SSD or HDD in your main rig? POLL

SSD or HDD in primary computer?

  • Only SSD(s)

    Votes: 47 25.4%
  • Only HDD(s)

    Votes: 6 3.2%
  • SSD and HDD mixed (includes SSHD drives)

    Votes: 132 71.4%

  • Total voters
    185

mnewxcv

[H]F Junkie
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Mar 4, 2007
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Just wondering, now in 2016, how many of you have eliminated traditional spinning drives altogether? And who is still in the stone age, rocking one as their boot drive on their primary computer? What made you get rid of your HDDs, or what factor is making you keep them?
 
1 ssd for boot, 1 ssd for popular games, 1 4tb for everything else, NAS for archiving
 
I have 2 laptops, 2 desktops and a tablet at home that I use almost daily (well except for the Mint laptop). The linux server / htpc has mostly 2TB , 4TB and 5TB spinners for the 15 or so TB of storage (with a 1TB SSD for the os and windows user folders). The windows desktop has no spinners currently 3 SSDs (1TB 850 pro + 2 x 256 GB Crucial). The main Skylake i7 laptop has a small 128GB M.2 nvme ssd that is only large enough for win10 and 1 game so I make a lot of use of the 1TB spinner on that. I hope to replace it with a 1TB or larger SSD sometime soon. The other laptop has a 120GB SSD and is running linux Mint. The andriod tablet is all flash.
 
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only SSDs for main rig now...just barely cheap enough to get by with pure SSD build but most files are stored off PC now.
 
M.2 SSD for boot and apps, 2.5" SSD for docs and pictures and music and such, HDD for the etc. bulk storage. My non-primary PCs are all SSDs, though.
 
If I could get SSD's for a better price/GB I would go only SSD, as it stands, HDD's are still viable if you want a good amount of affordable storage space imo.
 
Do you find the M.2 noticeably faster than the 2.5"?
Previously I went from SATA 2.5" Samsung 840 Evo, I think, to a PCIe M.2 HyperX Predator. That felt a little faster, but nothing decisive or even really definite. Going from the Predator to the NVMe Samsung 950 gave me that same thing, it feels a little faster. So, "noticeably faster", maybe a little, maybe not. I find the bigger advantage of the M.2 drives is the lack of footprint and cabling—especially on my current motherboard where the M.2 slot is on the back.

If I could get SSD's for a better price/GB I would go only SSD, as it stands, HDD's are still viable if you want a good amount of affordable storage space imo.
Exactly. I'd be glad to replace my 4TB WD Green with a 4TB Samsung 850 Evo, except a 4TB Green is $150 and a 4TB 850 Evo is $1500.
 
6TB of individual SSDs, one 2TB HDD for nightly rsync of new/important files in case anything shits the bed.
Weekly rsync's go to my NAS
Monthly, I rsync to an external drive and swap it with the prior months external that I keep at work.
 
128 SSD to boot, 2 TB SSHD for storage. Probably add an external when I need more storage space. Besides my games and comics, don't have much of a need for multiple internal storage drives.
 
I have nothing booting off spinning drives but I still have a bunch as SSDs above 512GB are not really affordable yet.
 
SSD for OS as well as game (I only keep a few installed).

Hard drive for storage.


I had to reinstall windows on an older (C2D, 4Gbs ram) system yesterday that only had a spinner. I mean, i know its older hardware (still decent for browsing an such) but, god damn... I fogot how slow it is to install on a hard drive.
 
Currently SSD's in every system with a HDD here and there for storage/backup. Got 3 more SSD's during Amazon's prime sale, not sure what I'm going to do with them yet but I don't want any HDD in use unless it's for backup/large data storage at this point.
 
SSD for OS and all installs.

HDD for mass storage.

Not surprising this is the majority response until we see larger SSD drives get closer to HDD price parity.
 
I use 1 SSD for Boot, another for games, and 3 HDD's (2x 3TB and 1 6TB) for redundant storage and games that I don't play often or just don't care about the drive, plus a plethora of USB HDD's.

I don't use M.2 because the cost to the system is too high (I lose 2 SATA ports for the performance of one, a ridiculous cost).

I am a data hoarder though, I don't delete anything unless I absolutely have to.
 
HDD, SPINNER...whazdat ???

