do you need a ssd/hdd for a pc

[NotShowingName]

do i need a ssd/hdd for a pc i am planning to buy parts for a pc but do i need a ssd

 

[Luminary]

You need a hard drive. That can be EITHER a SSD or HDD.

If you can afford it we always recommend getting a SSD for your main boot drive, as it will provide an amazing boost to overall system performance.

If you can't afford a SSD, a normal HDD drive will still work fine for a new PC, but will be a bit slower. Here are two examples of a very good SSD and a very good HDD:

Storage: Samsung 850 EVO-Series 250GB 2.5" Solid State Drive ($94.99 @ Newegg)
Total: $94.99
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2016-10-20 14:31 EDT-0400

Storage: Western Digital Caviar Blue 1TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive ($49.49 @ OutletPC)
Total: $49.49
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2016-10-20 14:32 EDT-0400

You must also consider how much space you'll need. A 250GB SSD is plenty for a boot drive an a few games, but not a comprehensive gaming or music library. If you have lots of games or media it is recommended to get a SSD boot drive and then have a second HDD for additional storage.

 

[Dave_89]

I think the days of needing a HDD in your PC are kind of over. Most "normal" users will not have any music library to speak of these days, and certainly no video library. They stream music from Spotify or Apple music, use streaming radio services and so on. In terms of video most users have Netflix, Amazon Video, Youtube, Hulu, some other streaming service or combination of streaming services that they watch video from.

Yeah you sometimes download Game of Thrones to your PC and watch it, but I don't think archiving it on a HDD is really a good use of anyone's time these days, when you could just download it again in 2 minutes if you wanted to watch it again for some reason. I tend to just delete stuff now as soon as I've watched it.

So it got me thinking, what's the point of a big HDD in a computer? I don't think there really is one.

The idea of a "comprehensive gaming library" is also kind of outdated. Even if you're a huge gaming nut, you don't need more than 5 or 6 games installed at any one time, and if you do run out of space, just delete some games and re-download on Steam when you want to play them again. With connection speeds the way they are, it makes little sense to archive hundreds of gigabytes of games that you don't even play, "just in case", when Steam does that for you already.

 

[SumTingW0ng]

do i need a ssd/hdd for a pc i am planning to buy parts for a pc but do i need a ssd

Once you go SSD, you will never want to go back with HDD. If you can find a good SSD storage, I would grab that over HDD any day when it comes to video editing, to gaming, and even to application speed. Other than that, You might want to grab either 128GB or 256GB SSD for your OS, and HDD for storage.