SSDs are indisputably better than spinning hard drives when it comes to speed, size, efficiency, and even cost. However, these benefits favor SSDs only as long as you’re considering a handful of 1TB or 2TB drives in a desktop PC. The moment you consider other use cases where capacity, long-term reliability, write-heavy endurance, and cost at scale matter more than performance, hard drives become the only sensible option. This is why hard drives are still relevant in 2025.
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Cold storage
Not the carnivorous kind
When you have tons of years’ worth of rarely-accessed but important data to store, SSDs don’t really fit the bill. The problem with using flash memory for long-term archival storage is the risk of charge leakage when the SSD is left unplugged for a long time. This can lead to data loss, especially on SSDs that have a considerable amount of wear already. Now, this won’t happen in a few months, but if you’re keeping an SSD underpowered for over a year or so, the data integrity might suffer.
For this reason, hard drives fare better for cold storage. You can keep your spinning drives unplugged and stored in a box for years, and find your data intact, as long as the drives aren’t affected by bit rot due to shocks, harsh weather, and magnetic interference. For creatives who need to store TBs of assets for years, or data hoarders who can’t let go of their childhood media collection, hard drives still rule.
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An SSD won’t stream your movies faster
If the purpose of your media server or home theater PC is only to stream your movies and TV series to your TV, you won’t gain anything by switching to SSDs. The main bottleneck for a streaming machine is the network bandwidth, not the sequential read speeds of the storage drive. Streaming apps like Plex and Jellyfin buffer your media for seamless performance, so you don’t need anything faster than conventional hard drives — spending on SSDs is a waste of money.
Besides, there’s also the cost factor to consider. Considering the size of your media library, SSD storage can get prohibitively expensive, especially if you like all your content in 4K lossless formats. Hard drives are significantly cheaper than SSDs when you move up in capacity, making them the only choice for a media server.
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Surveillance storage and NVR systems
Write-heavy operations favor HDDs
If you have a decent home surveillance system that continuously writes data to storage, SSDs don’t make sense if you want a feasible, long-lasting solution. SSDs have an endurance rating defined by a fixed number of write cycles, beyond which they’re not considered reliable. They might function for a while as read-only drives, but you’d want to replace them immediately for any remotely important data.
Hard drives again trump SSDs here, since they aren’t limited by write cycles. Of course, hard drives don’t last forever, but surveillance-grade HDDs are far better than SSDs in a write-heavy environment like an NVR (Network Video Recorder) system. You need reliability more than performance when writing large amounts of data to a drive 24/7.
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High-capacity backups
HDDs all around
Archival storage is one thing, but what if you want to back up all your data and adhere to the 3-2-1 backup rule? For a few hundred GBs of data, you can rely on a secondary SSD, but when you’re talking dozens of TBs, hard drives become the default option. For one, it isn’t even easy to find large-capacity SSDs beyond 8TB drives. You have to turn to HDDs if you need, say, 14TB, 16TB, or 20TB drives for backing up your entire NAS or home server.
And, of course, you need to be mindful of the price when dealing with larger drives. Even an 8TB hard drive will cost you less than $150, whereas a similar SSD will be upwards of $600. Data backup isn’t really optional, so you need to invest in an economical solution, and for now, hard drives far outshine SSDs in that respect.
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NAS systems
Not-an-SSD (NAS) device
Finally, the big daddy of ’em all — NAS storage is still predominantly a hard drive game. NAS systems also require capacious drives that can handle the demands of a write-heavy environment, especially if you’re making daily backups and recording surveillance footage on the same device. Using an all-SSD NAS is neither cost-effective nor efficient for serious users who store dozens of TBs of data.
Even if you’re using your NAS as a streaming server, the speed of your storage doesn’t make any meaningful difference to performance. Hence, if you’re planning to build your own NAS, you should opt for NAS hard drives and not SATA or NVMe SSDs.
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You just can’t beat hard drives for storing lots of data … Well, I can’t, anyway.
Hard drives are far from obsolete
Some people might have declared HDDs dead already, but as you can see, they’re pretty much the only option in a lot of scenarios. Whether you’re storing large backups, tons of archival data, or putting together a NAS, hard drives will continue to trump SSDs for the foreseeable future. Price, capacity, long-term endurance, and performance — everything is in favor of HDDs the moment you move away from a regular desktop or gaming PC.
#scenarios #SSD #doesn039t #sense
source: https://www.xda-developers.com/when-ssd-doesnt-make-any-sense/
