Selecting a hard drive: SSD vs. HDD or both

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Selecting a hard drive: SSD vs. HDD or both

At one stage, not so many years ago, for most people it was easy to decide what drive to select when buying a computer: a spinning drive (HDD). A solid state drive (SSD) option was simply too expensive and could not offer the capacity. So buying a hard drive was simple. You’d find the three or four highest capacity drives you could afford, pick the fastest, and, well, that was it! These days it is a little more difficult as SSD technology has come of age and is now fast overtaking the older HDD technology.
 
With new laptops supporting NVMe SSD drives in addition to traditional ones you can now have the best of both.
 
Just as a note - SSD's are great if you want high speed read. However, if you are doing a lot of writes to them, while they are fast, platter disks still have an advantage in terms of life span. Torrenting to an SSD for example which is doing tons of small writes is a fast way to kill an SSD, and while they are GREAT for using as swap disks because they are incredibly fast if you're doing a lot of swapping, again, they won't last terribly long.

I've got 40 platter disks linked into my system, and in 3 years I've lost 1. By comparison, I've got 4 SSD's, and in 3 years, I've had to replace 3 of them because of problems developing after 6 to 8 months of heavy use on the drives. So beware, SSD's are great for standard use, but if you're doing heavy writes and using them for high speed transfer/swap disks with the data constantly being changed on them, expect them to be consumable. (Basically, I use SSD's purely for swap and transfers - then I get the data off them onto something else that isn't being churned all the time, and simply replace the SSD's as they die)
 
At this stage, SSD's are possibly still a bit on the expensive side - especially for corresponding size (of a HDD). And recent applications/software pretty much expect the machine to have one. I've gone the hybrid route - a 1 TB SSHD - which has been impressive in performance terms, while still giving me the space I need.
 
NVMe as my OS drive, normal SSD drive for games, old school spinning drive for other random things. That's how I roll now \:D/
 
AndrewAlston said:
Just as a note - SSD's are great if you want high speed read. However, if you are doing a lot of writes to them, while they are fast, platter disks still have an advantage in terms of life span. Torrenting to an SSD for example which is doing tons of small writes is a fast way to kill an SSD, and while they are GREAT for using as swap disks because they are incredibly fast if you're doing a lot of swapping, again, they won't last terribly long.

I've got 40 platter disks linked into my system, and in 3 years I've lost 1. By comparison, I've got 4 SSD's, and in 3 years, I've had to replace 3 of them because of problems developing after 6 to 8 months of heavy use on the drives. So beware, SSD's are great for standard use, but if you're doing heavy writes and using them for high speed transfer/swap disks with the data constantly being changed on them, expect them to be consumable. (Basically, I use SSD's purely for swap and transfers - then I get the data off them onto something else that isn't being churned all the time, and simply replace the SSD's as they die)
Click to expand...

You should be buying SSDs with the correct write endurance.

TLC will be out for you.

1TB Kingston KC400 has a write endurance of 1600TB
 
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