SSD or HDD?

Chrysalis

depends on what it is used for.

The practical speed gains from ssd's are from random i/o, and usb 3 is easily fast enough to not bottleneck an ssd for that type of workload so e.g. a ssd on usb3 would be faster than a sata hdd.

However if its just been used for things like storing photos/videos then a hdd would be adequate for the task. If its used for things like loading games, then a ssd would be better.

arciere

that wrote: »

I don't know. failure and deletion are very different.

Yes, what I meant is that if data is important, no matter if disappears because the drive fails or you delete it by mistake, you should always have a backup, that would make the way the drive handles deleted/corrupted data irrelevant.

poppellerant

I think the OP needs to clarify what they want to store on the external drive and how they want to use it.

For backups, a hard drive will be more than fine. SSDs offer you less storage for the price, but they are faster for loading software. Having said that, SSD prices do seem to be falling slowly. Hopefully 1TB SSD drives will be reasonably priced in a year or two.

droopsnoot

Can I piggy-back onto this thread rather than starting a new one? Assuming yes:


I'm about to switch to a new PC with a 240GB SSD, and I'll have a 1TB HDD in there as well. Is it OK to keep things like Outlook and VMWare files on the SSD, as long as they're regularly copied to the HDD? I have zero experience on SSD yet, and I recall some stuff about number of read and write cycles. Of course, the main reason for the SSD is to make Outlook and stuff like it faster, so there'd be little point if the best way is to put the stuff that is interactive on the HDD>

arciere

droopsnoot wrote: »

Can I piggy-back onto this thread rather than starting a new one? Assuming yes:


I'm about to switch to a new PC with a 240GB SSD, and I'll have a 1TB HDD in there as well. Is it OK to keep things like Outlook and VMWare files on the SSD, as long as they're regularly copied to the HDD? I have zero experience on SSD yet, and I recall some stuff about number of read and write cycles. Of course, the main reason for the SSD is to make Outlook and stuff like it faster, so there'd be little point if the best way is to put the stuff that is interactive on the HDD>

There's no need for that, it would be a waste of space.
SSD and HDD can both fail, so if data is important you should have a backup, but somewhere else

droopsnoot

OK, cheers. I do have various external drives and sometimes backup stuff out to cloud storage. The main reason for the HDD alongside the SSD is for a more local backup, and for storage such as photos and music where the speed isn't an issue.


I suspect that I am like most people, in that my backups are not really regular (or often) enough.

grumpycrab

droopsnoot wrote: »

The main reason for the HDD alongside the SSD is for a more local backup.

Sounds alright to me, although not sure what Outlook's got to do with it (unless you're specifically storing your email locally?); guess the question is what's the chance of SSD and HDD blowing up simultaneously? power spike/blown PSU killing all connected peripherals?

arciere

droopsnoot wrote: »

OK, cheers. I do have various external drives and sometimes backup stuff out to cloud storage. The main reason for the HDD alongside the SSD is for a more local backup, and for storage such as photos and music where the speed isn't an issue.


I suspect that I am like most people, in that my backups are not really regular (or often) enough.

SSD+HDD makes sense, at least until SSDs become as cheap as HDDs.

In regards to the backup side of things, a proper backup needs to be somewhere else for a lot of reasons: what if you get a virus that compromises both drives? What if your PC gets physically damaged?
On the other hand, if you are concerned about time wasting should something happen (data transfer from an external drive), you also have the option to build a simple RAID1 array: simple redundancy, but double the cost (you have two identical drives, only one usable). Just remember that RAID is not equal to backup.

droopsnoot

grumpycrab wrote: »

Sounds alright to me, although not sure what Outlook's got to do with it (unless you're specifically storing your email locally?);

Yes, I'm storing email locally. Too much of it, but I can never seem to find the time to go through and decide what can be deleted.

arciere wrote: »

SSD+HDD makes sense, at least until SSDs become as cheap as HDDs.

In regards to the backup side of things, a proper backup needs to be somewhere else for a lot of reasons: what if you get a virus that compromises both drives? What if your PC gets physically damaged?
On the other hand, if you are concerned about time wasting should something happen (data transfer from an external drive), you also have the option to build a simple RAID1 array: simple redundancy, but double the cost (you have two identical drives, only one usable). Just remember that RAID is not equal to backup.

I did wonder about RAID mirroring to help with physical drive problems, though of course that won't help in the virus situation and, as you say, it's not a backup. And, it's a home PC that I happen to do a bit of work on, so I want to try to keep things reasonable.


I did used to have a background* in IT, but I've been out of it for a while so I'm not really up to date with current practice.


(* well, I guess as it's a background then I still have it, but it's more distant than it used to be.)

akira181

Hairs are being split over port speeds. Unless you're regularly transferring very large files, you're unlikely to notice any difference. The speed gains between them are barely noticeable in the real world.

If it's just for data storage, go for whatever gives you the most storage for your money. If it's for running programs and/or is your boot drive, then go SSD for the faster read speeds. That's where the noticeable speed differences are found.