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Jan 16, 2019 - SSD is far faster than HDD, and as the price differential has narrowed significantly, the popularity of SSD storage is exploding.
Should you use an HDD or an SSD? It's a debate that continues, a decade after the first SSDs arrived (with exorbitant prices). SSDs continue to improve in terms of durability and affordability, but they're still not at a GB/dollar ratio that can push HDDs entirely into obsolescence. Or are they?
The best SSDs for gaming continue to expand in terms of capacity, and as prices tumble, there's a convincing argument to be made that a traditional HDD is no longer required for most modern, consumer-level PC builds. In fact, a number of prebuilt gaming PC manufacturers are eschewing platter drives entirely and only including single SSDs, both as a way to mitigate loading times in PC games and productivity, and to push down the overall cost of their builds (as compared to including both SSD and HDD simultaneously). Furthermore, SATA SSDs are continuing to yield market share to NVMe alternatives, with a report from DigiTimes suggesting that NVMe SSD sales will equal SATA SSDs sales in 2019.
All that may seem to lead to a fairly obvious conclusion for gamers: the time has come to abandon HDDs and properly embrace the solid state future. But the reality isn't so clear cut, for a number of reasons. Here's the breakdown of areas where HDDs make the most sense, as well as reasons to use an SSD.
The growing size of games
As anyone with a reasonable game library can attest, modern games's voracious appetite for storage continues to expand, with new games including updates and add-ons easily pushing up to (or in some cases beyond) the 100GB mark. Given that we're winding down a console cycle, we're also due for another significant spike in the size of AAA titles, meaning that games in the next generation could easily breach 150GB.
Most games are 40-60GB today, with an additional 2-4GB patch on day one. While SSD prices have continued to deflate, the prospect of spending $50-$170 on a 512GB-class SSD to stash three or four games remains really unappetizing. A 1TB-class SATA SSD for $100 is a better bet, but that's still a decent chunk of money.
For roughly the same price, you can easily snag a 4TB traditional HDD and, while the slower read/write speeds may cost you a handful of seconds of staring blankly at a loading screen, your pain will be significantly salved by being able to stash almost eight times as many games on a single drive.
There's also traditional backup and media storage to consider. If you've got a vast library of music, video, and photos that you need a home for, HDDs remain the best option, both in terms of cost and privacy. Online solutions remain capped at lower capacities and are in many cases unreliable, with better solutions costing a quickly scaling premium. Given the durability and reliability of modern HDDs, they're still the single best solution for backing up your precious data.
Having an SSD for your boot drive is extremely useful
There are multiple reasons SSDs are faster than HDDs. There are no moving parts or spinning platters, which makes access times substantially faster, almost instantaneous in some cases. That means SSDs don't suffer much from degraded performance due to file fragmentation (where a file gets placed in non-sequential sectors). On a hard drive, the heads have to reposition over the correct sector to read each fragment, and over time this can really slow down access to files, especially for things like booting Windows.
How bad is it? That depends on many factors, like the speed of your hard drive (5400 rpm drives are noticeably slower than 7200 rpm drives for boot times), how long the drive has been used, the number of applications installed, whether a file defragmentation utility has been run, and more.
With a clean Windows 10 build and a fast WD Black 4TB HDD, boot times (from the end of the BIOS POST sequence to being at the Windows 10 desktop) can take 20-30 seconds. On a slower WD Blue 2TB HDD, under the same circumstances, boot times are typically 30-40 seconds. And for just about any good SSD, like a Samsung 860 Evo 1TB, booting in 10 seconds is typical.
That's for a clean build, however. With a well-used Windows 10 installation—one that has been in use for a year, through a bunch of Windows and application updates—things get markedly worse. Boot times of a minute or more are possible and even likely, especially if there are a bunch of startup utilities scheduled to run. But on an SSD, booting in 10-15 seconds is still reasonable.
We've said it before: using an SSD for your boot drive is one of the most noticeable upgrades you can make on an older PC. Many people refuse to use a PC that doesn't have an SSD boot drive.
SSD performance gains in games aren't that staggering
Windows boot times are one thing, but games tend to behave differently. There's a lot of sequential data to read, and usually you're not running a ton of other stuff in the background that's hitting your storage. The practical difference for gamers between SSDs and HDDs aren't as mind blowing as the hyperbolic marketing copy from manufacturers would have you believe. They're certainly not imperceptible, but we're talking in terms of seconds rather than minutes.
