As opposed to Solid-State Drives (SSDs), Hard Drives (HDDs) are more affordable, making them a fantastic choice for storing data. Hard discs offer more storage space for less money, but their size and speed could be restrictive.
Solid-State Drives, in contrast, are becoming more and more well-liked since they provide equivalent storage space to hard drives while also providing faster speeds and higher durability.
What we can say is that, depending on your perspective, their utilization has decreased significantly compared to prior years, but that, up to this point, they have been widely employed to store enormous amounts of data. Even though fewer consumers use hard drives, this shows that they are still in use today.
4 Reasons to use HDDs over SSDs
1. HDDs are less expensive than SSDs
HDDs continue to be regarded as the most cost-effective storage option. In comparison to SSDs of the same capacity, hard drives are significantly less expensive. It is clear that HDDs are produced at a lower cost than other storage devices, and since this cost is assessed per megabyte, they tend to be less expensive.
2. HDDs are more commonly available than SSDs
Given that HDDs have been manufactured since computers have been around, there are more HDDs, than SSDs, available for purchase. Regardless of whether you buy an internal or external hard drive in a physical tech store or an online website, you will be able to find them.
With rising demand, HDDs that include a SATA or SAS interface, such as a SAS-3Gbps HDD, have long been preferred over SSDs. The race for availability may get intense unless there is an exponential increase in SSD manufacture. However, a lot of computer users continue to buy HDDs, particularly if they want to update their PCs.
Hard drives are also the preferred type of storage device for computer geeks who enjoy building their CPU from scratch. This is because it gives them more options to customize their device.
3. HDDs have more basic storage space
With a common size of 500 GB on the market, HDDs are discovered to offer greater storage base capacity possibilities, which is more than half of the beginning capacity of SSDs. In addition, compared to older models, recently launched HDDs have greater storage capacities. You should be able to store a large amount of virtual data on a single device. Even external hard discs with 6 TB of storage are readily available.
Hard disc drives’ maximum density increased to 20 TB in 2021 from 18 TB previously. According to experts, the industry would be impacted, especially for cloud and archive storage, as a result of this 2 TB increase in density, which can pile up directly proportionate to the number of drives utilized.
4. HDDs last longer than SSDs
HDDs clearly benefit from having a higher read-write cycle since data is immediately written on the platter drives. These platter discs are extremely durable and seldom degrade. As long as you are not dropping your hard drive on a hard surface, your HDD will never leave you.
As a result, they are durable and long-lasting. However, because flash memory can only withstand a certain amount of writes, SSDs have fewer read-write cycles. Additionally, frequent read/write cycles limit the lifespan of flash memory and wear them out.
Who are HDDs best for?
- Multimedia enthusiasts and frequent downloaders: Video collectors require plenty of storage space, and a hard drive may easily provide 8TB of space or more at a reasonable price.
- Budget buyers: SSDs are expensive and not everyone can afford them. Besides, many people who can, still prefer to build their machine from scratch on a budget.
- Engineers and those who work in the graphic arts: The majority of people cannot keep up with how quickly video and picture editors use up storage. Although this difference is narrowing, upgrading or installing a 2TB hard drive will be less expensive than replacing a 500GB SSD.
- General usage: Users who choose to download or store significant volumes of their own media assets locally will still require a hard disc with extra storage; SSDs are pricey for huge film and music collections. However, if you primarily stream music and movies online, spending the same amount of money on a smaller SSD will provide you with a better experience.
Who should ignore Hard Drives?
We have talked a lot about the advantages of Hard Drives during these fast-paced days. But, we should also discuss a little about the disadvantages.
As you know CPUs are now becoming very powerful. So, the need for faster storage drives is increasing along the way. We can now see NVMe SSDs reaching 7 to 8 GB/s data read/write speed. Hard Drives can never reach this level.
So, if you are a gamer, enthusiast, video editor, photographer, graphics designer, etc, just go for an SSD instead of an HDD.
HDDs are good to use as secondary drives because you can easily grab low-storage SSDs and install your OS/Software/Games on them.
Conclusion
Even though there is tough competition between HDDs and SSDs in the market today, many people still prefer HDDs, as it is not only inexpensive but still offer many benefits. While SSDs are great in terms of speed and efficiency, HDDs are best for storing huge chunks of data. Hence, they are still worth purchasing today.