You'd think the most impactful storage upgrade I ever made would be the transition from hard drives to an SSD. While switching to a SATA SSD for the first time was game-changing, and getting my first NVMe SSD was great, the increased speed and responsiveness became stale in a few months. Recently, when I replaced all of my PC's storage, the best decision I made was adding a 4TB hard drive to the mix. This expansion turned out to be the best upgrade I ever made to my PC's storage in years.

My 2TB NVMe SSD was enough for Windows and games

Who needs over 2TB of primary storage?

When choosing the drives for my new storage configuration, I had no doubt about what my main drive would be: a 2TB Gen4 NVMe SSD. My AM4 PC isn't compatible with Gen5 SSDs, and they're not useful for a gaming PC right now anyway. Gen4 speeds are more than sufficient for most users, and the 2TB capacity meant that I could reasonably store all the games I needed to, leaving enough space for Windows. I have been using 2TB SSD storage for several years now, and don't see my primary storage needs increasing anytime soon.

The reason a 2TB SSD is good enough for my PC is that I don't store non-critical stuff on it. Anything that doesn't benefit from high-speed storage doesn't need to hog space on my NVMe SSD. In fact, even if I did store all my secondary data on the SSD, 2TB would have lasted me a few years. It would have left me less space for installing multiple large games simultaneously, though, and I didn't want to have to do that. So, a second drive was necessary, and that's where my best storage upgrade yet came in.

A cheap 4TB HDD beats a secondary SSD any day

Affordable and reliable secondary storage

Considering the cost per GB of hard drives, adding a capacious HDD to my PC was a no-brainer. A 4TB Seagate Barracuda would cost you only $75 today, if you wait for the right time. A 4TB Gen4 NVMe SSD would cost you at least $200, even if you grab a good deal. Since I didn't want to compromise with my 2TB of SSD storage, I decided to offload all non-essential data to the spacious hard drive. This included old backups, newer OS images, media collection, and any archival data I rarely accessed.

A hard drive is considerably slower than an NVMe SSD, but that doesn't matter when all I'm storing on it is data that doesn't need fast transfer speeds. My regular OS images are set on an automation schedule, and any time I need to manually add any new data to the HDD, it's mostly a Google Photos dump once in a quarter. The affordable, reliable, and spacious hard drive fits perfectly into my storage configuration.

I don't have to be stingy with storage anymore

It's a new feeling, and I love it

The reason my 4TB hard drive turned out to be the best storage upgrade for my PC is that I didn't have to think about freeing up space on my SSD anymore. Having tons of cheap additional storage meant I didn't have to grudgingly delete games on my SSD whenever I wanted to install a gigantic new title that needed 200GB of free space. The largest files that could have become a roadblock on my primary SSD — OS images, backups, movies, TV series, music — were safely stored on the hard drive.

I think I feel luxurious with my PC storage for the first time in forever. It's not just about storing multiple huge games on my SSD at the same time — I play mostly the same three games anyway. It's more about having the freedom to download or transfer whatever I feel like to my primary SSD, since I know anything I don't immediately need can be offloaded to the 4TB hard drive. I imagine the 2TB SSD and 4TB HDD won't be sufficient in the future, but that's many years away — I don't have to worry about that now.

Speed is just one aspect of your PC's storage

It might seem logical to have all-SSD storage on your PC, but even in 2025, large SSDs haven't reached a point where the cost per GB can be ignored. A secondary hard drive with 4TB or higher capacity can be effective in distributing your data across fast and cheap drives. All the stuff you need daily can reside on your 2TB SSD, while the non-essential data can be stored safely on a capacious hard drive.