HDDs and SSDs: differences and overview with buying tips

HDDs and SSDs

Options for a PC upgrade

If you own a gaming PC, it has not been easy to find a useful upgrade for your arithmetic servant in the last six to 10 months. Graphics cards have been completely gone for months if you don't want to pay significantly more in relation to the offered performance than in September or October 2020. Because of the tense situation, we had a special about used graphics cards as an alternative to buying a new one last weekend published.

Table of contents

Page 1 HDDs and SSDs: Introduction and hard disks 1.1 Hard disks: Tips for choosing Page 2 HDDs and SSDs: differences, loading times and performance 2.1 SSDs and hard disks - differences 2.1. 1 Advantage of SSD: loading times and performance Page 3 HDDs and SSDs: What to use - SATA or M.2 SSD? 3.1 SSDs: SATA or M.2? Page 4 HDDs and SSDs: Setting up a drive in Windows and an overview of hard disks 4.1 Integrating a new drive under Windows 4.1.1 Overview of best buyers: Hard disks Page 5 HDDs and SSDs: Overview with more than 40 SSD model series 5.1 Overview: SATA and M.2 -SSDs Page 6 Picture gallery for "HDDs and SSDs: Differences and overview with buying tips" Unfold If you have a bit of money on the high edge and are afraid to buy graphics cards, and have also not considered it sensible up to now, a new kit consisting of CPU and mainboard and to buy RAM (you can find purchase advice on this in our analysis of the new Intel Core i-10000 CPUs from the beginning of April), you might ask yourself: What to do with all that money?

Samsung 870 SSD EVO with SATA interface Source: Samsung options include a new housing, a new keyboard and mouse combination, a monitor or speakers. But also worth a look to carry at least amounts between 50 and 250 euros in the trade: More and possibly faster storage space. This is our topic today, because it is about hard drives and SSDs. Both product types have become cheaper and cheaper in recent years - however, a new cryptocurrency is leading to the assumption that prices could rise noticeably in the near future. Because the cryptocurrency relies less on computing power than on storage space. We will see in the next few weeks whether this assumption is true. At the end of our special, we prepared hard drives and SSDs in a market overview, whereby we will list over 40 SSD model series alone. Let's start with tips on hard drives.

Hard drives: Tips for choosing

If you want to use a hard drive for games, it is best to choose a model that offers 7200 RPM (revolutions per minute) . Faster models have proven uneconomical. Because the possible increase in UPM was only small for physical reasons, the gain in performance was also only small - but the surcharge was high. Hard drives with more than 7200 RPM are hardly available on the market - only three models between 300GB and 600GB between 55 and over 200 euros are available. For comparison: a 7200 UPM hard drive with 2TB of storage space is available for less than 50 euros, 3TB from 65 euros and 4TB from 95 euros. If it is not essential to have good loading times for games, the models with 5400 RPM are more recommended from a capacity of 3TB to 4TB, as they are cheaper. As a pure "data grave", the 5400UPM models are not a disadvantage.

Incidentally, the information relates to 3.5-inch hard drives. Because for a PC, 3.5-inch hard drives are the method of choice. PC cases usually have at least two to three installation bays available, so that one does not have to fall back on the smaller, but more expensive 2.5-inch hard drives per gigabyte. For the connection, regardless of whether it is a 2.5 or 3.5 inch hard drive or a 2.5 inch SSD, a free SATA port on the mainboard, a sufficiently long SATA cable and a SATA power plug from the power supply unit necessary. If no such connector is free, you can also use adapters that turn a SATA or Molex power connector into two or more new SATA connectors. For a modern PC, however, we definitely recommend an SSD, at least for the Windows partition - because these are much faster and have long been affordable. 480 to 512 GB cost from around 45 euros, 980 to 1000GB from around 80 euros. On the next page we explain what the differences are between SSD and hard drive.