Testing a range of top SSDs, including add-in cards, NVMe, and SATA drives, against the best of a crop of 7200 RPM HDDs in Metro Exodus produced some fairly eye-opening results. Using the RDY ELIBG205 as a test bed (packed with a powerful Geforce RTX 2080 Ti and Core i9-9900K) and loading into the Taiga section of the main campaign, the slowest of the HDDs (a Western Digital Blue 1TB) took just over 48 seconds to get us in game, with the most fleet of the HDD pack (Western Digital's 2TB Black) loading gameplay in 40 seconds. On the SSD side, the pricey, top performing 480GB Intel Optane 900P add-in card delivered Taiga in just over 22 seconds, while the slowest of the SSDs we tested, the 500GB Western Digital Blue 3D SATA took just clear of 33 seconds.
Those results might look pretty stark if you're just considering the best result against the worst. But bear in mind, a high end Optane AIC will cost well north of $350 for the lowest capacities, and 280GB just isn't feasible for a serious gaming library. Contrast that with the fastest HDD in our pack, the Western Digital Black, which can be had for a quarter of that price and provides nearly fourteen times the storage space, and took a scant 16 seconds longer to load Metro Exodus.
Results were similar when we compared one drive from each category (HDD, SATA SSD, and NVMe SSD) in Anthem load times back in February. The HDD loaded the game in 78-85 seconds, the SATA SSD in 59-60, and the NVMe in 58-60. The most fascinating element of those results is the extremely slight different between NVMe and SATA SSD load times, but as pricing gets closer to parity for the two interfaces, NVMe SSDs certainly become attractive.
Testing reveals an even narrower gap when you consider independent titles. To gather some data from a more lightweight indie game, I tested all eight drives against loads in the first episode of Life is Strange 2, and even the fastest of our SSDs roundup shaved a mere ~5 seconds off loads compared to the slowest HDD. If you're primarily playing smaller indie or 'double-A' games, upgrading to an SSD is unlikely to markedly impact your play experience.
Obviously, if you're flush with cash and want top performing hardware, SSDs will always be the better solution, but if you're more interested in value, HDDs look pretty attractive even with TLC flash storage continuing to slip in price.
Network considerations
Of course, if you're living under the tyranny of a data cap, this decision has likely already been made for you. Having to constantly redownload games in the shuffle that's inevitable with just a single, limited capacity SSD vastly expands the value of capacious HDDs if you're working with finite bandwidth. The same is true if you live in an area with poor internet connectivity—if a single AAA title takes an entire night to download, it can be a real deterrent to jumping back into older titles or taking a chance on new ones when it means having to clear drive space.
Even if you live somewhere with sturdy, reliable, blindingly fast internet, when you compare the length of time it takes to download titles against the slender moments you save in terms of load times there's not a lot of difference, particularly in shorter or well optimized games. Naturally, you may weigh that time differently, doing something else while a game downloads compared to the time you're restlessly sitting, controller/mouse in hand while you're waiting to play, but in terms of raw time saved there's not a tremendous overall difference.
The hybrid storage solution
Budget will always be the biggest consideration when you're choosing whether or not it's time to shift completely to an SSD lifestyle—in a world where you have access to unlimited discretionary income, of course SSDs are the obvious option, as you can afford to stack them in multiples and surround them with the hardware to support them. But for the financial mortals among us, HDDs still have a place.
Even if you want an SSD for your boot drive (and you should), nabbing a cheap and capacious HDD for secondary storage is arguably the best approach to a sometimes complex discussion. Use it for mass storage, most of your games library, videos, backups, and more. You can still put a few games on your SSD as well, but there are plenty of files that don't need SSD speeds. We'll be the first to welcome the solid state future with open arms, but keeping a large HDD handy still makes sense.
There are other alternatives to just a pure HDD or SSD setup. Intel Optane Memory provides for a fast SSD cache that supplements your HDD, and you don't need to worry about which data gets to reside on the faster cache—the software and drivers take care of that for you. AMD's StoreMI (and Emotus FuzeDrive) take a slightly different approach, with tiered storage so that you get the full capacity of the HDD+SSD, with the drivers and software managing where data is located.
In short, the debate over HDD vs. SSD storage isn't over just yet. SSD capacities are increasing, and there are enterprise solutions that can store up to 100TB on a single drive. That's five times larger than the current top HDDs. The price for such drives, however, isn't even worth mentioning (*cough* $50,000 *cough*). We're still a long way off from SSDs actually beating HDDs in price per GB, and until that happens, HDDs will remain a viable options for many people and businesses.
The Choice Is Yours: SSD or HDD?
