Mechanical hard drives should die already

[jeffnz]

I bought a desktop PC about 2 years ago. At the time solid-state disks were a wee bit expensive so the guys who built my PC didn't put one in. I really want one now because I'm on a programming course and sometimes Windows Update plus other software installation will take (almost) all day to complete! It's really annoying because it causes unnecessary stress and I can't stay on task as much as I'd like to. I have enough distractions already, like walking to the shops to buy ingredients, then cooking, and then later on cleaning the dishes. Windows Update on a mechanical hard drive is infuriating in my opinion, it wastes valuable time. Everything takes longer to install or upgrade. It only costs $180 in my currency to buy a 256GB solid-state drive so I'm going to do that once I've sold my car. The laptop that I bought for my study has a solid-state drive and it's pretty good at not crashing despite only having a petty AMD A-4 CPU. Operations take a while to complete but it's reliable.

My desktop PC has an AMD A-10 which is fantastic for everything except graphics capability. I'm going to get a budget ASUS video card so I can play 8 Bit Armies on at least medium settings, probably on full I think! Although the A-10 isn't as good as some of the i-5 processors, I think that the combination of a solid-state disk with a cheap AMD CPU is very, very good for saving money. I strongly disagree with Intel's pricing, especially when the hard drive is usually the culprit responsible for slow speeds. Why waste money? I've used the AMD A-10 for 2 years now and I don't regret it. I'm going to upgrade it with a new hard drive and a graphics card and it'll be useful for another 5 years. I might go full-Linux too, and have Fedora on one PC and Debian on the other. That'd be a lot cooler than running Windows 10. Next year, once I have a programming job I'll no doubt be forced to use Windows, against my will. It'd be stupid to use Windows at home too, when I have the choice not to.

[sphyrth]

Don't be so harsh. Have a heart for people who need more space at the cost of speed like me.

[jeffnz]

Isn't that what flash drives are for? Unless you're pirating movies you shouldn't need that much. Plus if you upgrade you can keep your old drive anyway. I could live with 256GB for a few years. I only use 80GB of space on my desktop PC. It has 2 versions of Visual Studio, Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio and a few basic games. My backups take up less than 20GB.

[LordGood]

I'd rather take the trade-off from speed to capacity. Easier to recover files from a broken HDD too

but thats my 'art perspective'

[feneur]

A couple of not-even-that-new games and it's easy to use up several hundred GB. If you do art related things it's easy as well, especially video.

[sanderd17]

Flash drives are way too expensive for their capacity. If you need a lot of storage space, the only option currently is magnetic storage. On my work laptop (which I'm only using for development purposes, no art, video or games), I'm already using 290 GB of my 1 TB available. And I'm only using that computer for about 6 months now.

I know 1 TB SSD exists, but these are 5 to 10 times more expensive than the HDDs.

[jeffnz]

I think it's normal for applications to install onto C:\ but is it more common now to let the user install on another partition or another drive? That'd be good if you had low value applications - put them on the slow drive.

[feneur]

You certainly can choose to install most applications on another disk Which is useful

[jeffnz]

In Windows I'm sure that many applications can do that, but in Linux the partitioning would mean that all applications are on one disk, I don't think you can put x application on the SSD and y application on magnetic disk in Linux. Once I sell my car I'll buy the 256GB for peace of mind - an extra $50 isn't much 

[FeXoR]

"I don't think you can put x application on the SSD and y application on magnetic disk in Linux" Yes, you can

You can even install them in the default location, move them wherever you want (accessible to your PC that is ofc. ^^) and soft-link to where it was installed (Doesn't work that well for network sources though).

So even if the installation process doesn't support installing on drive x/y one can easily change the locations of program data without much risk of breaking anything.

[jeffnz]

I got the SSD installed, I did it myself. I was surprised at how slim and light-weight they are. It seems almost stupid, to try to screw it into a slot. I just left mine hanging - the data cable and power cable were too stiff anyway, I didn't want to muck around. Heaps of people on Tom's Hardware don't put their SSD into the HD bay, they just tape it or shove it somewhere, where it won't cause trouble. Also: the computer store recommended an A-Data drive, though Samsung and San Disk are good brands too

[vladislavbelov]

I've the SSD one on my notebook, it's fast, but small. So I couldn't store something big there, and I store all my photo-reportages and time-lapses (> 2TB) on different HDD, it's better than have SSD with the same volume, because:

1. It's much cheaper, like ~$20 vs. ~$150. 2TB SSD costs ~$1000, I could buy 10 HDD and make RAID from them, and it'll be fast and really secure.
2. HDD could work much longer under loading, but SSD has a very limited resource, so you're not able to make R/W like 64GB/day like for HDD, because then SSD could be broken (lost sectors) in 1-2 years.

Also I use very old HDD (40GB) for my old notebook (it even has floppy!), it has Gentoo + OpenBox, it works good enough to surf internet and watch films without lags, when all other computers are under loadings/calculations.

Edited April 28, 2017 by vladislavbelov