Hello, everybody. I’ve been looking for a new storage solution. I know, that HDDs are reliable and SSDs are for fast access, but I’ve been an HDD user ever since. I have an SSD, but I only have the OS on it. Likewise, I want to do some basic File operations, as writing documents or copy files. It would also be great if I could use it as a Backup kind of sorts device. It would be great if I could move my data from my old WD-Elements external HDD, quickly, to an intern HDD without any fuss. I just need a Storage medium that’s cheap and good. Do you have any recommendations? Thanks in advance!
The main drive should ALWAYS be an SSD these days. Having an SSD drive is the single most important component when it comes to making your PC feel fast. Even when it comes to secondary drives, I’d stick to SSDs, since you can find 2TB SSDs for less than $100 these days.
HDD come into play when you need more than 4TB and have stuff to store that doesn’t need to be fast, like movies, backups, etc. Those are fine on a HDD, as HDDs are still substantially cheaper at that size and you won’t even find >10TB consumer SSDs.
Another thing to consider is noise, HDDs make quite a substantial amount of noise in a modern PC, so a USB HDD that you can disconnect when not in use ain’t the worst idea.
As for reliability, there is no real advantage one way or the other, both can randomly die. Make backups.
SSDs are way more reliable than spinning disks, especially in a laptop that gets banged around. HDDs win in only one category: capacity per price.
SSDs are way more reliable than spinning disks
That’s true, with one caveat: if an SSD fails, it’s usually catastrophically and without warning. HDDs usually give some warning signs before they fail completely (bad sectors, read/write errors, strange noises).
The SSD memory cell failure mode is to retain the last written contents, so I actually don’t think I agree. In the SMART diagnostics, it shows how many of these bad cells are present, which is a reasonable indicator of impending failure from age
One major failure mode of SSDs is that they can corrupt their FTL map. That kills all of the data instantly.
(Now, a major reliability advantage of SSDs is that by being faster, you can also make a backup of them faster. And if backups goes faster, you’re more likely to actually do them. Right? Right!?)
As someone who is slowly migrating his Nas to u.2 SSD, so much this.
Reliability, speed, density. Everything is better with solid state.
As a European: low power consumption!
if you need less than 4TB just get a solid state
if you have to ask then get an ssd
What you can do is have a 1-2Tb SSD and use that as your day to day drive then use Timeshift to regularly backup the entire drive to a HDD.
SSDs are really the way to go unless you need massive amounts of storage. I have 4x4 TB spinning disks in a RAID z1. I built it out of refurb WD enterprise grade hardware on the cheap. Going on almost a year of trouble free use. I got each drive for 30 bucks. There’s no way I am going to get that kind of space on an SSD for 120 bucks.
SSDs are quite reliable and way faster than HDD over time. Only use HDD if your backing up data and even yet, there are mdiscs for data archiving.
I use HDDs for long term and larger storage… my home partition, working partitions and the OS itself are on distinct SSDs.
It would be great if I could move my data from my old WD-Elements external HDD, quickly, to an intern HDD without any fuss.
Take the casing off and remove the hard drive, install it in your computer. Done.
Do google the model number to ensure the drive in question is actually shuckable, not all are