Until just a few years ago, PC buyers had little choice about what kind of storage to get in a laptop or desktop PC. If you bought an ultraportable anytime in the last few years, you very likely got a solid-state drive (SSD) as the primary boot drive. Larger laptops are increasingly moving to SSD boot drives, too, while budget machines still tend to favor hard disk drives (HDDs). The boot drives in desktop PCs, meanwhile, are a mishmosh of SSDs or HDDs; in some cases, a system comes with both, with the SSD as the boot drive and the HDD as a bigger-capacity storage supplement.
If you have to pick just one, though, how do you choose? Let's get into the differences between SSDs and HDDs, and walk you through the advantages and disadvantages of each to help you decide.
HDD and SSD Explained
The traditional spinning hard drive is the basic non-volatile storage on a computer. That is, information on it doesn't 'go away' when you turn off the system, unlike data stored in RAM. A hard drive is essentially a metal platter with a magnetic coating that stores your data, whether weather reports from the last century, a high-definition copy of the original Star Wars trilogy, or your digital music collection. A read/write head on an arm accesses the data while the platters are spinning.
An SSD does functionally everything a hard drive does, but data is instead stored on interconnected flash-memory chips that retain the data even when there's no power present. These flash chips are of a different type than the kind used in USB thumb drives, and are typically faster and more reliable. SSDs are consequently more expensive than USB thumb drives of the same capacities. Like thumb drives, though, they're often much smaller than HDDs and therefore offer manufacturers more flexibility in designing a PC. While they can take the place of traditional 2.5-inch or 3.5-inch hard drive bays, they can also be installed in a PCI Express expansion slot or even be mounted directly on the motherboard, a configuration that's now common in high-end laptops and all-in-ones. (These board-mounted SSDs use a form factor known as M.2. See our picks for the best M.2 SSDs.)
Note: We'll be talking primarily about internal drives in this story, but almost everything applies to external hard drives as well. External drives come in both large desktop and compact portable form factors, and SSDs are gradually becoming a larger part of the external market.
A History of HDDs and SSDs
Hard drive technology is relatively ancient (in terms of computer history, anyway). There are well-known photos of the IBM 650 RAMAC hard drive from 1956 that used 50 24-inch-wide platters to hold a whopping 3.75MB of storage space. This, of course, is the size of an average 128Kbps MP3 file today, in the physical space that could hold two commercial refrigerators. The RAMAC 350 was limited to government and industrial uses, and it was obsolete by 1969. Ain't progress grand?
The PC hard drive form factor standardized at 5.25 inches in the early 1980s, with the now-familiar 3.5-inch desktop-class and 2.5-inch notebook-class drives coming soon thereafter. The internal cable interface has changed from serial to IDE (now frequently called Parallel ATA, or PATA) to SCSI to Serial ATA (SATA) over the years, but each essentially does the same thing: connect the hard drive to the PC's motherboard so your data can be shuttled to and fro. Today's 2.5- and 3.5-inch drives mainly use SATA interfaces (at least on most PCs and Macs), though some high-speed SSDs use the faster PCI Express interface instead. Capacities have grown from multiple megabytes to multiple terabytes, more than a million-fold increase. Current 3.5-inch hard drives have capacities as high as 14TB, with consumer-oriented 2.5-inch drives maxing out at 5TB.
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The SSD has a much shorter history. There has always been an infatuation with nonmoving storage from the beginning of personal computing, with technologies like bubble memory flashing (pun intended) and dying in the 1970s and 1980s. Current flash memory is the logical extension of the same idea, as it doesn't require constant power to retain the data you store on it. The first primary drives that we know as SSDs started during the rise of netbooks in the late 2000s. In 2007, the OLPC XO-1 used a 1GB SSD, and the Asus Eee PC 700 series used a 2GB SSD as primary storage. The SSD chips on low-end Eee PC units and the XO-1 were permanently soldered to the motherboard.
As netbooks and other ultraportable laptop PCs became more capable, SSD capacities increased and eventually standardized on the 2.5-inch notebook form factor. This way, you could pop a 2.5-inch hard drive out of your laptop or desktop and replace it easily with an SSD. In time, other, more compact form factors emerged, like the mSATA Mini PCIe SSD card and the aforementioned M.2 SSD format (in SATA and PCIe variants). M.2 is expanding rapidly through the laptop SSD world, but today many SSDs still use the 2.5-inch form factor. SSDs in the 2.5-inch size currently top out at 4TB. (Seagate does offer a 60TB 3.5-inch SSD for enterprise devices like servers, but that's an outlier.)
Advantages and Disadvantages
Both SSDs and hard drives do the same job: They boot your system, and store your applications and personal files. But each type of storage has its own unique feature set. How do they differ, and why would you want to get one over the other?
