Wednesday, November 23, 2011

Understanding The Difference Between A Solid State Drive And A Hard Drive

By Andrew Johnson


When looking to build or buy a new PC, one has many choices to make. One of the most important is if to use a solid state drive or use a hard drive. HDDs can be bought in very large capacities very cheaply. And even SSDs are much improved its still valuable to understand the many differences between them.

One thing to consider is the spin up time. With SS drives it is almost instant because there are not any mechanical parts. A HDD can take a few seconds because of the mass of moving parts. Also if several drives are used they may have to staggered to diminish the total power drain. solid state devices will typically use half the power of a HDD.

The Random access time while using a SS device is around 1ms because information is accessed right from the flash memory part. With most HDDs it will take from 5 to 10ms or longer because of the heads movement to access the data in the disks. All solid state units have no mechanical parts that move to cause noise, but hard disk drives have differing levels of noise because of the parts that have to move inside them.

Read latency time with a SS device is generally pretty low because data can be read from any location in the memory. With a HDD is generally much higher because the mechanical parts within the drives have to be aligned. The real weight of flash memory and circuit boards is very light when put beside a comparable HDD.

With a SSD there is no real benefit from defragmentation, and doing so may decrease the overall life of the part. HDDs often require defragmentation after prolonged use especially when using large files. Because of the lack of moving parts SSDs seldom if ever break down. A HDD has many moving parts that could fail.

A SSD is not affected by shock, altitude or any vibrations. HDDs have a moving head and spinning disk and are affected by shock, altitude or any vibrations introduced to them. A SSD does not have magnetic susceptibility, where a HDDs data can be altered or erased. Any flash based system does have a limited number of writes over the life of the drives media. This is generally around 1 to 5 million. HDD generally do not have this limitation, but are limited by possible mechanical failure.

Making a true comparison between a solid state drive and a hard drive is difficult if for no other reason because they are different kinds of media. Ultimately it comes down to personal preference. How much one can afford also comes into play. The cost per GB is much lower for HDDs than it is for a SSD of equal size.




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