It's no secret that I have a savings fund for HDD purchases. Between work, home life, and hobbies, I create an astonishingly large amount of digital data. But not every piece of data I make needs saving for posterity, and not every byte is equal when it comes to how quickly I need to access it. Sometimes, I need things much faster than the network link to my NAS will allow, or I need local storage that's fast enough to keep up with video editing or other tasks.

So, when planning storage upgrades, I also add some budget for speedy SSDs. I still use hard drives for most of my storage, and that's never going to change. I'm currently building out the next step for storage upgrades, which will include building either a server or a custom-built NAS to replace my Synology, but I'm also going to need some SSDs for that build and for a few other devices.

That's the thing. I'll buy the storage I need for the uses I need it for, and that's what everyone should be doing. If you need fast storage or have a laptop or mobile device with upgradeable storage that needs NVMe or even SATA SSDs, then get it. I won't tell you otherwise. It's a fantastic way to upgrade an old device and probably the upgrade you'll notice the most for perceived speed, but it's also not the fix for everyone's use case. Neither will be the reasons I'm planning some SSD shopping, but if you're in a similar situation, maybe it will help.

5 To give my gaming handhelds more space

I find I do more gaming on the go nowadays and handhelds need more storage

I've loved handheld gaming ever since the Game Boy and Game Gear came out, chewing through AA batteries in an age when rechargeables were more expensive than anything else in a preteen's life. I've got a Nintendo Switch, an assortment of retro gaming handhelds, including the ModRetro Chromatic, and then PC gaming handhelds dropped and like digital characters collected via globes, I had to have them all. I've got a Legion Go, a Steam Deck, ROG Ally X, and I just spent a month with the MSI Claw 8 AI+, which might be my next acquisition.

The thing that all these handhelds have in common? Okay, it's two things. They use SSDs, and the supplied capacity of those SSDs is atrocious for the price of the handhelds. So far, I've already upgraded most of them to 2TB, except the Legion Go, because I could only find 1TB 2242 M.2 SSDs at the time of looking. I know I could technically put 8TB into the ROG Ally X, but not at the current prices for large M.2s. It can stay on 2TB until the prices for 4TB go down a bit more, then I'll upgrade that again.

Maybe, since there could well be a better handheld console by then, I can add to the collection. There's every chance it might come with more storage to start with. Then again, given the current pricing environment, I bet we're back to 512GB SSDs in gaming handhelds by default. In which case, I'll be shopping for some new SSDs.

4 For my SFF build

There's no space for hard drives in the sub-15L case market

My next planned PC build is going to be a little self-torture, stuffing powerful hardware into a tiny small form-factor (SFF) case. It'll be so small that there's barely room for the hardware and the power cables, but it'll still have a two-slot powerful GPU and one of AMD's best CPUs inside.

To fit everything in while still having cooling potential, everything that's not essential is going. It'll have no RGB to limit cable clutter, fans will be daisy-chained together for the same reason, and it'll have no SATA drives at all. These take up precious cubic centimeters because you need to fit the drive, the data cable, and also the power cable inside a tiny amount of 'spare' space. So, no HDDs at all, and no SATA SSD either. Only M.2 NVMe drives are going in this build so I can save on space.

3 To reduce cable clutter

The best cable management is not to have them in the first place

It's no secret that I hate cable clutter in my PC builds. On my custom watercooling rigs, I take the time to make custom cables for every visible one so they're part of the design. I also recable any of the non-visible ones, so that fan cables are exactly as long as they need to be, and covered in nicely colored sleeving, as are ARGB, SATA, and any other cables I need.

So, if I can do something to reduce the workload on any new build, I'll take it. Swapping out storage drives for NVMe SSDs in the M.2 format means two fewer cables per drive used, which adds up quickly when my current motherboard has four M.2 slots that are all filled. Admittedly, I'm using M.2 for aesthetic reasons, and so I can be a little lazier with cable management, but the extra speed isn't a bad byproduct of that laziness.

2 To cache my NAS drives

Even with RAID, some data transfers need a little help

My network-attached storage (NAS) is limited by several things in terms of throughput and how quickly it can find data. My home network link, the speed of the HDDs inside, and whether they're small or large files being transferred. I can't do much about the latter, but the other two I've done everything in my power to speed up, short of replacing all those HDDs with SSDs (which would financially ruin me).

I've bumped up the RAM amount as far as I can go, and I'm using 10GbE to connect to the rest of my network. I'm using hybrid RAID, so queries and writes go to multiple drives at once to speed up access past the SATA limits of my drives, and I'm using Seagate IronWolf Pro and EXOS drives which can reach around 285 MB/s in sustained transfers (at least, in theory). But that's still lower than SATA SSDs, so I've got two NVMe M.2 drives in RAID 0 to cache my NAS drives for a faster GUI experience, better transfer speeds, and benefits to the responsiveness of the self-hosted services I run.

1 Because they're now more affordable

I was waiting until the price per GB dropped substantially

My first SSDs were a pair of Samsung 970 Evo drives, one SATA and one M.2 because I wanted to test them against each other in the Gen2 x2 M.2 slot in the MSI MPower Z97 motherboard I was running at the time. They weren't the first consumer SSDs, but they weren't far off that mark, and 120GB of each was nearly $300 in total.

That isn't a gigabyte per dollar ratio that anyone should be using at home, but over the years since, at least the capacities that I want to use on my PCs and mobile devices have come down in cost. Laptops can't fit 2.5in drives any more, anyhow, so M.2 NVMe is the only option, if there's an option at all. And I already didn't like using cables in my PCs, so the jump to M.2 SSDs was a welcome one. Now it's on to the next price barrier, when 8TB+ drives are attainable in large numbers, or 20TB+ drives, so I can run an all-flash NAS as primary, and HDDs in the second for backup purposes.

I'm still buying more HDDs than SSDs, but I'll buy those solid-state drives for the devices that make sense

I already didn't like running HDDs in mobile devices, as it was all too easy to move them around before the HDD had parked its heads, and they never lasted long in my laptops for that reason. Nowadays, it's a space-saving exercise as M.2 is the only form factor for most mobile devices, whether it's laptops or gaming handhelds. But whenever I need speed, or the ability to move around while the device is running, I always pick SSDs, because for a given physical space, they can't be outpaced.