Well, I have just one hard drive left in my 3 machines.....

[ManofGod]

Ok, I have three computers that I built for home use. In one of them, there are no hard drives and in another, there is a single 2TB drive in it but, I cannot even here it running. Now, I had 2 x 1TB and 2 x 2TB HDD's in my third computer, all about 8 years old or so and their noise was driving me crazy. For months, I could not figure out what the noise was because it would not stick around. However, when it occurred, which appeared to have gotten more consistent, I would either hear a loud, steady hum or I would hear a hum that would get loud and fade, back and forth.

Welp, I finally decided to remove them and since I did not need all the space, I just upgraded my 250GB WD NVMe SSD boot drive to a 1TB SSD NVMe Sandisk drive, bought a 2.5 inch 1TB drive, installed that in another machine and swapped the 2TB SSD into this machine. Ahhhhhhhh, the silence is golden. This is coming from a person that has some hearing loss and I could hear the hum even with my headsets on.

 

[Ready4Dis]

Yeah, I have reduced the amount of spinners in all my boxes. Of my 6 desktops, only 1 still has a spinner for OS drive, and that's only because it's for a neighbors kid that is doing online school at my house and I used spare parts to put the computer together for him. I think 3 of 4 of my laptops are SSD's as well, 1 came with, 2 I upgraded. So much better overall, even for my old crappy laptop, it really zips along now when I am doing things like compiling projects on the go.

 

[ManofGod]

Yeah, I have reduced the amount of spinners in all my boxes. Of my 6 desktops, only 1 still has a spinner for OS drive, and that's only because it's for a neighbors kid that is doing online school at my house and I used spare parts to put the computer together for him. I think 3 of 4 of my laptops are SSD's as well, 1 came with, 2 I upgraded. So much better overall, even for my old crappy laptop, it really zips along now when I am doing things like compiling projects on the go.

Yeah, my systems appear to boot a bit faster, login faster and just are far more quiet now. HDD's are just way to slow to be useful like they were in the past but my oldest SSD is about 5 years old, a 512GB Adata SSD that is still going strong.

 

[SamirD]

Interesting. I'm still on hard drives everywhere. I think I have one or two systems that boot on some secondhand who-knows-what-condition ssds and I really can't tell the difference. Probably because all my OSes are running from ram once they're booted.

Today's top of the drives are pretty fast for contiguous transfers though, hitting well over 200MB/sec. If you've got a lot of small files the seek time does hurt the iops, but if you have a bunch of large files that are processing serially, I don't think a sata ssd really improves the transfers that dramatically.

 

[zandor]

I'm just about done with hard drives outside of the file server/Linux box in the basement. I still have a couple in my main rig that predate the file server, but it's in a Fractal Define XL case so I don't hear them. Once I finish the new build I'm slowly working on and the associated rearrangement of existing hardware all the spinners will be retired or end up in the file server down in the basement.

Once upon a time hard drives were usually the most expensive part of my system. 7200rpm SCSI in 1997, 10k in 1999, 15k in 2000... I haven't bought any hard drives other than big fat SATA storage drives since I got my first SSD. Actually, scratch that. The last couple I bought were only 4TB. Not fat by today's standards.