yeah thanks so uh i didn't actually mean to drop it that
hard when i was a kid ssds barely even existed i mean compact flash barely
existed then in college they were prohibitively expensive and then for
years the play was to have a one-two punch small capacity SSD for speed and
you know chungus HDD for the big files
but nowadays it's more and more common to see systems with no hard drive
whatsoever of course hard drives are still cheaper
but with their myriad drawbacks
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we all know that for responsiveness and boot times at the very least any modern
pc should have its operating system loading from a solid state drive even
one as small as like 32 gigs if you're using Windows 10 you might be able to
get away with 16 but that leaves zero wiggle room for file transfers on your c
drive not to mention Windows updates but with that setup can you do multiple
things at once can a single hard drive handle media playback file transfers and
like gaming across multiple monitors or
will it become a jumbled hitching mess of mass media
in our testing we had no problem running multiple applications off the hard drive
while transferring a large video file but just because you can doesn't mean
you should too much multitasking can lead to thrashing which is when data is
quickly transferred back and forth between the drive and the memory causing
additional wear and tear on the disc remember there's a physical read head in
here that has to physically seek for every reader write and if there's a lot
going on especially across multiple files spaced out all across the disk
the head is going to be seeking a lot more than usual to keep up
santa has had native command queuing for years now which helps alleviate this
problem a bit but not entirely it works
by looking at the transfer of a large set of files and optimizing the order in
which they're read or written to before executing the command
this is better but is still a physical limitation that ssds simply don't have
if you want to start multiple file transfers from a hard drive you'll be limited by how quickly the read head can
move back and forth between all the files with an SSD response times are
mostly limited by software your CPU or the interconnect to the host your
processing power no longer needs to wait for a physical head to find anything so
it just simply gathers it all up and starts pushing it through like some kind
of weird hose kind of like how our new chocolate
printer is going to be gathering and pushing chocolate make sure you subscribe so you don't miss out on the
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a strategy many people use is to put the games they play less often on their
extra storage hard drive because they're okay with taking a sip from their water
bottle from ltdstore.com while they sit through the loading screens whenever
they actually do play these games and fair enough because as it turns out
once the loading is done hard drives are fast enough to feed games like gta 5 or
even cyberpunk 2077 with the necessary data as you zip through the streets at
1080p however with the new consoles coming with support for technologies
like direct storage that allow the GPU to directly access a drive that ideally
would be NVMe hard drives may not only cause stuttering and hitching but could
limit the visual quality in your games as well to say nothing of falling through the
unloaded floor but there's more to it than speed alone not only are ssds
quieter because there are no moving parts they consume significantly less
power as well if you want to add multiple hard drives to your build for
extra storage you're looking at a potential noise increase and an extra 5
to 10 watts per drive whereas ssds can use as little as 30 ml watts while not
in use while this isn't huge if you're the kind of person who likes to get the lowest
wattage power supply possible for your build it's definitely not nothing to say
nothing of the extra heat generated inside your pc i know that one all too
well i have so many hard drives hard drives are also fragile hey can i
grab a hard drive real quick thanks
how many times have you simply tossed someone a usb flash drive or carried one
around in your bag without a care in the world with a mechanical drive even
though things are locked in place when powered down properly a drop of just a
few feet could be enough to render it inoperable
there goes all your photos sensitive files and 4k movies speaking of 4k you
may have noticed that media file sizes have been increasing let's say you just
bought a 4k or even 8k tv will your hard drive still be able to
keep up with your other components to access and output that footage fast
enough or are you going to get stuttering during the climax of the film
ruining your home theater experience well spoiler alert unless the film
industry switches to 48 FPS as standard you probably have nothing to worry about
4k blu-ray has a bit rate of about 70 to 80 megabits per second on average still
well below the expected 100 to 120 megabytes per second sequential transfer
rate of a mechanical drive even if 8k quadruples that bitrate
number you can really still get away with mr spinner here our 7200 RPM SATA 3
hard drive was able to play back 8k footage no problem and let's be real if
you're purchasing an 8k display in 2021 you probably have a rig with an SSD
anyway these days solid state drives are getting cheaper but they're still
typically twice as expensive as mechanicals so we can understand why
anyone would still be attracted to the older tech especially since there's
still an okay option for stored media however if you have the extra cash we
recommend shelling out for the SSD they're faster smaller silent usually
use less power can take more of a beating and thanks to modern weird
leveling techniques they last longer too even when reading and writing somewhat
frequently and you know what else we do somewhat frequently we get the best
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wireless bluetooth headphones okay valid in-store only no purchase necessary are
you in the middle of a new build and trying to squeeze every last dollar by going mechanical for your storage let us
know in the comments below and if you liked this video check out our video about drive manufacturers sneaking smr
shingled magnetic recording into their hard drives without telling consumers
it's a lot slower and some people say less reliable