SSD vs HDD
An SSD is many times faster than a hard drive and makes a PC feel quicker in everything it does; a hard drive gives you far more space for the money. For a boot drive and the games you play, buy an SSD. For bulk storage, backups and a large archive, a hard drive is still the cheaper tool.
Put your operating system and your active games on an SSD, and add a hard drive only when you need more space than an SSD you can afford. The table below shows what that trade costs today.
The difference on paper
These hold for each kind as a whole, independent of any one drive.
The difference in price today
Across 394 SSDs and 206 hard drives with a live offer at the retailers we track, updated daily.
Prices per TB use each drive’s cheapest live offer divided by its capacity. Quality scores are left out on purpose: they are calculated within each kind of drive and do not compare across kinds.
What an SSD changes in games
Not the frame rate: that is your graphics card and processor. What changes is everything around it. Load screens that take a minute on a hard drive drop to a fraction of that, and open-world games that stream the map in as you move stop hitching, because a hard drive cannot fetch thousands of small scattered files quickly enough while an SSD can.
That second effect is the one a frame counter will not show you. A game can report a high frame rate on a hard drive and still stutter as you travel, because the stall is in storage, not in rendering.
Why random reads matter more than the headline speed
The speed printed on the box is a sequential figure: one long file read in order. Games and your operating system mostly do the opposite, asking for many small files from all over the drive. A hard drive has to physically move its head for each one, which is why its real-world speed collapses on that kind of work, while an SSD has no head to move.
The setup most builds end up with
An SSD of 1TB or 2TB for Windows and the games you are playing, plus a large hard drive for everything else: the older games you might return to, video, photos and backups. You get fast loading where you notice it and cheap space where you do not. Most desktop cases take both.
If a hard drive will be the only drive in the machine, it is worth stretching the budget for a small SSD instead. A PC that boots and loads from a hard drive feels slow in every task, and that is the one storage decision people regret.
The picks on each side
The cheapest per terabyte on each side, and the cheapest that also scores at least 40 out of 100 within its own kind. Recalculated daily from live prices.
SSDs
Hard drives
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Common questions
Does an SSD increase FPS?
No. Frame rate comes from the graphics card and processor. An SSD shortens load times and removes the stutter a hard drive causes when a game streams its world in as you move.
Is a hard drive still worth buying?
Yes, as a second drive. Per terabyte a hard drive costs a fraction of an SSD, which makes it the right place for backups, media and a large game archive. It is the wrong choice as the only drive in a PC.
Which lasts longer, an SSD or a hard drive?
For normal desktop use, neither wears out first in practice. An SSD is rated for a total amount of writing (TBW), usually far more than a desktop writes in its life. A hard drive has moving parts and is rated for a yearly workload. Failures at home are usually a faulty unit, not wear.
Can I use an SSD and a hard drive together?
Yes, and it is the most common setup: the operating system and current games on the SSD, everything else on the hard drive. Windows handles both without any setup beyond choosing where to install.
Keep going
Browse SSDs or Hard drives with every filter, see how storage prices are moving, or start from the storage comparison hub.