Admittedly, SATA SSDs don’t have much use; they are almost obsolete for many people. When faced with a choice, almost everyone will choose an NVMe that offers significantly faster speeds and has done so for many years.
But SATA SSDs still have a place in this storage-centric society: You can turn them into “abuse drives.” That’s exactly what I did with one of mine.
The abuse drive is where all the sloppy, disposable (but not disposable enough to delete) typed junk goes. I decided what to do with my old SATA drive while it was retired.
Your poor old SATA SSD is perfect for all those pesky little jobs
Where speed is less important, but still somewhat important
SATA SSDs weren’t back when NVMe prices were low, but those days are gone now. NVMs are few and far between. The same can be said for SATA drives, which motivated me to sort through my files and create some “abuse drives” from my old SATAs.
These abuse drives give my old SATA drives some semi-important work without making them my sole backup source (I 3-2-1 rule quite religious).
If you decide to build your own, you can use it for high-scale tasks that don’t fit on expensive NVMe. Downloads, installers, temp folders, random archives… all kinds of junk that a primary SSD shouldn’t bother with in the first place.
The biggest win here won’t be raw performance. If Your SSD is full to the brim (I sincerely hope not), you won’t see a huge performance gain by separating important and not-so-important files. But you’ll keep your main drive cleaner, more spacious, and focus on things that really benefit from all that extra speed.
The abuse disk is not a spare disk
Note this important difference
However, I don’t use the term “abuse drive” as some kind of fancy equivalent to whatever drive I put backups on. An important distinction here: your backups must live elsewhere.
This disk should never be the only copy of something very important. Instead, it’s where all your overflowing, high-scratch files go without cluttering your best SSD.
The difference between this drive and the stock drive is subtle but significant. Yes, both can store a lot of additional information. But a backup drive is there to protect you in case something goes wrong, and it can even contain backups of the entire system. Meanwhile, this “abuse drive” is there to absorb the daily chaos so you can spend it at your leisure (or, if you’re me, let it accumulate). You can keep the temporary files there for a while, but you should still assume that anything really important needs a second backup as well. That’s the whole point of the 3-2-1 backup rule: You should keep three copies of important data.
Of course, you can send them all to one HDD, as they make good backup targets. But an abuse disk is not a backup, and you shouldn’t treat it as such. I consider myself a semi-temporary warehouse. It’s a stage area, not a stage.
These are jobs you can outsource to your old SATA SSD
There’s more to it than you might think
Once you shift the focus from the fact that SATA SSDs are slow and focus on how useful they can be as SSD storage, many use cases open up. It’s a drive for files that are active enough to benefit from solid-state speed, but not important enough to take up space on the best NVMe.
Of course, a hard drive can also perform these tasks. But if you’re constantly moving files, opening folders, extracting archives, etc., using the HDD will be bad. There is a huge gap between even the slowest SATA SSD and HDD.
Here are some things you can throw on the “abuse drive”:
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Downloads folder
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Installers and ISO files
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Both compressed and extracted archives
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Game screenshots and posts
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Temporary media export
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Torrent folders
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Mods and mod archives
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Temporary project folders
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Secondary game libraries (if you don’t mind long loading screens, don’t run them from this SSD)
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VMs
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Test program
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Caches
Honestly, the sky is the limit. The point is that the clutter ends up where it matters less, but remains accessible and where the good stuff can benefit from speedy NVMe.
You don’t need to baby your primary SSD, just don’t waste it
It’s less about damage and more about getting the most out of your hardware
I realize this article sounds like you need to keep your primary SSD under lock and key. That’s not my point though. The point is, splitting your files is just a smart thing to do.
In addition to not overloading the main SSD, organization is also made easier. If something breaks, it’s easier to track what it is. Plus, why throw away a perfectly good SATA SSD?
Get what you pay for and keep your files safe
The reason I started bringing my old SATA drives into my arsenal is simple: SSDs are too expensive to waste. I might still buy another NVMe SSD for fast storage purposes, but I’ll always have a so-called SATA abuse drive for files that don’t really matter.
7/10
- Storage capacity
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1TB, 2TB, 4TB, 8TB
- Hardware interface
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M.2 NVMe
I can’t recommend buying a new SATA SSD right now, but if you need a good NVMe, this is mine. Incredibly fast and reliable, it’s a solid choice for all your important files and work.
