Is it SSD time or HDD still rules the ocean?

The hard drive is one of the components of a PC that evolved much in terms of storage capacity in past years but advanced little to none in terms of raw performance. You can blame this to mechanical limitations, but everyone agrees there has to be a solution, and that’s SSD (Solid State Drives) which are practically chips of flash memory (almost like the one used in USB drives). SSDs are great in terms of performance but lack much on other fields like price, capacity and reliability.

SSD is the future, not the present

I have no doubt that in a few years SSD technology will mature and prices will follow, but for now you can’t deny the fact that you pay for a 64 GB SSD more than you do on a 2000 GB hard drive. So performance is 2-3 times better but price per gigabyte is 32 time worse. So, the question is: should we stay away from SSDs?

SSD, HDD or combo?

As the answer doesn’t have to be black or white there’s always a gray area and that means there’s a middle way to handle things, and my answer now is using an SSD drive for your system disk, where you install Windows and all your programs and use another ‘classic’ HDD for storing multimedia files, install games and save your work. You come up with a cheaper solution than buying one big 256 GB SSD (prices for 512 GB models are really prohibitive) and you solve the storage problem with a big storage disk.

Remember that you should plan carefully what you’ll install and see how big the SSD must be. I recommend you don’t go lower than 40 or 64 GB. You could do with 32 GB but you’ll be very limited (I know friends that use 32 GB models and there’s always the problem with space).

The only catch I see is that you can’t use this solution on laptops, as it means carrying around an external drive each time you travel, and that’s not a true option. Do you agree or you’re hoping 6Gb/s S-ATA interface will revive HDDs in terms of performance?