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 PC for day to day. It is not my case, since since the SSDs came on the market, I made the decision to use only solid state drives in my PC and do without hard drives completely. 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 a hard drive for games and other things in the PC. The low capacity of the first years of life of these devices forced us to do so, but today you can buy SSDs of 1 TB or more for more than affordable prices, so the need to have large capacity hard drives for storage They are over.
Ten years without hard drives in the PC
It was in April 2011, with the release of G.Skill Phoenix PRO SSDs with SATA 2 interface, that I installed an SSD in my PC for the first time. It had only 60 GB of capacity, but it was already a radical change in the performance of the PC 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 you to have too many games installed, but even so, it was also enough to have the two or three that I used the most, and the performance improved a lot.
Of course, 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 120GB SSD. for the operating system with a SATA 3 interface that already offered 500 MB/s read and write, leaving that old SATA 2 SSD as storage for documents and such.
A curious thing that made me make the final decision is that even if you have a secondary storage hard drive and in which you do not have any programs installed (only games and documents), if your hard drive crashes, the system does 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 there was a click in my head and I said to myself “Why not do without the slow, noisy and heavy mechanical hard drives? and use only SSD in the PC?». So I did, and since 2012, ten years ago, no mechanical hard drive has been installed in my PC again.
At present, logically the SSDs installed in my PC have been “evolving”, and at this 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 7,000MB/sit is absurd to think of having a mechanical hard drive that barely exceeds 100 MB/s, right?
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 when you need it, but that your PC does not depend on hard drives because in the end that will penalize you.
And it is no longer just a matter of performance, which of course if you start using only SSDs in your PC you will notice, it is also a matter of comfort and practicality. Not surprisingly, many manufacturers of PC cases have stopped incorporating racks to install 3.5″ units (and even 2.5″ in some cases), since the current SSDs have an M.2 format and are installed directly in the motherboard; This gives you added convenience, as you don’t have to run power and data cables or screw anything into the PC case.
In short, what I have to tell you here is that I have been using only SSDs in my PC for 10 years now and I do not 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.
