I'm getting ready to make a new PC next month or in January (based on availability of cheap parts). How are people doing disk space these days? I know people are increasingly going SSD, but are people spending the top dollars for large SSDs? Or are most people opting for a small to medium size SSD (say 512GB) and a large mechanical/platter drive (2+TB)?
I have a lot of photos and videos of family going back more than a decade so I need a 4TB drive minimum. I'm thinking of getting a 1TB SSD and then a 8TB mechanical/platter drive to future proof myself since I build PCs every 6-8 years.
For media like photos and videos no reason to use an SSD. A lot cheaper to use a nice big HDD for that.
As far as your OS, games, programs, etc, we're at the point where I'd at least suggest going full SATA SSD. M.2 SSDs are great but still pretty expensive for the 1-2 TB ones.
But yeah my suggestion is only use HDDs for media/file storage at this point. Once you start running all your programs on SSD it becomes really obvious what a difference it makes over an HDD even for really basic stuff.