ideal mechanical and SSD hard drive sizes?

[Ron Burgundy]

are people still using mechanical? if so how big should your mechanical HD be vs your SSD?

[anon5123]

I'd assume that most people use 1TB or 2TB mechanical drives. SSD prices are coming down though; a year ago I bought a 500gb SSD for just $150.

[chazus]

You get a drive that has enough space for the stuff you use. What other people do has no relevance to how much you need.

[Mifuyne]

Mechanical for storage of files mostly, movies, music, etc. got a 2TB drive for it.
Other than that I have 3 SSDs, one for the OS and programs; the other for games.

[Shakadam]

SSD's only in the computer. HDD's have too much noise imo.

I use a 128GB SSD for OS and a 750GB SSD for programs and games.

I have 4 HDD's in a server/NAS in my closet where I store everything else. It's the optimal solution imo.

[ldev]

SSD's only in the computer. HDD's have too much noise imo.

I use a 128GB SSD for OS and a 750GB SSD for programs and games.

I have 4 HDD's in a server/NAS in my closet where I store everything else. It's the optimal solution imo.

Do you use RAID-Z1 in your NAS? If not, then it's not an optimal solution.

[Triggered Fridgekin]

I bought a 1TB MX500 for gaming but it's overkill in my case since whatever I don't play I usually don't keep like Doom. Has little replay value to me so I just wiped it off the drive once I was finished. At most I have about ~350GB of games installed and that includes the 100+ mods for Fallout 4.

I went overkill on my OS drive too with a 256GB SX6000 but since it was only like $80CAD I figured why not. It's not even 1.3 certified so it's not like it's even a good NVME drive.

My mechanical drive is a 1TB WD Blue and that's more than enough since, like with my game drive, I don't hoard data so that's something you should consider.

[mrgreenthump]

I'd look at the storage needs of what you have and go from there. If it's under 1 TB, I'd just go with 500 GB SSDs, adding a new one if you run out of room. At 2TB+ I'd start looking for a cheap HDD (assuming we don't start seeing downward trend in SSD pricing again).

That said, SSD pricing hasn't continued on it's downward trend in a really long time, so getting bare minimum now is probably the way to go and wait till new technologies and increased memory supply drive the price per GB down.

[dacoolist]

Lots of amazing SSD's these days for a great price. I saw one a few days ago on new egg a Samsung 860 1TB SSD for 229 U$D

I have a PCIeX4 in my current gaming laptop, but it's only 256gb (I recommend if you have a little extra money to go for the 512gb ssd's)

It also has a firecuda combo drive by seagate that's 8gb SSD and a 5400 RPM 1TB drive, it seems to work nice, my buddy thinks it's just a 1TB 5400 and doesn't see the reason for the 8gb caching, but oh well

If you have the money go as high as possible. SSD's are awesome

[nToxik]

SSDs less than ~500GB are generally slower than 500+ GB sizes. The sweet spot for SSDs is currently ~500GB.

[Fahrenheit]

are people still using mechanical? if so how big should your mechanical HD be vs your SSD?

Personally, I don't use mechanical, that's old tech.
I have my OS and a few select games on a 500gb M.2 and use a 1TB SSD for any storage.

[Shakadam]

Do you use RAID-Z1 in your NAS? If not, then it's not an optimal solution.

No, Synology Hybrid RAID with 1 disk redundancy.

[anon5123]

HDDs died to me about 5 years ago. NEVER going back. 512 GB is a nice spot as a minimum.

They're still useful for storing media, since SSD speeds will not affect video/music/photo playback.

[Kagthul]

HDDs died to me about 5 years ago. NEVER going back. 512 GB is a nice spot as a minimum.

A lot of “normal” people have large collections of music, photos, and media, and arent tech savvy enough or in a financial situation to move such mass storage to a NAS (or it isnt feasible because they are on the go alot). SSDs are -terrible- investments for mass storage for 99% of users. ~60 for 2TB vs several hundred is not even in the realm of sensible, particularly when for the file types in question, the SSDs extra speed is utterly irrelevant.

Unless youre doing pro-sumer work (which most people are not) using an SSD for mass storage is foolish. Only if youre editing extremely large files in real-time is it remotely financialy intelligent.

[Kagthul]

Well, I did say me, not everyone. Obviously they're useful to some people, but SSD prices have come down significantly in the past 5 years, and cloud storage is always a thing and is following the price trend of SSDs. To be honest, I don't expect HDDs to be around 10-15 years from now at all (especially with the way storage technology has evolved in only the past few years) . Will SSDs become the norm? Maybe, but hybrid drives might take HDDs spot before that.

All those cloud centers are using massive arrays of high capacity network-rated storage drives. Sometimes fronted by a single rack of SSDs to act like a giant cache. But until Solid State price/gb can get down to somewhere near the 6-10c mechanical drives get per/gb, its never going to happen. (SSDs are in the 30-50c/GB for SATA and almost double that for NVMe). A lot of data centers still back up to TAPE ffs, because it even cheaper (2-3c/gb).

And while SSHDs may “replace” traditional HDDs (i dont think they will. I like them and im a big advocate, but they arent marketed well and dont sell well), they are... at their core, still Platter HDDs with a tiny amount of flash as cache.

SSHDs with Optane as the cache instead of traditional NAND could be extremely good, as Optane is available in much higher capacities for cheaper (the cache-style Optane, not the more expensive variety used in the full-up Optane SSDs) which would make it far better. But, again, theyd have to be marketed right ormtheyll never be more than a niche product.

Ideally, if makers really want to push a good storage/GB solution AND keep the speed benefits of SSDs for most tasks, they need to make the Fusion-Drive style of SSHD the option they really push. Apples Fusion Drives pair a MUCH larger SSD cache portion (usually 64GB in 1TB models and 128GB for the 2GB portion), and intelligently manage such that the entire OS is on the SSD portion, and the like. Doing that style of drive with the Optane cache would bring prices down into the ~100$ range for a 1TB drive and ~140-150-ish for the 2TB. Its just as good as an SSD for 99% of daily-drivers, and substantially cheaper, while still packing a ton of storage for the average photo-collecting, music-colletion-having, video-hoarding normie.

[Twoddle]

are people still using mechanical? if so how big should your mechanical HD be vs your SSD?

My SSD is 250GB and HD is 150GB.

[Spicymemer]

SSD's arent worth the money, unless;

1. Suffer from ADD
or
2. Have disposable income.

[SoulForge]

SSD's arent worth the money, unless;

1. Suffer from ADD
or
2. Have disposable income.

100% not true. SSD's are well worth the money.

[Skroe]

I just bought a 500gb 970 Evo M.2 NVMe SSD. It's amazing.

It's paired with my 500gb OCZ Trion 150 and a 4TB WD Blue HDD.

[Spicymemer]

100% not true. SSD's are well worth the money.

Thats why i said Unless, if you're the kind of person to loose your mind over a 30 sec vs 60 sec boot time, then yeah, go for it.

But you get similar performance by putting windows on a dedicated mechanical drive with all your startup programs on another.