2x M.2 boot....2.5 ssd as backup...ext.ssd for storage....
 
250GB Sandisk Extreme Pro for system/software
120GB Sandisk Plus for Steam/Games
1TB WD Blue for bulk data
2TB WD Green for Data recovery work

All laptops etc. are SSD equipped. Life is too short for HDDs as primary. Gone are the days of short stroking 1TB HDDs to the first 150GB.
 
In my opinion the best setup would be NMVE and 4TB for storage and you good to go =D
 
SSD for boot and multiple HDDs for storage. Think my raptor drive may still be one of those....My case allows for 5 HDDs and I think


Would love to go SSD for all, but $,$$$.
 
In my gaming rig: 256GB SSD for the OS, 4TB SSHD for games / applications
The sluggishness of the SSHD really shows in a lot of my games, sadly. Will likely replace both drives with a single 1TB M.2 drive when I eventually get off of my 2600k


Bulk storage on two 30TB+ UnRaid NAS's w/20 HDDs per. IOPS suck, but I don't do anything that requires performance from these.
My singular ESXi box has 16*1TB HDD's in a RAID10 (IBM M5014 + HP SAS Expander). I would love to move to a purely SSD array, but.... money, and I haven't hit any IOPS performance walls yet.
 
SSDs in all the things for OS and applications. Spinners for games, general storage and redundancy!
 
Why would this be?

In wow when you portal/move between zones you want fast loading on a pvp server because someone might be waiting to kill you. If you are on an HD and your body will load in and be attackable before you have control over it. When you load into a zone that has a large amount of people the ssd helps populate the people quicker; otherwise you will be running around thinking you are alone then all these people pop infront of you.

On games like Overwatch and Rainbow 6 siege you want to load the map quickly so you can pick your favorite character. This is because RS6 and OW(competitive) can only have 1 of each char per map. RS6 is especially nasty because you only get 60 seconds to pick your gear, so you want to load in as fast as you can.

Yeah you could say these are some what niche as most other games this would not matter. If you play wow or ow or games like them then you probably play ALOT. Remember also that any ssd is better than a hard drive. You do not need to spend alot. Like the recent 240gb OCZ for $50.
 
SSD for boot and OS, rest is on hdd. SSDs just aren't up to the capacity to make it worth swapping all 24tb over.
 
2 x older Sammy Evos in RAID 0 for OS
4 x older WD RE-3s on a dedicated RAID card in RAID10

On the main rig, have a few other rigs with the standard SSD/HDD setup.

The main is still plonking along well after 7 years, with those. The SSD's were after the HDD's.

I didn't mess with SSD's much till the prices dropped, usually used WD Blacks in a few things and added to those also later on a few rebuilds.
 
2 SSD's for Win 7 & Win 10, 1 spindle for Win8.1 & CentOS, 1 spindle for games, 1 spindle for ******* (no, not porn ya toads!) and 2 external spindles for backups on my main rig.
 
2 SSDs in RAID, and my home server has 10TB for storage over gigabit connection.
 
I am in a transition moment right now but for the last 5 years my main rig and that of the lady had SSDs as boot drives. Shortly i did have 2xsata iii ssds in raid 0 and yes they were benching 1GB/s reads but they were only marginally faster than a single one at least at Windows loading. Right now i have one ssd in my laptop and 2 old busted Seagate 7200.9 in raid 0 on the desktop rig. They move quite ok despite benching at 160MB/s reads. Windows loading is a hair slower than a ssd but not by much. I plan on getting a simple video editing rig, as in capturing tv material and cutting the commercials so i will pair 2 wd drives in a raid 0. Probably will go with a pair of used blacks.
 
I've been transitioning my storage systems over the past few years, starting with a few early gen Samsung PM800 drives from Dell (IIRC it was 256gbs for $800).

Now I've got SSDs as main and only storage in all but one of my systems now. My newest / latest rig has a 500GB NVME samsung boot / main drive + 3x 1TB SSD in RAID0 for games / things that need to go fast and 2x 3TB HDs in RAID1 to backup all my actual documents. My bedroom box has a 500gb AHCI boot PCIE drive + 2x 1TB SSD RAID 0, while my home theater box (a NCase M1) has a 500gb msata drive only but all are linked across my network to my 4x 1TB HD based NAS for "slow" files.

Once you go SSD you can never go back.
 
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