timppu: If you want extra space (which doesn't cost arm and leg), HDD.
Otherwise, SSD. Or both, SSD for a primary OS drive and HDD as a secondary.

I have two laptops in use (both used for gaming too), one has purely HDDs, the other has only a SSD. I am not seeing the "unbelievable" benefits with SSD that some people say. Yes yes, Windows loads up faster as do bigger games (in case they are indeed installed on a SSD and not a secondary bigger HDD), but in the end it doesn't matter that much to me if loading some game takes e.g. 15 seconds instead of 4 seconds.

Each to his own, but I feel the claims that "SSD is the best upgrade ever for your PC!" are pure plain simple bullshit. In fact, I personally feel they are almost a downgrade, considering you have to put up with smaller drives (or indeed pay lots of moneys for a bigger SSD).

I'd much much MUUUCH rather use any extra money to e.g. buy more RAM (up to 16GB at least, in case you have less), a faster GPU, more HDD space... and maybe after that a faster SSD.

But as said, to each his own.

Cavalary: Because you have little control of things on Home, so good luck tweaking out, and having those tweaks last after each forced update too. Some options have been removed from Pro too (and others only ever existed on Enterprise), but there's still quite a hefty difference.
But, of course, Win 10 is dreadful due to this taking away of control from the user either way you go about it. Dread the prospect of next year myself, as 10 is not an option.

Edit: Specifically, if you do go with 10 (*shudder*), you'll want Pro for some control of updates (still intolerably little, but way more than Home) and group policy (which may be presented as a business feature, but ends up being necessary just for those tweaks you want to do). Bitlocker for encryption (now that they apparently made it work on single files too, not just whole drives anymore) and Hyper-V for VMs may also be handy if you think you may use those.
Cavalary: I'd second that combo, Samsung for SSD and WD Black for HDD. A tad hard to justify the Pro now though, since they reduced the warranty for it to 5 years, same as the Evo. Used to be 10 in previous series. Still has more writes though, and either way the values are past what you'd normally use. And that test that was linked to, from back in 2013 too, shows how much further than the rated values they can go anyway.
Cavalary: Damn, reaching into the PBs, and even the first to fail going several times above the rated limit! That's insane. But yeah, it confirms the sudden death thing, which HDDs don't typically have.
Cavalary: Well, I'm not dt, but no.
For one, the idea is that SSDs (or anything using flash) can't overwrite a sector as a HDD can, but must first erase it. So when you delete something off a HDD what happens is just that the entry in the allocation table gets erased, but the data remains there until those sectors are written with something else (hence the easy recovery too). A SSD will also do that at first, but if the data remains written when those sectors will need to be written again, the write operation will be twice as slow, since it'd need to first erase the old data and then write the new. So you have the trim function, which if enabled (and it normally is) will tell the SSD which sectors are no longer considered in use and it'll erase them when it's not otherwise busy. So, whenever it happens, either when the sector needs to be written again or as part of this maintenance work, that erasure counts as writing, doubling the amount actually written on the disk.
Also, when sectors will trigger wear leveling warnings, after a certain number of writes (again, that means a LONG time under regular usage scenarios), that data will likely be moved to "fresher" sectors, again adding to writes without you actually writing to the disk, this being done internally by SSD, without the user (or the OS for that matter) noticing the difference, assuming it doesn't fail in the process.

Oh, PS, another difference between SSDs and HDDs: SSDs have firmware. Firmware has updates. Not required to install them of course, but some may correct bugs or what not. Updating a SSDs firmware will normally wipe it (or even if you try not to, if possible, there's no guarantee there won't be data loss), hence SSDs come with utilities to make image backups and restore them after such an update. Normally it should be hassle-free, just have the space on another drive to store that image and it'll be put back as if nothing happened. But, of course, scary prospect. I haven't updated mine's firmware for one, and I don't even have the OS on it (was purchased quite recently).

Dark_art_: Modern HDD are very fast but would bottleneck any modern system. If you do nothing on pc but game, you can get away with HDD, any other use -> SSD, even browsing speed is faster.

I would go for SSD even for the games disc ,not HDD As someone call them "spinning disc fossil". They use far more power and do some noise (modern ones are almost inaudible with a usual desktop pc).

Yes, SSD have limitations, like endurance writing (it´s not a flaw) but is something only concerning pro market (data centers etc), Pro SSD are better in this regard.
However there's a big problem with SSD, like any other flash memory, not correctly shut down the pc might corrupt the data, like constant power surges. A good power supply prevents this for the most part (Dont buy a desktop with a cheaper one, preferably to buy better with less watts)

Not to scare you because HDD are far worse. Anyone here that use computer for a long time and never had a disc failure?
Well I remember 1 particulary with weeks worth of simulation work. And I lost all my porno as well, thats a bummer!

Tauto: Getting new pc and would you stick to normal Hard Drives or make one an SSD?

dtgreene: No, that's not what I am saying. (Also, please don't abbreviate my username that way.)

