I'm seeing people move away from mechanical hard disks and say they won't go back. I am acknowledging that computer storage is undergoing rapid change however I decided to create this post to provide sensibility during these times.
This advice is based on the following facts:
- SSD's are faster
- SSD's die from usage and are less reliable than HDD's
- HDD's can store way more than SSD's
- Cloud storage is awesome but incurs a subscription and hasn't proven itself as reliable
- Backup's can die too
Based on the current realities you need 4 different solutions:
- An SSD or a pair of RAID 1 SSD's for your OS and apps and temporary local data. RAID 1 is to help with insurance of SSD death
- An SSD or a pair of RAID 0 SSD's for your swap and cache. This to help stop your primary SSD from dying from reads and writes. A RAID 0 configuration will ensure your computer will run trice as fast as someone without it when you run out of RAM
- A mechanical HDD or bunch of mechanical HDD's in RAID 5 for storing large amounts of data. This is for reliability and capacity. RAID 5 will help retain both performance and further reliability.
- A remote copy of your HDD's. This is to ensure you retain your data even if the premise suddenly explodes for whatever reason