SSD vs HDD: Do You Still Need a Hard Drive?

A few years ago, pairing a small SSD for your OS with a large HDD for storage was the standard budget build. Today, NVMe SSD prices per gigabyte have fallen enough that many builders skip HDDs entirely.

SSDs win on every performance metric that matters day-to-day: boot times, game load times, file transfers, and general system responsiveness. If your budget allows for a 1TB+ SSD as your only drive, that's the simplest and best-performing choice.

HDDs still make sense for one thing: cheap, bulk, long-term storage — think large media libraries, backups, or archival footage — where raw speed matters less than cost per terabyte.

Our general recommendation: build around a single fast NVMe SSD for your OS and active files, and only add an HDD later if you specifically need cheap bulk storage.