Hard disk drives have always been affordable. That’s the only reason why anyone buys them over SSDs, as there’s no hard drive out there that can hold a candle to the best SSDs. While they still have their place in NAS servers and other backup storage solutions, using a hard drive as storage in your PC isn’t the best idea.
It’s even worse if you plan on using it as your main boot drive. Apart from being slow, hard drives have a lot of problems that have been solved by SSDs. From reliability concerns to noise issues, here are six reasons why you should never use a hard drive in 2023.
1 Longer boot times
The fact here is quite simple: SSDs are faster at everything compared to hard drives, so an HDD will always have longer boot times. If you don’t know why that is, you first need to understand how SSDs work. To put it simply, hard drives have mechanical parts that physically read and write data to the drive itself. SSDs have no moving parts, as they use volatile flash memory to hold and access data.
Think of it as going from an analog film camera to a digital one. The digital camera is always going to be faster, and the lack of moving parts is what makes that possible.
An average SATA SSD will boot in around 15-20 seconds, while a hard drive will need 45 seconds or sometimes more than a few minutes.
Sure, boot times also largely depend on your system configuration, what OS you’re using, and how many programs you have enabled to launch on startup. However, regardless of your configuration, an SSD will always be faster to boot.
2 Longer loading times
The issues with speed don’t end there. If you are tired of sitting in front of game-loading screens for minutes at a time, it’s time to ditch your hard drive. Again, because of the moving parts, hard drives can be painfully slow when playing games. It might not be as big of an issue for those of you who play only online multiplayer games, but if you play any single-player games, you know how bad it gets at times.
It’s especially bad considering how resource-intensive certain games can get. Usually the bigger the game, the longer the load times. Red Dead Redemption 2 is around 120GB, and loading that game up on a hard drive is a painfully slow process. An SSD will take this pain away, and you’ll be thanking yourself years down the line that you got rid of that hard drive.
3 Worse for productivity
If you care about productivity, the choice between an SSD and an HDD can significantly impact your workflow. Picture this: You’re a photographer or video editor working on a tight deadline and every second counts. Between copying, pasting, exporting, and rendering the footage, your hard drive is going to eat up a lot of your time. Even scrubbing through the timeline will feel sluggish. This is why the best laptops for photo and video editing all use SSDs.
The same idea applies to all professional workflows. If you deal with a lot of large files simultaneously, hard drives will always feel slow compared to SSDs. The slower speeds also impact overall system responsiveness.
Finally, hard drives also negatively affect multitasking. Switching between apps, different browser tabs, and copying/pasting several files will always be faster on an SSD.
4 Reliability issues
Generally, hard drives are also less reliable compared to SSDs. Since an SSD doesn't have any moving parts, it’s never going to fall victim to mechanical failure. You can’t say the same for a hard drive. This is also true for external SSDs. Because of the absence of moving parts, external SSDs might survive a couple of drops. If you drop an external hard drive, there’s a high chance you’ll damage the read/write heads inside.
This sort of reliability is important if you depend on consistent and uninterrupted access to data (which is pretty much every computer user out there). No one wants to lose any of their important files, but if you have a hard drive, the chances of that happening are higher than with an SSD.
5 SSDs have never been more affordable
This reason might just be the nail in the coffin. It doesn’t make sense to buy a slower hard drive when SSDs are now so affordable. The cost of even the average SSD has decreased significantly in the past few years. You can easily get a 1TB SATA SSD for around $50 these days. The price-to-performance is hard to ignore there.
In fact, you can even get your hands on incredibly fast M.2 SSDs with either PCie Gen 3 or PCIe Gen 4. Those SSDs are significantly faster than your average SATA SSD, and if you’re a professional who deals with a lot of large files, you’ll see the benefits immediately.
A lot of people use hard drives for mass storage as the cost per gigabyte is much cheaper. However, you don’t even need to do that in 2023 considering how affordable SSDs are. It’s completely possible to build a hard drive-free build these days even on a tight budget.
6 Hard drives run hot and make a lot of noise
An underrated aspect of SSDs is their entirely silent operation. Hard drives generate noise due to their moving parts. This can be a bit bothersome, especially in quiet environments. On top of that, SSDs also generate less heat compared to hard drives. If you want to maintain optimal temperatures in your system, swapping out that old drive for a new SSD is the way to go.
At the end of the day, lower heat generation improves the overall lifespan of other components in your system. A higher temperature inside your case means that your CPU and GPU will also run hotter, and this will diminish overall performance.
Conclusion: It’s the end of the road for hard drives
Considering how faster and cheaper SSDs are now, there’s no real reason to buy a hard drive, even for mass storage purposes. They can still serve you well in NAS servers and other niche usecases, but upgrading to an SSD is the way to go for most of you. You’ll get faster boot times, better system responsiveness, and lower load times for games. Our noisy mechanical drives have served us well, but it’s time to say goodbye.