SSD vs HDD: What You Actually Need

An SSD (solid-state drive) has no moving parts and is dramatically faster than a traditional hard drive, which is why it should almost always be your boot drive for Windows and your applications.

A HDD (hard disk drive) still makes sense for bulk, infrequently accessed storage — think photo archives, downloaded media or backups — at a much lower cost per gigabyte than an SSD.

The most common setup we build for customers pairs a 512GB–1TB NVMe SSD for the operating system with a 1-2TB HDD for storage, giving fast day-to-day performance without the higher cost of an all-SSD build.

If you're upgrading an older desktop, moving from a hard drive to an SSD is one of the single biggest performance improvements you can make — often more noticeable than a CPU upgrade.