HDDs, not SSDs

Most people, including the team here at XDA​​​​​​, will readily say that replacing an old hard drive with an SSD is the single most important performance boost that you can make. It’s true, mostly, especially if that speedy SSD is going to be the main storage drive in your computer. But there are some storage situations where the hard drive is still king, and SSDs haven’t quite got what it takes.

The primary driver for my hard drive stockpiling is to increase the space I have for longer-term storage. Things like photos, business receipts, media files, and regularly used installers, so I don’t have to download them every time. I’ve gone through a succession of external hard drives and off the shelf NAS units, from single-drive Western Digital MyBook drives, through two-bay, four-bay, and currently, a six-bay Synology NAS, and I’m going to need to upgrade that soon enough.

Every step has involved buying the largest 3.5″ hard drives that I could find, installing them into a NAS, filling them with data, and planning for the next round of upgrades when the storage pool reaches a certain point. The data on these drives dates back to before SSDs were affordable and, in some cases, before they were widely available to consumers as well.

The data on these drives dates back to before SSDs were affordable and, in some cases, before they were widely available to consumers as well.

The first SSD I used was a Samsung 840 Evo 250GB, way back in 2014. SSDs had been around for a while, but that was the first time they were really affordable. At that time, I could get a 2TB hard drive for around the same price, eight times the storage space. Not to mention that 250GB was barely enough for a Windows boot drive and some programs, so all my secondary storage on my gaming PC was HDDs.