Price: SSDs are more expensive than hard drives in terms of dollar per gigabyte. A 1TB internal 2.5-inch hard drive costs between $40 and $60, but as of this writing, the very cheapest SSDs of the same capacity and form factor start at around $125. That translates into 4 to 6 cents per gigabyte for the hard drive versus 13 cents per gigabyte for the SSD. Since hard drives use older, more established technology, they will remain less expensive for the near future. Though the price gap is closing between hard drives and the very lowest-end SSDs, those extra bucks for the SSD may push your system price over budget.
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Maximum and Common Capacity: Although consumer SSD units top out at 4TB, those are still uncommon and expensive. You're more likely to find 500GB to 1TB units as primary drives in systems. While 500GB is considered a 'base' hard drive capacity in 2019, pricing concerns can push that down to 128GB or 250GB for lower-priced SSD-based systems. Users with big media collections or who work in content creation will require even more, with 1TB to 4TB drives common in high-end systems. Basically, the more storage capacity, the more stuff you can keep on your PC. Cloud-based (Internet) storage may be good for housing files you plan to share among your smartphone, tablet, and PC, but local storage is less expensive, and you have to buy it only once, not subscribe to it.
Speed: This is where SSDs shine. An SSD-equipped PC will boot in less than a minute, and often in just seconds. A hard drive requires time to speed up to operating specs, and it will continue to be slower than an SSD during normal use. A PC or Mac with an SSD boots faster, launches and runs apps faster, and transfers files faster. Whether you're using your computer for fun, school, or business, the extra speed may be the difference between finishing on time and failing.
Fragmentation: Because of their rotary recording surfaces, hard drives work best with larger files that are laid down in contiguous blocks. That way, the drive head can start and end its read in one continuous motion. When hard drives start to fill up, bits of large files end up scattered around the disk platter, causing the drive to suffer from what's called fragmentation. While read/write algorithms have improved to the point that the effect is minimized, hard drives can still become fragmented to the point of affecting performance. SSDs can't, however, because the lack of a physical read head means data can be stored anywhere without penalty. Thus, SSDs are inherently faster.
Durability: An SSD has no moving parts, so it is more likely to keep your data safe in the event you drop your laptop bag or your system gets shaken while it's operating. Most hard drives park their read/write heads when the system is off, but they are flying over the drive platter at a distance of a few nanometers when they are in operation. Besides, even parking brakes have limits. If you're rough on your equipment, an SSD is recommended.
Availability: Hard drives are more plentiful in budget and older systems, but SSDs are becoming the rule in high-end laptops like the Apple MacBook Pro, which does not offer a hard drive even as a configurable option. Desktops and cheaper laptops, on the other hand, will continue to offer HDDs, at least for the next few years.
Form Factors: Because hard drives rely on spinning platters, there is a limit to how small they can be manufactured. There was an initiative to make smaller 1.8-inch spinning hard drives, but that stalled at about 320GB, and smartphone manufacturers have settled on flash memory for their primary storage. SSDs have no such limitation, so they can continue to shrink as time goes on. SSDs are available in 2.5-inch laptop-drive-size boxes, but that's only for convenience in fitting within established drive bays.
Noise: Even the quietest hard drive will emit a bit of noise when it is in use. (The drive platters spin and the read arm ticks back and forth.) Faster hard drives will tend to make more noise than those that are slower. SSDs make no noise at all; they're non-mechanical.
Power: An SSD doesn't have to expend electricity spinning up a platter from a standstill. Consequently, none of the energy consumed by the SSD is wasted as friction or noise, rendering them more efficient. On a desktop or in a server, that will lead to a lower energy bill. On a laptop or tablet, you'll be able to eke out more minutes (or hours) of battery life.
Longevity: While it is true that SSDs wear out over time (each cell in a flash-memory bank can be written to and erased a limited number of times), thanks to TRIM command technology that dynamically optimizes these read/write cycles, you're more likely to discard the system for obsolescence (after six years or so) before you start running into read/write errors with an SSD. If you're really worried, several tools can let you know if you're approaching the drive's rated end of life. Eventually, hard drives will wear out from constant use, as well, since they use physical recording methods. Longevity is a wash when it's separated from travel and ruggedness concerns.
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Overall: Hard drives win on price and capacity. SSDs work best if speed, ruggedness, form factor, noise, or fragmentation (technically, a subset of speed) are important factors to you. If it weren't for the price and capacity issues, SSDs would be the hands-down winner.
