Do we still need spinning drives?

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Jul 29, 2019
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I have a question regarding my new build please. Is there a reason to be utilising a HDD alongside a SSD these days? If my understanding is correct, traditionally something like the OS would ruin off a small SSD for speed while everything else was assessed from a HDD. Is that still the case of could I simply go for one larger SSD for everything? Are there pros and cons that I'm missing here? Cheers.
 
If you can fit everything on a SSD within what you're willing to spend, then go all SSD. If you have a lot of media files like many videos, then HDDs are useful. What a lot of people do now is use SSDs in their rigs and HDDs in a NAS/Server.
 
I have a 4TB HDD USB drive for data recovery dumps. I also have a 1TB 2.5" HDD in my rig just in case I want to dump some data or hold a folder of media for a while.

If I wasn't in the support business I wouldnt have HDDs other than in my NAS box.

I'm only using 47GB of the 250GB NVMe that's my system drive.

The first rule of data management is not to accumulate data in the first place.
 
we dont NEED spinning rust (HDD) but their cost is hard to argue with (4+TB not even $200 shipped)
however the cost of Solid State (flash memory of nearly every type/format) simply cannot compete pricing wise (even though flash memory should be low cost as the sand it made from)


They still use tape drives at the very highest end servers etc and tape drives are the grand pappy of HDD.


as other person pointed out, we usually do use more than the one drive (regardless of HDD or SSD or Hybrid etc) in case something happens, not want to lose everything on said storage medium, so, SSD for OS (the stuff you need at fastest) HDD or other for long term "junk" stuff (or primary for SSD slave for HDD ^.^


in perfect world only 1 drive for everything, but, this world not perfect and asking for something to happen if only on one drive (unless not really care if something is lost) if not care, SSD all the way (hell, m.2 nvme / pci-e SSD all the way, if cost were not the other issue that is
 
No reason to use SSD for general storage like movies, picture, music and stuff. Anything like games and application s should be on a SSD these days.
 
Cheers, that makes sense. I don't hold a lot of media so maybe a 1TB HHD plus a 500GB SSD might be the way to go.
 
I wish SSDs were cheap enough that I could get 228TB of them to replace my spinning drives :(

HDDs will always have a place among mass data storage IMO. Especailly with new techs coming out that "promises" to get us to 40+ TB per drive in the next few years. Cloud companies and data storage companies will always be using that since the density and cost per GB is so much better.



As for your personal situation, If you can get something like a 500GB drive for OS and another 1TB drive for games and random junk then you should be plenty fine. Unless you are storing lots of backup data or large movies then you probably dont need 8+ TB hard drives in your PC.
 
I'm personally running a 256G NVMe SSD for OS and apps, and a 2TB HDD for general games and data storage. I will install games that strongly benefit from the SSD on it, though - not all games really benefit from running on an SSD over an HDD. Example: Smite dynamically loads in a lot of data sets between and during matches, and it causes micro stutter during gameplay when installed on HDD. Warhammer 40,000 Mechanicus, on the other hand, derives no benefit from SSD beyond shaving a second or 2 off the initial load time launching the game.

All of my media is on a Dell PowerEdge R515 I was gifted, acting as a NAS with 16TB of storage.
 
Related note: The last few builds I have done for frinds and family, I have been getting new HP 4TB Enterprise HDDs from NewEgg(GO Hard Drive, in their Marketplace) for ~$70. My experience is these are re-badged HGST drives and carry a 3-yr warranty. I've had no problems with them at all so far
 
Family and friends should be on SSDs man. Even my grandparents are on SSDs
 
HDDs will always have a place among mass data storage IMO.
I’m sure the same was said about:
Punch Cards
Reel to Reel Tape
Tape Cassettes
Floppy disks
Optical ROM disks

Platter hard drives are a dying breed. It’s only a matter of time before they leave mainstream home and corporate use.
 
Sure, on a PC with limited expansion, you could replace the 8TB spinning disk with an SSD. It's really up to you.

Many, might prefer the cheaper spinning disk, just because they might be a bit cash strapped at the time. I'd talk more, but I need to do a quick sale on one of my Lamborhini's (it has a scratch on it).

(that was answering the "subject")

To answer your post (the real meaning), if you're satisfied with the capacity of your high speed flash based media, I see no reason for the spinning disk (not sure I ever did).
 
I recommend two drives. One for OS one for games/archive. I point my docs libraries to the secondary drive. That way if you have to wipe the OS for whatever reason (virus, corrupted, OS patch failure - whatever) you can do so without concern because your user data is on the second drive.
 
I have moved my main PC and laptop to only ssds, but storage servers will continue to use mechancial for years to come, still is too expensive, my guess is 10 years to start moving my servers toward NAD storage.
 
