Best Consumer Hard Drives: Q1 2020

Data storage requirements have kept increasing over the last several years. While SSDs have taken over the role of the primary drive in most computing systems, hard drives continue to be the storage media of choice in areas dealing with large amount of relatively cold data. Hard drives are also suitable for workloads that are largely sequential and not performance sensitive. SSDs are yet to achieve the low $/GB metric that makes HDDs attractive in that market segment. From a gaming perspective, install sizes of 100s of GBs are increasingly common for modern games. Despite the falling flash prices, high-capacity SSDs still tend to carry a price premium, making hard drives attractive in this market segment. This guide will help readers choose the appropriate hard drive based on their workload, while also keeping the price factor in mind.

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