Published May 2, 2026, 7:00 AM EDT After a 7-year corporate stint, Tanveer found his love for writing and tech too much to resist. An MBA in Marketing and the owner of a PC building business, he writes on PC hardware, technology, and Windows. When not scouring the web for ideas, he can be found building PCs, watching anime, or playing Smash Karts on his RTX 3080 (sigh). Talking about hard drives in 2026 might be a bit odd, but not everyone uses an all-SSD PC yet. Spinning drives were left behind by SSDs long ago, at least for primary storage, but they remain quite valuable for secondary and NAS storage. In fact, buying HDDs rather than SSDs in this market may be the smarter move, given the sky-high SSD prices. If your PC has one or more hard drives spinning away 24/7, you may be stressing them more than you really need to. Hard drives don't need to be operating at their maximum speed all the time, and can spin down when not in active use.…