QOTW:Do you still use mechanical storage?

[Hoonigan]

I was in quite a fortunate position of being able to go with 2x 2TB Gigabyte Aorus Gen. 4 NVMe drives in my PC, so I did. I've still got mechanical storage in my media server however.

[persimmon]

29Tb of HDd storages ...12+6+6+5 (12 6 6 WD, 5 Toshiba, noisier) mostly for media files, photos... 500+240 as Boot SSD's .
Only using > 12Tb at present ...need a good caching solution ? Primocache? Or Enmotus ? or ??
I want speed (ish) of SSD on HDD..

[SkywalkerLuke]

I use a mix of NVme (OS & some essential programs as only 500 GB), platter drive (2TB for media and games) in my PC.

[Shane74]

Yes,
40TB Synology 5 bay NAS, plus all that is backed up on pc on many other drives so 80Tb worth.
Plex media server converted all my 100's music cd's to FLAC and WAV,DVD/Blu Ray movies, GOG game storage,Steam Back ups, DSLR camera photos/videos 4k etc etc
Never enough storage,I would double or even triple that size next upgrade,Honestly can't wait until they bring out H.266 Codec to try and save some more space, Not really looking forward to 8k content and I hate streaming and cloud services, So I like to have local storage for all my needs
Main system and games are on a very fast PCI-E NVMe though, Would never use mechanical for OS/Game drive. Even the Samsung pro 1TB NVme SSD is too small for games these days, I would get a 2TB for next pc build so I don't have to constantly uninstall and re download my games.

[DevDrake]

yes. And I will for photos and other stuff that can be slow.

[dave2207]

I have four hard drives, each of 4 TB, in a mirrored W10 Storage Space array, offering 7.8 TB of mirrored storage, with access times of one or two milli-seconds, even when Task Manager shows 95% utilisation. My 250 GB SSD is only around two or three times as fast. (The PC is seven years old, so a modern motherboard might show different performance (hopefully, better).

[Kumagoro]

HDD's for backups and main data storage of things like photos and home video or other stuff I want to keep long term. If they fail I can at least pay a lot of money to get it back. SSD recovery doesn't seem to work due to the way they operate.

[Bagpuss]

Anybody who uses SSD's for large multimedia libraries is being incredibly stupid and just wasting their money.

[kalniel]

Anybody who uses SSD's for large multimedia libraries is being incredibly stupid and just wasting their money.

Not if you're going for a silent server. HDDs make noise.

[Duckboy79]

Yes, I have 2 SSD's both 250gb, 2 HDD's both 1tb. Once I upgrade my PC I'll add 2 M.2's as well, you can never have enough storage!

[spacein_vader]

Not if you're going for a silent server. HDDs make noise.

True. Which gives you 3 options:

1. Have a server with far lower storage capacity than the same cost HDD server.

2. Have a server with the same amount of storage for a far higher cost.

3. Move the server to somewhere less noise sensitive.

I went for option C, moving the server onto a shelf in the integral garage. Total cost: £10 for a longer network cable, 99p for a pack of cable clips and half an hour drilling and running cable.

[Amblyopius]

My latest PC is the first one where I gave up on spinning disks. 1TB of PCI gen4 NVME and 2TB SSD. The difference is massive. Aside from archival purposes I don't think price outweighs benefit now.

[Phrontis]

I use a 256Gb Samsung XP941 as the boot drive and storage for programs on an AsRock X99 motherboard. I partition it C: just for the system and a D: partition for the programs. The data files are on a pair of mirrored 1TB WD Black HDD's. All of it and the laptops, other PC's, laptops, the wife's iPad are all backed up to a Synolgy NAS with 20Tb of Seagate Ironwolf Pro drives in RAID 6. When I do my next build it will have 1Tb of something NVMe on an X299 board with mechanical drives for the data store all backed up to the synology.

[philehidiot]

I"ve primarily used SSDs for some time. I've still got one functional HDD but I never access it. I've been tempted to remove it.

I am very sensitive to lag, access times, etc. My workflow depends on consistent response times and feedback and unexpected delays or inconsistencies greater than around 50ms really, really impact me. I even have to set the duration of vibration on my phone's feedback so it's consistent with the last one. Otherwise my automated routines don't work. An SSD makes a big difference to that consistency on a PC. The addition of the spectre / meltdown mitigations added just enough latency to my last system to make it really hard to use. Benchmark differences weren't massive but the actual usability was hugely affected. The effect is similar to touch-typing and expecting a certain response on the screen and that response being unpredictable. It just throws you off. Consistent lag I can deal with.

As a result, an SSD with decent random access times matters. Sequential stuff doesn't matter to me at all, really as it's all insanely fast.

The concern is backup reliability as recovery isn't as easy with an SSD. To this end I have a multi-stage backup with critical stuff being off site as well.

My last HDD failure was met with a stern "meh" as it was removed from the system and smashed with some very, very large hammers.

And an axe. I love my axe. My axe hates me. Anyone know a good axe repair specialist?

[gagaga]

Probably at about 16-20TB SSDs scattered across a few machines but still 130 or 140TB of spinning rust. Would love it to be all SSD but that's a bit off yet. 14TB mechanicals dip down to £190 or so quite frequently.
Suspect we're still 5 years from raw cost equalisation (though data centres much sooner once power included).

[atomicWAR]

Surely I am not going to do 60+TB of backed files with duplicates of everything I possess on SSDs. they are far to expensive do so the shear amount of space my files, media and games I have been backing up for the last 20 years take up. Games and movies surely take the largest chunk of my drive space up. Many of which are either niche, to old to find now and are unavailable in other more modern formats like streaming. So I see myself using mechanical storage for a very long time to come.