I think the best of both worlds is a combo drive with booting from an SSD and data on a good quality, high capacity Hard drive. Makes for a very snappy system.
That’s what I do on my Windows2000 home server. (Now with PCI-SATA I! SATA II/III only available on PCI-X, PCI64 controllers, before moving to PCIe, which supports all current SATA modes)
I finally broke down and spent a little money to replace my computer. That is exactly what I did. A motherboard with an i3 and 4G of memory. A 128G SSD to be / and boot linux, and /home on a 1T spinning disk.