what are the benefits of HDDs over SSDs?
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They cost less to make, so they can be made bigger without pricing it out of people’s budgets.
The cost per GB on spinning disks is currently much much lower than SSDs
So while SSDs are way faster and better performing, spinning disks are more cost effective for long term storage
So you use your SSD for your OS and your Applications/games and you use your HDD to store movies, photos, etc
The $/bit is much lower. And historically, it has improved faster than that of semiconductors in general.
1. At the moment, HDDs are cheaper per byte than SSDs, especially at larger capacities (2+ TB). So if you need a lot of storage cheaply, HDDs are the way to go. This advantage is decreasing every day, as flash memory gets cheaper and higher capacity, hard drives are not getting better at nearly the same rate.
2. SSDs can actually lose data if left unused for long enough. Hard drives are a very good way to store data for years or decades with very little chance of the data being corrupted.
3. SSDs wear out as they are written to. Hard drives on the other hand can be written to continuously for years without degrading. This makes hard drives useful in applications where there is a large amount of data being written, such as security system recordings.
one thing that hasn’t been mentioned is it’s easier to securely erase data from a hard disk as opposed to an SSD. on SSDs there are layers of abstraction that make it very hard for your operating system to know exactly where data “lives” on the drive, so when it goes to erase it, it may only be erasing references to the data, not the data itself. so if security is a concern (like real security, not just freeing up space), hard disks may be better because you can reliably overwrite the specific sections of the hard drive where the data lives.
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