Storage technology has come a long way in the last decade, and with the improvements to SSDs, do HDDs continue to have a place among consumers? The prices for both SSDs and HDDs have gone down in recent years, while storage capacity has gone up. However, with SSDs being a newer technology, they tend to be more expensive while bringing benefits over HDDs in various ways.
Hard Drives (HDDs) and Solid State Drives (SSDs) are both technologies for storing data for users to access at a later date. HDDs operate by using a physically spinning disk and store data magnetically, while SSDs have no moving parts whatsoever and instead store data in integrated circuits, removing the need for a spinning disk. Hard drives have been around for much longer than SSDs, but are larger and bulkier.
So, is there any reason to still buy hard drives when SSDs are the newer technology? For the vast majority of users, SSDs are the better choice for storing data. They are also significantly faster, more reliable, and last longer than hard drives. As Intel explains, the one area where hard drives are better than SSDs at the moment is the price per capacity since HDDs are cheaper than SSDs at the moment. Although SSDs are increasingly becoming cheaper every year, HDDs still win in this area by a long shot and are a great choice for long-time, high-capacity storage for mass amounts of data if the price is a factor.
SSDs Are The Better Choice For Most
Not only are SSDs the overall better technology in terms of efficiency and speed, but they are also far more compact. An M.2 SSD, for example, comes in at around 22 x 80 x 2.23 millimeters while a 2.5-inch HDD is 2.7 x 3.96 x 0.37 inches in size. This difference in size is astounding and shows how small storage can get when compared to the legacy technology of an HDD. And without moving parts, the likelihood of an SSD malfunctioning is significantly lower. These days, you can even get SSDs with 100TB of storage.
For most users, a 2TB SATA SSD for around $100 will be plenty of storage for documents, games, music, etc. The only reason why an HDD may be the better choice over an SSD is for people who tend to store terabytes of data and want to keep all their data stored for the long run without spending as much money since, for around the same price as the 2TB SSD, a user could get a 10TB HDD. But for the vast majority of users, a faster, smaller, more reliable, and more efficient SSD will be the better choice.
Source: Intel