1 TB SSD Vs 256 GB SSD + 1 TB HDD? Which One Should I Go for? October 11, 2022May 18, 2023 Shahmeer Lodhi Hardware Whether you’re purchasing a new laptop for work, education, or making a custom-build gaming PC with your set of hardware, you will need to decide whether you need a single or a combination of SSD and HDD. While both drives are used for the same purpose, they have their own pros and cons. Product Spotlight (Duplicate Files): Use Sorcim’s Clone Files Checker to remove 1000s of duplicate files in your PC. Clone Files Checker follows Google Software Principles. It will not ask you to provide email address to download the software. Frequent Travelers Do you travel a lot? Do you often find yourself using (or overusing) your laptop without being plugged into a charger? Or, do you often face several hours of power outages at home? If so, you would be better off buying a laptop with a single 1 TB of SATA SSD. Here’s why: Traditional hard disks have mechanical parts that spin. Due to the spinning disks and the nature of the design, hard disks require more power, especially when they start up and read out data fragmented across different sectors. In contrast, SSDs don’t have any moving parts. As the data in your SSD is stored in microchips, the SSDs (particularly SATA SSDs) consume less power than traditional hard disks. Eventually, it adds up to your battery’s life. An average SATA SSD can draw under 5W at most, while an M.2 NVMe SSD — which offers higher speed than an ordinary SATA SSD — can draw up to 8W or sometimes even 10W of load. Students If you’re a student and intend to use your laptop for educational purposes, you should consider a 256 GB SATA SSD + 1 TB HDD combination. It’s economical and affordable. You may store more data at a cheap price. Besides, as a student, you won’t use much of your storage except for your documents, presentations, digital notebooks, in addition to a few games, songs, and movies. Professionals & Businesses If you’re a working professional or business, a speedy 256 GB SATA SSD works best for the operating system drive. Or, you can have at least 2 TB HDD for your documents and data. Booting Windows or opening apps and files will be much faster with an SSD. It doesn’t work like a creaky mechanical HDD that degrades the overall performance and affects work productivity & efficiency. Remember that SSDs have a limited life expectancy. The more frequently you write to them, the shorter their lifespan. That’s one of the key reasons you should avoid file-intensive activities on the SSD drive and keep your documents and other data stored on a hard disk. Besides, there are several cloud storage services available these days at cheaper rates. You may upload your files on the cloud if you’re running short of space. Backup & Archiving Purpose If you’re using your device mainly for backup and archiving purposes, prefer HDDs over SSDs. Not only are SSDs expensive but also they can wear out over time, as they have a limited write frequency. Of course, SSDs are gradually improving, and modern SSDs last much longer than first-generation SSDs. But they are still newer, and there’s no track record and enough research to evaluate an average lifespan of SSDs yet. In contrast, HDDs have been around for a few decades now. Ever since hard disks were invented by a team of IBM engineers in San Jose in the 1950s, they have been extensively used in various data centers across the world. Remember, any drive could fail at any time. An SSD might last longer than an HDD, or vice versa. So many factors (such as manufacturing defects, physical damage, sudden power failure, usage pattern, dust, and heat) can cause problems and impact the lifespan of your drive. So, stay safe by diversifying your backups across different drives or on the cloud. Video Editors & Content Creators Are you a big YouTube influencer or a Vlogger? Or, do you edit and render a lot of videos daily using complex tools such as Adobe Premiere Pro? If so, we strongly recommend you buy a single 2 TB or larger SSD with the M.2 NVMe PCIe 4.0 (Generation 4) interface. While an ordinary SATA 3.0 SSD can offer a maximum speed of up to 750 MB/s, an M.2 NVMe PCIe 4.0 (Generation 4) SSD can hit up to 7,500 MB/s. Although you’ll pay more per gigabyte with an M.2 NVMe SSD, the increased investment is often justified. With an SSD, your video rendering will be much faster and smoother at lightning speed. Sharing large videos with other members will also be much quicker. At the end, it comes down to the video rendering performance and your budget. Bonus Tip: Regularly Delete Duplicates & Free-up Massive Storage Did you know that you can free-up massive storage by finding and removing the duplicate files? We often hear people talking about Disk CleanUp utility, but little do we hear about the duplication of our files. Downloading the same files twice or copying them from one folder to multiple folders at different intervals can contribute to it. By searching and fixing duplicates, you’ll not only free up your storage but also resolve a completely disorganized, messed-up file system. Now, the question is, how to do that? You may use a reputed duplicate cleaning tool Clone Files Checker (CFC) to de-dupe your entire hard disk and SSD. CFC is a small, lightweight tool that supports both Windows and Mac. CFC Features: Duplicate scan: Scan for any file types for duplication. Music scan: Scan for duplicate music files based on ID3 tags, such as title, artist, album, track, duration, bitrate, and file content iTunes scan: Scan for iTunes music library for duplication based on different music tags Cloud scan: Scan for duplicate files on Dropbox, Amazon S3, Google Drive, Box, and other cloud platforms. With your subscription to CFC, you get free access to Cloud Duplicate Finder. CDF connects to your cloud account using the official APIs to scan and remove duplication. Empty folder remover: Delete all unwanted empty folders on your disk with one click. One-click duplicates selection: Select duplicates from the list with one click. Choose a pattern of your choice to mark/ unmark duplicates automatically. Choose an action: You may choose to move duplicates to another folder or delete them permanently. Backup: Your files are backed up before deletion (The backup setting needs to be on from the settings dialog). Note: Some features are Windows-only. They may not be available in the Mac edition of Clone Files Checker.