Depends on the use case and budget. Budget being the biggest driver. for the OP and home use, ff you have a bunch of warm data you want online line because of.. reasons.. Its not a bad idea to get a spinner that's fairly large and cheap. I currently do that. I keep my os, and the steam games I'm playing on a regular basis on my SSD. I have a 4TB spinner I keep backups on, media files, and steam games that I'm not playing all that much. I have an external 4TB spinner that I archive anything I want from my SSD and 4tb spinner over to. If you have a healthy budget, but don't have a ton of luke warm data, buy a single larger SSD for everything. A larger SSD will be cheaper then an SSD and a spinner drive combined.

As I type this today this moment.. Spinning rust has a place in large enterprise shops. How else do you thing S3 storage is so cheap or just about any cloud provider? However, SSD prices and capacity is slowly closing in on spinning rust price points and capacity. In the not to distant future, SSD price and capacity will surpass spinning rust. Today? No. 5 years? Maybe and most likely sooner. But watch, its coming.
 
Family and friends should be on SSDs man. Even my grandparents are on SSDs

All of them have bulk storage requirements, and no NAS or other device to meet those requirements.
What can I say, I am related to/befiend a lot of data hoarders.
 
I’m sure the same was said about:
Punch Cards
Reel to Reel Tape
Tape Cassettes
Floppy disks
Optical ROM disks

Platter hard drives are a dying breed. It’s only a matter of time before they leave mainstream home and corporate use.

This is true of every storage media for computer systems that has ever been, and likely will be true for any that ever will be. SSDs are the hotness now, but they, too, will be replaced by something better eventually.

Even with spinners, popular data storage solutions today look nothing like they did 20 (or even, really, 10) years ago...
 
All of them have bulk storage requirements, and no NAS or other device to meet those requirements.
What can I say, I am related to/befiend a lot of data hoarders.

I should also clarify that ALL of those builds have a 256G NVMe SSD as an OS and App drive.
 
If you are making a basic PC and don't need a lot of media storage, then yes, skip the spinners and just get a SSD. Or even 2. Depending on price points.

Basic PC can be a screaming gaming rig as long as you don't need a lot of games loaded and ready to play at the same time.

As others have mentioned, if in the future you need/want a lot of bulk storage, get a NAS with enough spinners to meet your needs. That way the bulk storage is sharable with all of the SSD only PCs you have.
 
My linux PVR / fileserver / backup device currently has 7 internal spinners + 2 external spinners + ( 4 to 6 externals not connected) and a 1TB NVMe SSD. My 6 other computers (including the windows workstation which has 4 SSDs) are all 100% flash based.

Edit: OOps there is a 1TB spinner that I have to open the 6C /12T 17 inch laptop to swap with at 1 or 2TB SSD. Can't access the drive bay without taking the bottom off of the laptop. The laptop currently also has 2 NVMe drives installed.
 
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Yes, even when we have PPGB parity, one last glaring issue is even though flash memory failures are rare, they are more sudden and catastrophic than mechanical drives. Where we could get some warning a good portion of the time with mechanical drives, SMART is only useful for seeing how many write cycles have been used and temperature. Prediction of failing flash memory is next to impossible.
 
The only benefit of spinning drives these days are the the cost advantages at very large sizes.

If you need a large storage pool then hard drives are still a more cost effective way to go. My NAS has 12x 10TB hard drives in it. The cost to buy that kind of capacity in SSD's would be higher than my budget.

For more normal storage sizes there really is no reason to not just go with SSD's.

SSD pricinng is constantly getting more competitive at larger and larger storage sizes. Right now it seems like the cutoff is at approximately 1TB. If you need larger than 1 TB drives, maybe start thinking hard drive, otherwise go SSD.

We have had a thread going for a while about an awesome 1TB M.2 NVMe drive for only about $100.

That really is more than most people need on their desktops, but if you need more storage than most, one could even argue that cheaper SATA SSD's are the new hard drives. I could easily see having a fast M.2 SSD for booting and most programs and games, and a slower larger SATA SSD for mass storage.
 
Yes, even when we have PPGB parity, one last glaring issue is even though flash memory failures are rare, they are more sudden and catastrophic than mechanical drives. Where we could get some warning a good portion of the time with mechanical drives, SMART is only useful for seeing how many write cycles have been used and temperature. Prediction of failing flash memory is next to impossible.


That is a good point, but the counter point to that is, important data should never be stored on a single drive.

Important data should be on a redundant pool, and should be backed up to an offsite location regularly.
 
^Preach, a disk is not a backup, raid is not a backup, it's all just steps along the way to offsite if you want it backed up.
 
I predicted 3 years ago that we would no longer have HDDs in consumer builds by 2020. I think I'm near dead-on, I've already gone Disk-less on my main machines. With 1TB Sata SSDs being only 2x the price of 1tb HDDs (and still dropping) I don't see a need for HDDs unless you need an abnormally large amount of storage.
 
I predicted 3 years ago that we would no longer have HDDs in consumer builds by 2020. I think I'm near dead-on, I've already gone Disk-less on my main machines. With 1TB Sata SSDs being only 2x the price of 1tb HDDs (and still dropping) I don't see a need for HDDs unless you need an abnormally large amount of storage.


