Build Planning Data

[kewtz]

I wish we could see for the year what was the most recommended over the course of the year.

 

Generally speaking though, why don’t people seem to suggest mechanical drives as much?

I may be wrong, my impression is that mechanical drives will outlast flash and for most people, there won’t be a noticeable performance gain. 

I put games on mechanical drives. What am I missing?

[bellabichon]

8 minutes ago, kewtz said:

Generally speaking though, why don’t people seem to suggest mechanical drives as much?

SSDs are smaller, have much faster reads and writes, and can connect with faster interfaces, such as NVMe. Plus, the price for SSDs with decent capacity is actually reasonable these days. 

8 minutes ago, kewtz said:

I may be wrong, my impression is that mechanical drives will outlast flash and for most people, there won’t be a noticeable performance gain. 

I'm not sure where you picked that idea up, but that's not the case. Mechanical drives are much more susceptible to physical damage than SSDs. As for performance gain, it's absolutely noticeable. In a side-to-side comparison of two systems, the one with its OS installed on an SSD is going to be noticeably snappier and smoother, even when just navigating the desktop. 

8 minutes ago, kewtz said:

I put games on mechanical drives. What am I missing?

Putting games on mechanical drives is fine, especially if you don't play them super often, but it's always better to have your OS on solid state. 

[kewtz]

1 minute ago, bellabichon said:

As for performance gain, it's absolutely noticeable. In a side-to-side comparison of two systems, the one with its OS installed on an SSD is going to be noticeably snappier and smoother, even when just navigating the desktop. 

That I agree. To clarify I was referring to other applications, like games.

[Joseph K]

30 minutes ago, bellabichon said:

Mechanical drives are much more susceptible to physical damage than SSDs.

Completely misleading. Unless you're throwing your computer out of a window every day, your drives will never sustain enough physical damage to ever matter in a desktop computer. SSDs on the other hand, especially cheap ones, will degrade significantly faster than a classic hard disk.

[Joseph K]

44 minutes ago, kewtz said:

I wish we could see for the year what was the most recommended over the course of the year.

 

Generally speaking though, why don’t people seem to suggest mechanical drives as much?

I may be wrong, my impression is that mechanical drives will outlast flash and for most people, there won’t be a noticeable performance gain. 

I put games on mechanical drives. What am I missing?

I would definitely reccomend mechanical drives if you both need a lot of storage and cost is a concern, which is almost everybody's scenario. The thing is that some people will only ever need 1TB of storage plus a boot drive in their gaming PC which makes hard drives not viable for them. For the average grandma, they would only need the storage to store pictures and videos from the last vacation to England so the SSD is useless beyond having the OS and Chrome on it. If you are like 90% of people on this forum, you probably only need an SSD with your OS and the select most important games, programs, and files on it, then you might have an extra SATA SSD for the less important stuff, and you definitely would be using a 2-4TB HDD for all the useless junk in your documents, downloads, and pictures folders.

[YourRandomForumGuy]

look SSDs are game-changers, a single 240gb ssd costing $25 can house your OS and a couple of other programs that you use quiet often. If you boot from an hdd and also manage to have your games load from the same drive, it is going to be painfully slow, so games can be on an hdd as loading from sata ssds wont be more than 10-15% faster

[bellabichon]

1 hour ago, Joseph K said:

Completely misleading. Unless you're throwing your computer out of a window every day, your drives will never sustain enough physical damage to ever matter in a desktop computer. SSDs on the other hand, especially cheap ones, will degrade significantly faster than a classic hard disk.

I mean, I did my research on this:

1. 2. 3. 4.

A cheap SSD will degrade faster from actual data transfer, but HDDs are always going to be at a higher risk of physical damage, due solely to the fact that they have moving parts. It's not a huge deal, but it's worth mentioning. 

[wanderingfool2]

3 hours ago, YourRandomForumGuy said:

look SSDs are game-changers, a single 240gb ssd costing $25 can house your OS and a couple of other programs that you use quiet often. If you boot from an hdd and also manage to have your games load from the same drive, it is going to be painfully slow, so games can be on an hdd as loading from sata ssds wont be more than 10-15% faster

I've bought a few cheaper SSD's before, would never recommend it as an OS.  (So many failures)...only reason I use cheap SSD's is when data isn't a concern (because sometimes constant backing up isn't practical).

 

3 hours ago, Joseph K said:

Completely misleading. Unless you're throwing your computer out of a window every day, your drives will never sustain enough physical damage to ever matter in a desktop computer. SSDs on the other hand, especially cheap ones, will degrade significantly faster than a classic hard disk.

While I do agree, harddrives are a lot more resilient than he let on...there are countless people I know who constantly shake the legs (and by proxy their system) which can cause harddrives to fail prematurely...the thing is though, I find harddrives you can usually get stuff off of though (albeit slowly or a few tries).

 

SSD's are great for anything that might move around, or if capacity is needed for cheaper.  OS should still be a SSD though.  I use an SSD for the OS, an SSD for data that is frequently accessed/benefits from the random read/write speeds and an HDD for long term storage and bulkier files (such as media).

 

SSD's for longterm cold storage aren't great (bit rot), but HDD's can be better at that...and HDD's usually give a better indication when they are dying/being able to recover the data more often (without sending it away)

[YourRandomForumGuy]

15 minutes ago, wanderingfool2 said:

I've bought a few cheaper SSD's before, would never recommend it as an OS.  (So many failures)...only reason I use cheap SSD's is when data isn't a concern (because sometimes constant backing up isn't practical).

I'm not recomending cheap SSD's from stupid manufacturers, it is kingston's a400 240gb

[wanderingfool2]

9 hours ago, YourRandomForumGuy said:

I'm not recomending cheap SSD's from stupid manufacturers, it is kingston's a400 240gb

I've had Kingston SSD's fail.  You ultimately get what you pay for.

[WkdPaul]

* thread moved to the New Builds and Planning section *