Do you know what SSD or HDD is? If you don’t, then read up at the end of this article to learn about these two. Most of you will have come across the terms before, but if not, it’s time to get familiar with them.
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What is SSD?
Solid-state drives are storage device that is based on solid-state technology. It has no moving parts, which means the data can be accessed at a very high speed. Although it may sound like a perfect solution for hard disk drives, some of the drawbacks of solid-state drives are their high cost and limited performance.
The SSD (solid-state drive) or SSD is ideal for those who want an entirely new device or one that will last for the next few years.
Contrary to the HDD (hard drive) storage device that uses magnetic disks, there is no spinning parts in an SSD (solid-state drive). It is a non-volatile memory device and retains information even when power is disconnected from your laptop computer. Therefore, while your laptop may lose its data when it powers off, all information stored in an SSD will be retained function until it is powered on again.
The Main Features of an SSD
- The data storage can be erased in one of two ways:
- By burning it onto a new drive or By overwriting the data that is already stored on the SSD.
- When you are buying an SSD, you’ll often see “SSD” instead of “2.5” or “3.5”; this is due to a new standard format for SSD drives that was rolled out in 2010, which was called the 2-Bit Multi-Level Cell (MLC) and 3-Bit Multi-Level Cell (MLC).
Advantages
- It’s fast, more than any traditional hard drive, and provides improved performance over traditional hard drives.
- The data is safe from corruption and wear because there are no moving parts in this form of a solid-state drive.
- It is more reliable due to no moving parts hence there will be no mechanical wear and tear on the components of the SSD drive making it a longer-lasting device than a regular hard drive with moving parts.
- It’s very silent, compared to a traditional hard drive as it does not have any spinning parts (which can be loud) and consumes less power compared to a regular hard drive that uses spinning disks (as it goes round and round).
Disadvantages
- SSD technology hasn’t been perfected yet, so only laptops with a SATA interface are currently equipped with them
- In order for an SSD to take advantage of its high-speed capabilities, the motherboard should have on-board caching or be used in conjunction with a motherboard that has caching capabilities.
- The random access time is slightly faster than a hard drive, but not nearly as fast as an SSD’s read speed; this means the vast majority of data will be read sequentially.
In general, the SSD is not much different than an HDD in terms of its price and performance, but because its main differences are in size, performance, and lack of moving parts, it costs almost twice as much for the same amount of storage on an SSD as compared to traditional HDDs.
What is HDD?
Hard disk drives are also types of non-volatile memory devices as well as storage devices used to store large amounts of data, but since they have moving parts, there is no such thing as a solid-state drive! They have replaced hard disks by utilizing magnetic disks and platters. They do not use electronics for information storage. HDD has been around longer than the SSD, but they are slowly being phased out.
The Main Features of an HDD
- The data storage can be erased in one of two ways:
- By burning it onto a new drive or By overwriting the data that is already stored on the HDD.
- When you are buying an HDD, you’ll often see “HDD” instead of “2.5” or “3.5”; this is due to a new format for hard disk drives that were rolled out in 2010, which was called the 2-Bit Multi-Level Cell (MLC) and 3-Bit Multi-Level Cell (MLC).
Advantages
- The prices for hard drives have dropped significantly over the years, so now it is not uncommon to see the price of a 1 TB drive at under $50 and even as low as $10.
- HDDs are very common in laptops and desktops because they can be quite large, so it is impossible to replace them easily with an SSD when a computer is no longer used (when you take it apart and throw away the part that holds the hard drive).
- They are more reliable than traditional RAM in that they don’t need to be refreshed or replaced often; however, if they get too close to their limit of errors, then they can give out and fail.
Disadvantages
- Hard drives are the slowest to erase and write because of the moving parts. Over the past few years, newer hard drives have been made to be a lot faster than older ones, but for now, it’s much faster to use them for reading and writing than for erasing or writing.
- The problem of airflow is a significant one as well; as more people get used to SSDs, there will be less demand for hard drives because they are fairly large and take up a lot of space (much like HDDs before).
- HDD by nature have some loud noise when they power up, especially if they have been using them continuously over many hours at a time (unlike an SSD which has much less noise).
Final Words
Although hard drives are still being used by many people, SSDs will slowly become the standard and more common choice for the next few years. In a few years, it will be practically impossible to find a computer without an SSD.
