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Comment by Dalewyn | Hacker News Reader

> well after SSDs have come close to superceding spinning rust when all tradeoffs and variables are considered together

SSDs are great, but I wouldn't put them that far. There are definite drawbacks to SSDs due to the nature of their design that HDDs don't have, and vice versa. Use the right tool for the job, as they say.

Personally, I have both SSDs and HDDs in my rigs because I have workloads appropriate for either of them at a given time.

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I also have both, but only because I can get HDDs for $10 to $20 per TB while SSDs still cost $50 to $100 per TB.

Could you give examples of suitable workloads for HDD and SSD

I’m not the person you answered but SSD: boot disk, cache, video files you’re working off of. HDD: data you don’t mind waiting for such as video and audio storage, backups, or just cases where you have a lot of data and the SSD isn’t yet cost effective enough

Workloads that require low latency, fast random access, don't involve too much (re)writes, mobile environment, money is not an object: SSDs.

Workloads that involve lots of writes and especially rewrites, transient and ephemeral data, don't require low latency or fast random access, money is a factor: HDDs.

The key thing is that HDDs have a theoretically infinite amount of writes compared to SSDs which have a finite amount. Certain workloads are consequently going to be more suited for HDDs.

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