The only situations where the OS could be destroyed by the drive are if:
* The drive has worn out and is unable to copy the data. (In which case, time to get a new one.)
* The drive is defective. (Should be covered under warranty.)
* The firmware has a bug. (Time to update the drive's firmware, or return it under warranty if you can't.)

I would expect these sorts of failures to be rare, possibly rarer than with HDDs.

i_hope_you_rot: My opinion : SSD is a waste of money . All you need a good HDD , an updated OS , a defrag software and a junk cleaner .

TerriblePurpose: I think you can tell by the numerous conflicting replies that no one really knows definitively which is best. I'll just say that I have Win10 Home on a 256 GB SSD, with two other larger SSDs for games and a couple HDDs for storage and backup. I've had no issues with any of the drives and everything works smooth and fast. I built this rig 3 years ago. Take that for what it's worth: totally anecdotal.

i_hope_you_rot: My opinion : SSD is a waste of money . All you need a good HDD , an updated OS , a defrag software and a junk cleaner .

ariaspi: I think is has mostly to do with the silicon lottery. It's the same for NAND flash memory and anything produced on a wafer. So the lower quality modules are sold cheaper and automatically end up in cheap SSDs. Often times you'll see comments from people complaining their product failed within a year or even faster, and other people who are happily using the same product for many years without any issue.

Edit: If you're curios about more drives, check that reddit thread from my previous post. I was looking at the spreadsheet right now and they too say that WD Green is garbage, but the WD Blue 3D is good.

lukaszthegreat: I'm just curious on whether people who claim hdd is as good actually worked and played on pc with modern ssd.

Tauto: Nope,that's why I asked the question. And in saying that,I'm not knocking people's choices but trying to figure out what suits me and HHD is an old friend where as SSD is a bit controversial and not the ''ants pants'' as by the results in this thread.

lukaszthegreat: My query was not really to you because you are the one asking :)

It's the people who say hdd is as good. As somoene who had hdds and 7200rpm hdds I now only have 2 ssd in my gaming rig and a single ssd in my laptop. Replaced old hdd cause it was damn slow after 2 years of using without format.

Are you by any chance going to use it on laptop?

Cause that's also means more points for ssd.

It's lighter
Quieter
More robust for shaking and dropping
More energy efficient
And laptop hdds come with 5400 rpm. Those are sooooo slow especially after a year or so of usage.

lukaszthegreat: And laptop hdds come with 5400 rpm. Those are sooooo slow especially after a year or so of usage.

dtgreene: Interestingly, if using Linux, I believe it is technically possible, without having to write code in any language other than shell scripting, to create a system that boots off a disk, copies the OS into RAM after booting, and then unmounts the disk, allowing it to be used during the copying to ram stage. In fact, I can think of two approaches:

1. Use the device mapper. At boot, the initramfs will use the device-mapper to create a mirror (RAID1) between an image file on the disk and a disk image stored in RAM. Then, once the system is loaded (or perhaps while it is loaded, particularly if it's a mulit-core system that can easily multi-task), the mirror is broken, and the on-disk file is removed from the mirror. (Note that the issue with the disk file can be solved by making a snapshot; we are really making a RAID1 setup with a snapshot of an on-disk readonly disk image and a in-memory disk image.)

2. Use btrfs. A btrfs filesystem is created using an on-disk image as a seed, and then adding an in-memory btrfs filesystem (again, this is done in the initramfs), then the seed block device is removed from the btrfs filesystem (which causes the data to automatically be moved to the in-memory device). (If the seed filesystem code turns out to have a bug, the same dm-snapshot trick mentioned above can be used to make the first filesystem writable.) This system has the advantage of allowing the in-memory filesystem to be grown at run-time just by creating a new block device and adding it to the filesystem (doing this for the above system would require some more device-mapper trickery and a filesystem resize tool), and it also allows for things like compression, but it also needs a newer kernel version to be reliable.

(Note that ZFS is not suitable for this purpose, as you can't remove a device from a filesystem after creating it.)

Tauto: No,Desktop but two years since last format is indeed a fair while but mine hasn't been since purchased and that's over five years ago and as long as you use some cleaners and do a defrag every now and then it should be okay.I don't dl much crap or install different programs as that is just asking for trouble.My pc is still as fast as the day I purchased it which proves my theory correct,well in my eyes it does,age and (wear and tear) slight graphics card and maybe a run down HHD problem is all that's wrong with it.

Dark_art_: My laptop came with a 7200 rpm disc.

lukaszthegreat: True. Some come with those but they are loud and battery hungry.

rtcvb32: Mhmm. Some LiveCD's allow this, as an intermediate step copy the image and run from ram.

I'd probably master a basic/main OS using squashfs (using zlib optimized for speed, xz/7z is too slow).

Alternates could include making a few squashfs FS's, copy them to the tmpfs and then mounting them afterwards, though being able to use it after the kernel initializes would be better.