The Right Storage for You
So, does an SSD or HDD (or a hybrid of the two) fit your needs? Let's break it down:
HDDs
• Enthusiast multimedia users and heavy downloaders: Video collectors need space, and you can only get to 4TB of space cheaply with hard drives.
• Budget buyers: Ditto. Plenty of cheap space. SSDs are too expensive for buyers of $500 PCs.
• Graphic arts and engineering professionals: Video and photo editors wear out storage by overuse. Replacing a 1TB hard drive will be cheaper than replacing a 500GB SSD.
• General users: These folks are a toss-up. Users who prefer to download their media files locally will still need a hard drive with more capacity. But if you mostly stream your music and videos online, buying a smaller SSD for the same money will give you a better experience.
SSDs
• Road warriors: People who shove their laptops into their bags indiscriminately will want the extra security of an SSD. That laptop may not be fully asleep when you violently shut it to catch your next flight. This also includes folks who work in the field, like utility workers and university researchers.
• Speed demons: If you need things done now, spend the extra bucks on SSD for quick boot-ups and app launches. Supplement with a storage SSD or hard drive if you need extra space (see below).
• Graphic arts and engineering professionals: Yes, we know we said they need hard drives, but the speed of an SSD may make the difference between completing two proposals for your client and completing five. These users are prime candidates for dual-drive systems (more on that below).
• Audio engineers and musicians: If you're recording music, you don't want the scratchy sound from a hard drive intruding. Go for quieter SSDs.
Hybrid Drives and Dual-Drive Systems
Back in the mid 2000s, some hard drive manufacturers, like Samsung and Seagate, theorized that if you add a few gigabytes of flash chips to a spinning hard drive, you could fashion a so-called 'hybrid' drive. This would combine a hard drive's large storage capacity with the performance of an SSD, at a price only slightly higher than that of a typical hard drive. The flash memory acts as a buffer for frequently used files, so your system has the potential for booting and launching your most important apps faster, even though you can't directly install anything in that space yourself. In practice, hybrid drives work, but they are still more expensive and more complex than regular hard drives. They work best for people like road warriors who need both lots of storage and fast boot times. Since they're an in-between product, hybrid drives don't necessarily replace dedicated hard drives or SSDs.
A better solution for many folks will be a dual-drive system. In this case, a PC builder or manufacturer will install a small SSD as the primary drive (C:) for the operating system and apps, and add a larger spinning hard drive (D: or E:) for storing files. This works well in theory; in practice, manufacturers can go too small on the SSD. Windows itself takes up a lot of space on the primary drive, and some apps can't be installed on other drives. Also, some capacities can be too small. For example, you can install Windows 10 on an SSD as small as 16GB, but there will be little room for anything else. In our opinion, 120GB to 128GB is a practical minimum size for the C: drive, with 256GB or more being even better. Space concerns are the same as with any multiple-drive system: You need physical space inside the PC chassis to hold two (or more) drives, which means that these kind of arrangements are practical only in PC desktops and some big-chassis, high-end (usually gaming-oriented) laptops.
Last but not least, an SSD and a hard drive can be combined (like Voltron) on systems using technologies like Intel's Smart Response Technology (SRT) or Optane Memory, or Apple's Fusion Drive. They use the SSD invisibly to act as a cache to help the system more speedily boot and launch programs. As on a hybrid drive, the SSD is not directly accessible by the end user. SRT requires true SSDs, like those in 2.5-inch form factors, but those drives can be as small as 16GB in capacity and still boost performance; since the operating system isn't being installed to the SSD directly, you avoid the drive-space problems of the dual-drive configuration mentioned above. On the other hand, your PC will need space for two drives, a requirement that may exclude some laptops and small-form-factor desktops. Fusion Drive is only available on Mac desktops, for instance. You'll also need the SSD and your system's motherboard to support the caching technology for this scenario to work. All in all, however, it's an interesting workaround.
The Storage of Tomorrow
It's unclear whether SSDs will totally replace traditional spinning hard drives, especially with shared cloud storage waiting in the wings. The price of SSDs is coming down, but they're still too expensive to totally replace the terabytes of data that some users have in their PCs and Macs for mass storage that doesn't need to be fast, just simply there. Cloud storage isn't free, either: You'll continue to pay as long as you want personal storage on the Internet. Local storage won't go away until we have reliable wireless Internet everywhere, including in planes and out in the wilderness. Of course, by that time, there may be something better.
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Looking for some extra storage? Check out our guide to the best external hard drives. Or if you want to protect or store your files online, check out our roundups of the best cloud storage and file-syncing services and the best online backup services.