SSD vs. HDD: Which Storage Drive is Right for You?

It depends on what you’re doing. If you need fast data transfer speeds, then you want a solid-state drive (SSD). If you have massive amounts of data to store or back up, then a spinning drive (hybrid hard drive, or HDD) is the cheaper option. If you’re a videographer, you need both—open your wallet wide. In general, SSDs are the way to go when you can afford it.

If speed trumps price, then you want to look at the solid-state drives we’ve listed here. SSDs don’t just have a speed advantage. They also lack moving parts, which means they’ll withstand the bumps and falls of life in a bag on the road better than spinning drives. The disadvantage is that they can wear out faster. Every write operation to an SSD—that is, when you save something to it—slightly degrades the individual NAND cells that make up the drive, which wears it out somewhat faster than a spinning drive. Just how much faster depends on how you use it. That said, I have several SSDs that are more than five years old, and I’ve used them for daily backups throughout that time. None of them have had any problems.

Do you need an SSD over a spinning drive? The answer is almost always yes—if you can afford it. They’re especially useful for any drive you’re working with regularly: your main boot drive, an external drive you use to edit documents from, and for backups, if you need them to happen fast.

The one caveat is that if your Mac or PC doesn’t support the same USB standard as the external SSD you’re considering, then you might be wasting your money. A drive claiming USB 3.0 speeds in the neighborhood of 2,000 MB/s will do you no good if your laptop has only USB 2.0 ports. Be sure to check the specs for your laptop, and don’t waste money paying for transfer speeds you’ll never see.

The other caveat is if you’re going to be leaving the drive in an off state for long periods of time—think years, not weeks. In this case SSDs are sometimes more prone to data corruption, and traditional hard drives (or tape drives) are a better choice. For most casual users, though, this will not be an issue.

I test these drives by first running them through a suite of benchmarking tools. On Windows, I use CrystalDiskMark to measure both sequential read/write speeds and random read/write speeds. On macOS, I do the same with the Blackmagic Disk Speed Test and sometimes AmorphousDiskMark, and on Linux I use KDiskMark (and I usually reformat the disk from exFAT to ext4). I run tests six times and then take the average. In addition to benchmarks, I have two folders for testing real-world speeds. I transfer a 25-gigabyte folder of MP3 files, and then a folder with three files that together are 25 gigabytes in size. For top-end drives, I also test read and write speeds for ProRes RAW video files.

Once I’ve run the tests, I use the drive in day-to-day tasks—editing files directly off it (booting from it in the case of bare drives), making nightly backups, tossing it in my camera bag, and so on. All these data points, along with price, form factor, portability, and other functionality (does it offer encryption, etc.), go into informing the decisions about which disk is best.