I installed my first SSD boot drive in my Desktop in 2009. Back then it was a small SSD, and I always had at least one spinner in my desktop for mass storage.

Since I started messing with NAS builds in 2010 i haven't had a spinning drive in any desktop or laptop, but that's only because of the NAS.

I think for most people you are right. 1TB is A LOT of storage space for the average user, and Microcenter was recently selling fast 1TB NVMe drives for less than $100.

Eventually spinning disks will be no more, but for now, if you do anything that requires disk sizes greater than 2TB it starts getting prohibitively expensive.
 
Umm forecasted long ago...
https://www.techpowerup.com/249972/...hit-the-magic-10-cents-per-gigabyte-threshold

Anyways, if I have my way, my company will be getting 2 of yet unnamed (it has been named, cough nda) "upgrade" to a dell R7415, this (cough) year.
24 NVMe bays; Tho we will only be populating about a third of it with micron 9300 drives.

But for now, spinners do still have their place, dollars being dollars n all... Love to see some one else get 312TB in 2U under 20K via SSDs, but I'm sure it will happen... in another 7+ years.
https://hardforum.com/threads/h-ard-forum-storage-showoff-thread.1847026/page-10#post-1044149054
 
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Umm forecasted long ago...
https://www.techpowerup.com/249972/...hit-the-magic-10-cents-per-gigabyte-threshold

Anyways, if I have my way, my company will be getting 2 of yet unnamed (it has been named, cough nda) "upgrade" to a dell R7415, this (cough) year.
24 NVMe bays; Tho we will only be populating about a third of it with micron 9300 drives.

But for now, spinners do still have their place, dollars being dollars n all... Love to see some one else get 312TB in 2U under 20K via SSDs, but I'm sure it will happen... in another 7+ years.
https://hardforum.com/threads/h-ard-forum-storage-showoff-thread.1847026/page-10#post-1044149054


Yeah, if you are in an enterprise environment working with business critical databases something like that makes financial sense.

For my home NAS? Not yet. :p
 
Someday I hope too, but the cost of SSDs are too expensive for my ridiculous TB needs.
 
I installed my first SSD boot drive in my Desktop in 2009. Back then it was a small SSD, and I always had at least one spinner in my desktop for mass storage.

Since I started messing with NAS builds in 2010 i haven't had a spinning drive in any desktop or laptop, but that's only because of the NAS.

I think for most people you are right. 1TB is A LOT of storage space for the average user, and Microcenter was recently selling fast 1TB NVMe drives for less than $100.

Eventually spinning disks will be no more, but for now, if you do anything that requires disk sizes greater than 2TB it starts getting prohibitively expensive.

You are right, 1TB is a decent amount for regular home users, and if I was a bit less of a hoarder and keep less games installed it could suit me, but seeing destiny 2 + all expacs will add up to 165 GB next month you may be running out of space fast in the near future. (and there are even bigger games already).

I have left my RAID 0 WD black days behind me, I keep most games on SSD's now and just have one 2TB WD black for older mostly steam games I keep around and music/downloads storage.
 
You are right, 1TB is a decent amount for regular home users, and if I was a bit less of a hoarder and keep less games installed it could suit me, but seeing destiny 2 + all expacs will add up to 165 GB next month you may be running out of space fast in the near future. (and there are even bigger games already).

Jesus. That's huge. What the hell is taking so much space in modern games? Surely it can't all be textures?

That said, I've never understood the obsessive need to have all the games you own installed at the same time.

I'll usually install a game, play through it, and then remove it when I am done. Typically I have no more than 2-3 games installed at any given time.
 
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For big games of 60-100GB of size, I will still need at least a 3-4TB to be ready for the next few years. Not willing to uninstall great games for newer ones every few months. So, yes!
 
For big games of 60-100GB of size, I will still need at least a 3-4TB to be ready for the next few years. Not willing to uninstall great games for newer ones every few months. So, yes!

What's the point in having a game sit installed if you aren't going to play it anymore?
 
I have a mobo that supports 3 NVMe's and they are all full. I love not having to deal with SATA and power cables. I have a Crystal 570x case and it looks clean as hell thanks to that.

It does limit storage space though so I have to manage game installs.

What's the point in having a game sit installed if you aren't going to play it anymore?

But this is pretty much how I keep my library these days.
 
What's the point in having a game sit installed if you aren't going to play it anymore?
Re-playing good games isn't something rare, don't you think? And you can replay a great game any time if you don't have to install it again if it is 60-100GB large eh? After all, new drives with bog cache size don't cause problems in gaming. Just a few secs more to load it at first.
 
What's the point in having a game sit installed if you aren't going to play it anymore?

I might play it, and its a hell of a lot easier to just double click something that's installed than deal with the time it takes to download 100+ gigs. My Steam Library alone is about 1500 titles at this point, i usually keep at least 100 installed.
My game drive has about 5TB of games installed on an 8TB, gonna upgrade to at least a 10TB in the future.
 
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