If there’s one thing everyone needs in their system, it’s a data drive. And if there’s one thing that can really bog down a system, it’s a data drive. In today’s PCs, hard drives are by far the biggest bottleneck in typical usage scenarios, so it definitely pays to go in with your eyes wide open as to what a fast drive can do. And that typically means a solid-state drive. Luckily, the price of SSDs has been on a downward trajectory for years, but it will take many more years before they reach price parity with hard drives on a gigabyte per dollar basis.

Long before then, however, we predict that SSDs will make hard drives irrelevant, not so much due to their capacity per dollar, but rather because of their performance per dollar. Even so, there’s still a place for mechanical spinners today, including for use in data backup and in hybrid drives that utilize a small amount of solid-state cache to speed up oft-used applications, so we’ll continue to test hard drives from time to time where we see an application for them.