There are some good deals on SSD's right now and I am looking for feedback from this great community. Do you have an SSD or an HDD?

I am using an HDD right now and am increasingly loosing my patience concerning the read/write speed.

If you use an SSD, have you found it to be a great deal faster? How about long term reliability?

Yes, a SSD is a great deal faster. It's most noticeable (for me) on startups. When powering the computer on every day it comes up much faster than with the old HDD's.

However, now there's an even faster option. NVMe or something like that (can't recall now, I'll look it up after posting and correct). Windows comes up INSTANTLY when I power on my laptop with that. I mean instant.

ADDED: Yep, NVMe is the correct name. My memory actually got something right!!!

SSD's are enormously faster. For sequential reads, it's like 550MB/s vs 100-150MB/s. NVMe is even faster than that. However the real deal is with random reads. HDD's can drop to barely 1MB/s when dealing with lots of tiny 4 kilobyte sized files spead over the disc (mechanical heads have to constantly swap back & forth) whilst solid state SSD's are hundreds of times faster under similar conditions. Access times / latency are much faster too which can eliminate / reduce stutter in a lot of games. HDD's still have their place for cost effective bulk storage / backup / media drives / NAS, etc, but I guarantee once you switch to SSD for a main system / boot drive, you won't ever go back. And yes reliability is fine (though I've only ever used Crucial & Samsung and not ultra-budget brands).

It's been years since I had a spinning HDD. I really wouldn't consider one (unless I wanted to hoard terabytes of data, which I used to, then realized life is easier when I don't have to worry about backing up all of that).

I haven't had any SSD break on yet but of course that's just anecdote. (I've had multiple HDD failures and recently my sister struggled with one). Anecdote doesn't mean much.

I think some HDD can get over 200mb/s nowadays.


Never heard of NVME though.

Check out the link in my post.

I have both, because they each have their advantages:
-> a 512GB SSD for my main OS and Games
-> a 1TB HDD for long term storage (archives) and non-I/O intensive stuff like videos and the like

SSDs are faster. Regular SATA ones are considerably faster. NVMe SSDs are in a whole different class and will blow you out of the water in terms of I/O performance, but they are expensive and you might not really need one.

I've had my SSD (a "regular" SATA SSD) for about 2 years now, writing 2.74 TB to it all in all, well below its minimal ultra-conservative life expectancy of 50TB of writes. They tend to last, but when they fail it's usually over in a second. As with regular HDDs: ALWAYS BACK UP YOUR DATA!

Yes, I could not go back to mechanical drives for main drive. I thing hdds are great when storage needs are large, but for pure execution there is no competition, even with hybrids.
There are, looks like ram type ssds which seem another order on top. Might get myself one.
It also depends on several other things as well though. I have a desktop monster which takes several seconds to boot up, and a laptop which boots almost immediately. On paper the desktop should be quicker, but the various components, windows, company rubbish and such like change that.
Also depends on what your booting and how.
Anyways, yes, I would get the best ssd you can affford, it will be less storage space, so make sure to factor operating system and some basic adverts off the capacity. Me I thing 256gb or 512gb fine, but then i don't install everything I own and keep a nice cleaned drive.

Edit: I have win10, win 7, Linux mint, all on ssd, and loads of back hdd's including a 10tb in the main machine.
Hdd for pure storage, ssd for bashing thems bits out.

The first SSD I ever got was about 2 -3 years ago at work. My laptop took 10-15 minutes to boot up into Windows and it would take forever to get anything substantive done on it. They tried adding memory to it, but it didn't make a difference. Then I got an SSD and had my hard drive imaged onto it. Night and day. The computer then booted up in 10 seconds or so and the heavy-duty work I was doing was instantaneous. I'll never again have a standard hard drive as anything more than a backup.

As others have noted, it's faster. I've been using SSDs for several years for my OS drives. In my latest build, I also have a 500+ GB SSD for games. I use HDDs for backups, many of which I've salvaaged from my older rigs.

As for long term reliability, my personal opinion is reports of concerns of wearing them out with too many read/writes are far overblown. For the vast majority of users, you'll never get close to wearing out the drive before you upgrade to another rig. I've not had any issues with any of my SSDs yet (anecdotal evidence, to be sure, but that's been my experience with them).

Is that correct? That seems awfully low in comparison to something like current Samsung offerings that have up to 1,200 TBW endurance.

Perhaps I was not clear enough - it's not the manufacturer's specified rating, but rather a rough figure even an ultra-paranoid doomsday engineer would fell comfortable with :P. They usually last way, way longer than that.

SSDs are not only much faster, but also substantially more reliable.

My current SSD is a Samsung 960 EVO 1 Tb, and there isn't a single bad thing I can say about it.

Much like some others here, I don't really remember what my last HDD was, but even though I always went with top of the line HDDs, I still recall the feeling of relief when I finally dumped them something like 10 years ago.

Edit:

Saw this recently: https://i.redd.it/orqn5chj45r11.jpg

I'm still using a sluggish spinning platter. I thought about upgrading my Winbox with an SSD, but this compactly designed rig of mine has to be almost completely taken apart to add one, and knowing me I'd completely mess it up and brick my computer on reassembly. The downside of having bought a prebuilt special design. =/ Maybe for my next PC... which won't happen for a number of years as I see my current rig lasting me quite a while yet.

I saw that as well and just assumed it was a typo.