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

1. Enthusiast multimedia users and heavy downloaders: Video collectors need space, and you can only get to 4TB of space cheaply with hard drives.
2. Budget buyers: Plenty of cheap space. SSDs are too expensive for PC buyers.
3. 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.
4. General users: General 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, then buying a smaller SSD for the same money will give you a better experience.

SSDs

1. Time warriors: People who push their laptops into their bags randomly 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 people who work in the field, like utility workers and university researchers.
2. Speed demons: If you need things done now, spend the extra bucks for quick boot-ups and app launches. Supplement with a storage SSD or hard drive if you need extra space (see below).
3. Graphic arts and engineering professionals: Yes, I know I 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.
4. 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'd get a so-called "hybrid" drive combining 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 like the Seagate Momentus XT 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.

Dual Drive System

In a dual-drive system, the system manufacturer will install a small SSD 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. Some capacities may also be too small. For example, you can install Windows on a SSD as small as 16GB, but there will be little room for anything else. In our opinion, 120 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.

Last but not least, an SSD and a hard drive can be combined on systems with technologies like Intel's Smart Response Technology (SRT). SRT uses 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 8GB to 20GB 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. You'll also need the SSD and your system's motherboard to support the caching technology for this scenario to work.

Thanks for reading. Hope to see you in my next post.