there so many times it is "never again").

Mailing rates from lower 48 to Austrailia can be sorta expensive, but NOT that radical! Are you SURE that the express post delivery is international?

The $49.99 LOCALLY, is exactly what in $A? If USD $50 then that is $A 71.60

Because my $A 58.50 is about $US 40.80 - GBP 32.90 OR Eur 37.50

HDD rpm is of no concern - most of my programs are in WX or Y drives. The C Boot drive I try to restrict to Win 10 OS. My Removable drives store Terabytes of video.

Anyhoo is an Iron Wolf NOT suitable for a Boot Drive? Ordinarily I would buy a Seagate or WDC drive for boot - none are on special at present.

SSD? Let me count how many dead ones I have lying around - just after warranty expires.

About eBay [Australia]? NEVER over 10+ years with 700+ tranactions have I lost a cent. Only two dud transactions in all that time and eBay refunded money. Remember eBay Oz is subject to Australian Consumer Law which is tough on shonks.

eBay Express delivery is of course totally local.- I doubt any Australian seller sends overseas.- perhaps ethnic group catering to home countries might. Powdered milk to China was big once until retailers clamped right down.

Apparently not. A NAS drive is different from a regular drive.

I just looked up the price of a 1 TB SSD and they're selling for the equivalent of 64.18AUD. If you're going to use it for a boot drive, seems like SSD is the way to go?

That's what I'm getting for my next computer soon.

My current boot is a 1tb WD SSD, all the rest are spinning rust. The SSD ended up in the mix because there was a "buy one, get second at half price" sale at the same time my 1tb spinning rust boot was giving me fits and a client needed to replace his boot drive...

Cloned my old 1tb to the 1tb and have been happy ever since. Of course, now that I have talked about it that piece of gear will probably belly up in a few days---or hours!

According to seagate documentation, Iron Wolf CAN be a secondary drive when not used in NAS configuration, but the Seagate you want as a boot drive is a Barracuda. Which, in most cases, is cheaper than any of the other Seagates. Or, more properly for boot purposes (NOT STORAGE) SSD is the better way to go for system operation and housekeeping.

Followup ... my boot SSD, which has only the OS, Office, Firefox and Thunderbird (and fonts) only uses about 250gb.... that's why a 512gb SSD is very useful for boot. Everything else I have is supplemental internal hard drives (3) or external drives (12)... with a total of 22tb all told ... of which I am using about half-ish.

Been quite awhile since I last posted in my tipsy topsy world for a now 80 year old.

Heh! Racing as fast as I can to catch up! Seventy-four on this end. I suspect there are others doing the same (whether they wish it or not!), and some are envious you made it while we struggle to get there!

Sending Mr. Spock wishes: "Live long and prosper!"

Thanks to all.

Well I will re-examine SSD again - notwithstanding having four dead SSD in a junk box somewhere.

Ah yes Mr. Spock

Well with SSD a well respected vendor on eBay has this:

Crucial CT480BX500SSD1 BX500 480GB 2.5" SATA3 6Gb/s SSD

Should do as a boot drive. Priced at $A 50.69 after eBayPlus discount and with free postage. I have successfully used 2.5" drives before.

ADDED:
Free express delivery with eBay Plus

Good luck! Let us know how it all turns out!

Aside: I, too, have a couple of fried SSDs in the past (didn't keep them), but decided to give it one more try when I could get one at half price ... Going on four years and working like a champ.

Late to the party on this, but, yes, go for SSD for booting. You'll kick yourself for not doing it sooner. If you just use it for boot it'll be much better: Regular writing is the downfall, so stick to hard drives for data writing if you're looking for longevity. I stick to hard drives and RAID 1.

Word of warning about SSDs: There are lots of bogus drives out there. Make sure you've got a genuine part. I read a report about an SSD which used software to fool anything checking it that it had a bigger memory but it was only about 64mb. The way they found out it was the software fooling things was using a testing tool to load lots of files. It crashed out before 64mb.

I read a report about an SSD which used software to fool anything checking it that it had a bigger memory but it was only about 64mb.

I doubt that any SSDs listed at the major outlets (think Amazon, even eBay) have any of those. After all, they have to make good on all customer complaints!

Large, known, computer/media dealers will certainly list only the good stuff.

If one can find it there, then one is likely to avoid the bogus!

Reading from spinning rust at boot time is "kinda slow". SSD is way faster! HOWEVER, when using the system after boot most of your speed will be in RAM memory once the programs have loaded---or near instant responses when calling from memory cache.

That said, I do include some apps on the SSD boot to make them load swiftly first access, but have all the WORK written to and stored on spinning rust where write/rewrite works so much better than trying to do the same on SSD. ON THE OTHER HAND, if there is CERTAIN DATA that I want to access (which does not change) I will keep it on SSD for that speed boost.

Each situation is different. Each will have to determine what works best for their purposes.

I doubt that any SSDs listed at the major outlets (think Amazon, even eBay) have any of those.

That's the source that was indicated in the article. A trawl through the inventory and you can find questionable memory.

For a boot device, it really needs to be SSD these days. The day you migrate from HDD to SSD is the day you wish you had done it sooner. It's not a small difference, it's a huge difference.

What a lot of people seem to do these days is buy a good brand low-capacity SSD (500 GB or so) and use that for the OS. Then install a large HDD for storage, or if you have the need for lots of storage multiple HDDs in some form of Raid array.

Mack.