Guide: Choosing a Hard Drive and/or SSD

1) Hard Drive and SSD Features

It's important to know what the various features of HDD's and SSD's are so you can make an educated design about what is right for your PC

The major stats on HDDs are capacity, spindle speed, read/write speed, and response and seek time.

• Capacity is a pretty obvious stat, Larger capaicty means it can hold more data. I recommend drives with at least 1TB of storage when building a PC. While many can get by just fine with less, the amount of money saved by dropping to a 500GB hard drive is generally minimal.
• Spindle speed and read/write speed tends to go hand in hand. Spindle speed is the speed at which the internal platters rotate, drives are generally 5400 RPM or 7200 RPM. The slower 5400 RPM drives use less energy and generally have more capacity, but are slower and often ill suited for use as a main hard drive and better suited for media storage and backup. The faster 7200 RPM drives generally boast faster read/write speeds and are better suited for gaming and general use.
• Response and seek times are much less important now than they have been in the past, most reputable brands have very fast timings on all of their drives with the advantage going to the faster drives as the speed of the platter is more often than not the limiting factor. An important consideration however is power saving features such as what are present on some 5400 RPM drives, when a drive slows down to save power the next time it is used it will incur a bit of lag time before it will operate.

The major stats on SSDs are capacity, read/write speed, and max random IOPS

• Capacity is obvious again, but is much lower than HDD's and will often be paired with a HDD as a secondary drive to compensate for this. price is much more linear in terms of GB per dollar however I still recommend at least a 120GB SDD to ensure that there is enough space to install all of your heavily used programs onto it.
• Read/write speeds on SSDs are many times faster than HDDs and are the reason people choose to use them. Read speeds on low end models tends to be near the limit of SATA 6.0 gbps however write speeds are significantly lower than the high end models (write speed will likely not effect gaming and general use, this effects professional work such as video editing much more)
• Random IOPS (input outputs per second) is a measure of how many random inputs and outputs that the drive can handle per second. As most files and programs will not load in a continuous manner, this is important to maintain the high speeds that the drive is capable of.

2) Choosing your Storage Solution

Single hard drive:

Pros

• Good capacity
• Consistent performance
• Cheap (a 1TB drive is around 70 dollars at the time of writing)

Cons

• Not as fast as an SSD
• No redundancy

Single SSD:

Pros

• Very fast
• Consistent performance
• Somewhat cheap (a 128GB SSD costs around 100 dollars at the time of writing)

Cons

• Low capacity
• No redundancy

SSD + HDD:

Pros

• Good Capacity
• Very fast for SSD installed software
• Allows duplication of important files

Cons

• Expensive
• Speed for HDD installed software is still low

Other solutions not mentioned are RAID, and Intel SRT