Today, many people use an SSD (whether in 2.5″ or M.2 format) as the main storage device, for the operating system, and a traditional hard drive as a secondary one to act as additional storage. This is great, since for now mechanical hard drives still provide the best capacity / price ratio, but you have to be careful because there are a series of bad practices that could lead to disaster.
What you should NOT do if you have an SSD and a hard drive at the same time
Especially when we talk about users who have low capacity SSD, it is common that they decide to use it only for the operating system and install the programs and games that they use the most, leaving the normal hard drive for the rest, including other program or game installations. They are not used very often. This is a serious mistake, since in this way we will be “linking” the mechanical disk to the operating system, so that if the disk breaks down or if we disconnect it, the PC will stop booting.
Notice that we are putting quotes around that “link” between the hard drive and the SSD, and we do it because obviously it is not a link as such, but there are routes (“paths”) in the operating system that lead to the hard drive and that, due to the way in which the operating system is programmed, cause that if these do not work, the system is not able to boot).
This, at the same time, causes Windows to constantly check if the data on the hard drive is still there, and of course, the hard drive is much slower than the SSD (again, whatever the type, a hard drive is always slower). slower than an SSD) and this causes an increase in the latency of access to information that, in short, hinders the performance of the equipment. This is especially noticeable when starting the system, but it also slows down the overall performance of the PC.
Follow the “best practices” and everything will work better
The good practice when you have both an SSD and a hard drive on your PC is to use the SSD for ALL installations, be it programs or games, leaving the hard drive simply for mass storage. In this way, even if the mechanical disk is damaged or even if you disconnect it from the PC, the operating system will be able to continue booting without problems, as if nothing had happened and, at the same time, you will avoid that performance drag that we have mentioned before.
This is one of the main reasons why you should think very carefully about what capacity of SSD you need when you go to buy it, especially for the sake of not falling short. When you go to buy a new SSD for the system, think that you will not only install the operating system, Office and the programs or games that you use the most, you should think that EVERYTHING will be installed on the SSD, leaving the hard drive simply to save your photos, documents, videos, etc. but not to install anything on it.
Now the question will come: what SSD capacity is it recommended to buy? That will depend on you, but normally in a PC used for office automation and browsing, with 256 GB you will have more than enough, while in a gaming PC in which you are going to install several games, you should think about buying 1 TB or even more.