TECH TALK
Revisiting the slow but capacious hard disk drive
WE DON’T TALK ABOUT hard disk drives (HDDs) much these days. When you’re after maximum performance, solid state drives (SSDs) are so much faster But HDDs still have a place, particularly if you have large archives of movies, videos, photos, and other files that don’t need a lot of speed.
Jarred Walton
The cheapest HDDs now start at under $0.015 per GB. The cheapest SSDs start at $0.03 per GB, with more desirable M.2 PCIe 4.0 models that don’t use QLC NAND starting at $0.06 per GB— about four times the cost of an HDD. Even though you could buy ten 2TB SSDs for $650, good luck packing ten or more M.2 drives into a single PC.