SSD vs. HDD: Choosing the right storage for you

Hard drives have been around since the 1970s. We’ve since come a long way since the fridge-sized disks of the mid-twentieth century, with finger-sized solid state drives offering terabytes of storage at affordable prices. Solid state drives (SSDs) are an improvement over hard drives in many ways.

They’re denser, faster, and more durable than hard drives. Because SSDs are completely digital, they draw less power than hard drives and make no noise. So why does the HDD vs. SSD issue persist? HDDs have stuck around because they’re so cheap, but SSDs are rapidly closing that gap. Still, spinning hard drives do have a use case or two where they shine.

What is a storage drive?

A hard disk drive (HDD), or hard drive, is a nonvolatile storage drive that works by reading and writing information to physical disks called “platters.”

As the hard drive spins the platters, a magnetically charged “read/write” head magnetizes tiny pieces of the platters. Those differently-charged magnetic bits become the 1s and 0s that make up your data.

Usually, hard drives sit in a 2.5-inch or 3.5-inch storage bay in the computer. To send the data through the motherboard, most modern hard drives connect with a Serial ATA (SATA) cable.

The solid state drive (SSD) is also a nonvolatile storage device, but unlike an HDD, an SSD has no mechanical moving parts. The information is read and stored electronically onto NAND circuits or flash memory.

You can hook up an SSD the old-fashioned way. However, most modern SSDs connect directly to motherboards through the much faster NVMe ports. This helps get the most out of the improved drive performance an SSD offers.

An NVMe SSD can come in a variety of sizes, named for the kind of plug they use and their size. Most desktop computers use M.2 2280 SSDs. Here, M.2 is the form factor, while 2280 refers to the length of the SSD board).

Many laptops also use M.2 2280 SSDs, though sometimes they will use smaller, denser drives to make laptops thinner. The smallest SSDs are in handheld devices like phones, but some tablets also use them.

If you’re looking to upgrade the storage in your Steam Deck or Microsoft Surface tablet, you’ll need a 2230 M.2 drive, which are only 30 millimeters long. Because of the increased memory density, these drives often demand a correspondingly higher price. We recommend the Sabrent Rocket 2230 drive, which can reach up to one terabyte.

The PlayStation 5 also uses M.2 SSDs, which you can easily install yourself into the console's extra slot.

Size and storage space

In terms of physical size, an SSD can be extremely small. The limiting factor is the size of its integrated circuits (ICs), which get smaller year by year. Meanwhile, hard drives can’t be smaller than 2.5 inches wide because of the way they work. This is why you don’t see mechanical hard drives in thin devices like tablets or smartphones.

There is no technical cap on the storage capacity of an SSD. The more ICs that can fit on the board, the more storage it has. The largest drive is a massive 100TB, while the largest consumer drives are 8TB.

However, you pay for what you get. A 1TB SSD goes for about $60 to $80 at the time of writing, and prices quickly rise as you go past that 1TB mark in a single drive.

Hard drives are much cheaper than SSDs for the same storage capacity, with 1TB selling for about $40. The largest hard drives are about 20TB and retail for about $300. Because it’s an older and more developed technology, there isn’t much room left to make hard drives denser or cheaper.

Performance and speed

A hard drive needs time to rev up but can reach peak speeds of 7,200 rotations per minute (RPM). At that speed, it can read and write around 80 to 160 Megabytes per second (MB/s). Older SATA SSDs can read and write data up to 550MB/s, but the newer and more common NVMe SSDs have a peak speed of up to 8000 MB/s.

Even the slowest NVMe SSDs are ten times faster than HDDs, which makes them great for your main storage drive. While SSDs can boot a PC in seconds, boots from an HDD can take two minutes or more. Because loading programs takes so much more time on HDDs, you want to keep your most frequently used programs and your operating system running from an SSD as your main (C:/) drive.

However, for files that are infrequently accessed or for small files, an HDD can be a great secondary storage drive in your system. Things like Word documents, music, and videos will load fairly quickly from a hard drive if they’re small files.

Durability and longevity

For most use cases, SSDs are more reliable than HDDs, but HDDs have some niche benefits. Data on HDDs is stored physically instead of electronically, so it’s less likely to degrade or corrupt over long periods of disuse.

SSDs need an electric charge to work, so they usually have small batteries to keep them powered at all times. That means if you leave an SSD lying around for a year or more, its battery could run out, causing it to start losing data. A hard drive is the better option if you’re planning to archive data for a decade or more.

However, hard drives are also more fragile than SSDs. Their mechanical operation means that there are moving parts inside that can break if you drop them, expose them to extreme temperatures, or expose them to a strong magnetic field.

The average person might not be tossing their storage drives into space, but considering how likely you are to drop your laptop or desktop at least once in its life, the SSD’s drop resistance is a godsend.

SSDs also win out over HDDs for writing over old data. Everything wears out over time, and SSDs and HDDs both have a limited lifespan when it comes to rewriting the same part of the drive multiple times. Additionally, revisions to digital files can end up scattered across physical parts of the drive, causing drive fragmentation.

Fragmentation can seriously affect an HDD’s performance, so they need to be defragmented occasionally to keep them as fast as possible. Meanwhile, SSDs use a few processes to prevent fragmentation, so you never have to defrag them. They also have tools like wear leveling that evenly distribute files in order to prolong the life of the drive overall.

You can expect a hard drive to last about five years before it starts to fail. Reading and writing data affect its longevity, so it wears out fairly quickly if you use it daily. Meanwhile, SSD longevity is more dependent on use than on time. They’re rated for a maximum number of rewrite cycles (usually 7,000 to 10,000 rewrites) before they run into issues, but the average person won’t reach that for decades.

Price

HDDs are almost always much cheaper than SSDs with the same storage capacity. A Terabyte of HDD storage may run $35, versus $100 per TB for an SSD. The newest, fastest SSDs can go for as much as $150 for a 1TB drive. For external drives, the need for a rugged protective case may also increase the price.

HDDs are almost always much cheaper than SSDs with the same storage capacity. A Terabyte of HDD storage may run $35, versus $60 or $80 per Terabyte for an SSD.

However, prices can vary a lot for SSDs in particular. The newest, fastest SSDs can go for as much as $100 for a 1TB drive. If you’re looking for an external storage drive, the ruggedness and durability of the case can add to the cost, as well.

Best use case for each technology

SSD technology is faster and more reliable than HDD technology, but HDDs can still have a place in your life. The much older tech is also much cheaper, so you can buy an HDD with a lot more storage capacity than an SSD of the same price.

If you have multiple terabytes of data that you want to keep around (photos, videos, business or school files) even though you don’t access them often, a hard drive will save you a lot of money. They’re especially useful if you’re building out network-attached storage (NAS), a bulk storage device that lets you connect to your files over the internet.

For frequently used files or data that need to be accessed quickly, however, an SSD’s upsides will more than make up for the initial cost difference.