SSD vs HDD in 2025: what to buy and what to keep
Speed, price per gigabyte and reliability compared — plus the hybrid setup we recommend for most desks.
Sadia Islam
Technical Writer
If your computer feels slow and it still boots from a spinning hard drive, no other upgrade will feel as dramatic as moving to an SSD. But hard drives have not disappeared, and there is still a sensible place for them.
The speed gap is not subtle
A typical hard drive reads at roughly 120 MB/s. A PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD like the Samsung 990 EVO reads at up to 5,000 MB/s — around forty times faster, and the gap on small random reads, which is what makes an operating system feel responsive, is even wider.
In practice that is a boot time of fifteen seconds instead of ninety, and applications that open before you finish letting go of the mouse.
Where hard drives still make sense
Price per gigabyte. For archives, camera footage and backups that you touch occasionally, a 4TB hard drive is still far cheaper than the equivalent in flash.
The setup we recommend for most desks is a 1TB NVMe SSD for the operating system, applications and current projects, with a large hard drive alongside for cold storage.
- NVMe SSD for the OS, apps and active work
- Hard drive for archives, media and backups
- Keep at least 15% of any SSD free for wear levelling
Reliability and lifespan
Modern SSDs are rated in terabytes written, and a 1TB drive rated at 600 TBW will outlast most systems it is installed in under normal use.
Hard drives fail mechanically and often give warning through noise and SMART errors. SSDs tend to fail without warning, which makes backups just as important either way.
