interesting and a no brainer if you only need 2TB, but how many of us need that little total storage these days. It does beg the question if you need 4TB of storage and are set on SSD, why not buy 2 x 2TB as opposed to 1 x 4TB?
There are two related parts here.
- If you have that much stuff, and you care about it, it probably needs a means of backup and data protection. So you don't need 4TB of storage, you need 6TB or more, so if you lose a drive you don't lose all your data. It really really sucks losing terabytes of important, difficult or possibly impossible to replace stuff to a single failure.
- Once you start thinking about data protection, you again probably want dedicated hardware (and a dedicated client, or at least a VM) for that purpose. Trying to do it on whatever client box you use daily tends to be inefficient and reduces the protection.
Alternately, if your data is something you can just pull out of the cloud if the drive goes bad (like a game library or something) then you probably don't need many terabytes of local storage in the first place.
The major reason I wouldn't go with spindrives near point of use is because they're slow, unbearably slow for something like an everyday Windows box, once you get used to SSDs. For a data array it's a different matter. I've also had many, many HDDs go bad on me over the years, they're moving parts, it's a matter of time. SSD, if you buy a decent quality one, don't abuse it (which is pretty hard for a client drive) and pay minimum attention to cooling, it lasts nearly forever. On a more minor note, the average SSD consumes a lot less power and makes a lot less heat than an HDD.