Since the beginning of the computer age, hard drives have been the storage units par excellence, and despite the fact that SSD They have been with us for several years now, many users continue to use them on their PCs on a daily basis. This is not my case, since since SSDs came on the market, I made the decision to only use SSDs in my PC and do without hard drives totally. In this article, I tell you about my experience.
Gone are the days when we had an SSD for the operating system and applications and an HDD for games and other things on the PC. The low capacity of the first years of life of these devices forced us to do this, but today you can buy SSDs of 1TB or more for more than affordable prices, so the need to have hard drives of large capacity for storage is over.
Ten years without hard drives in the PC
It was in April 2011, with the release of the G.Skill Phoenix PRO SSDs with SATA 2 interface, that I installed an SSD on my PC for the first time. It only had 60 GB of capacity, but it was already a drastic change in PC performance to have an SSD for the operating system, Office and the main applications. At that time, the low capacity of the SSDs did not allow having too many games installed, but still, it was also enough to have the two or three that I used the most, and the performance improved a lot.
Sure, there was a time when I used this SSD for system and HDDs for storage, but in 2012 SSDs with higher capacities and faster interfaces started coming out, so I immediately installed a 120 GB SSD for the operating system with a SATA 3 interface. which already offered 500 MB/s read and write, leaving that old SATA 2 SSD as storage for documents and the like.
A curious thing that made me take the final decision is that even if you have a secondary storage hard drive and in which you have no program installed (only games and documents), if your hard drive fails, the system will not boot. That’s what happened to me, and since there were already 500 GB SATA 3 SSDs on the market at the time, that’s when my head clicked and I thought to myself “Why not do away with slow, loud and heavy hard mechanics? disks? and only use the SSD in the PC?”. So I did, and since 2012, ten years ago, no more mechanical hard drives have been installed in my PC.
Currently, logically, the SSDs installed in my PC have “evolved”, and at the moment I only have a 2TB PCIe 4.0 SSD for everything, operating system, programs, games, documents, etc And it is that, really, with 2 TB of space you have more than enough for all this, and with speeds that exceed the 7,000 MB/sit’s absurd to think of having a mechanical hard drive that barely exceeds 100 MB/s, isn’t it?
If you still use a hard drive… think about it
When you have very large storage needs, it is obvious that you need hard drives since their price per GB of capacity is still much better than that of SSDs. However, our recommendation in this regard is that do not install them on the PC but in a DAS or NAS to access it when you need it, but that your PC does not depend on hard drives because in the end it will penalize you.
And it’s no longer just a question of performance, which you will of course notice if you start using only SSDs in your PC, it’s also a question of comfort and practicality. Unsurprisingly, many PC case manufacturers have stopped incorporating racks to install 3.5″ (and even 2.5″ in some cases) units, since current SSDs are M.2 form factor and are installed directly in the motherboard; This gives you more convenience because you don’t have to run power and data cables or screw anything into the PC case.
Anyway, what I have to tell you here is that I’ve only been using SSDs in my PC for 10 years now and I don’t regret it at all. If you still have a hard drive slowing down your system, I recommend you think about it and invest in a 1-2TB SSD for everything, you won’t regret it either.
