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SSD vs HDD

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SSD vs HDD

What is a SSD?

We’ll make no assumptions here and keep this article on a level that anyone can understand.

You might be shopping for a computer and simply wondering what the heck SSD actually means? To begin, SSD stands for Solid State Drive. You’re probably familiar with USB memory sticks, SSD can be thought of as an oversized and more sophisticated version of the humble USB memory stick. Like a memory stick, there are no moving parts to an SSD, information is stored in microchips. Meanwhile, a hard drive uses a mechanical arm with a read/write head to move around and read information from the right location on a storage platter. This difference is what makes SSD so much faster. As an analogy, what’s quicker, having to walk across the room to retrieve a book to get information or simply magically having that book open in front of you when you need it? That’s how an HDD compares to an SSD, it simply requires more physical labor (mechanical movement) to get information.

Differentiating Hard drives with Solid state drive:

Physical Parts
Traditional hard drive contains physical equipments like platters, heads, spindle motor etc. to store data, perform read/write operation and many others. A hard drive uses platters with magnetic coating to store data on hard drive and maintains it even after no power source is connected. Solid state drive operates in same manner but without using any platters, as it has series of flash memory chips for storing data. Now a days, hard drive comes with a huge storing capacity and easily available unlikely any solid drives which is far more slim and free from power failure.

Storing Technology
Hard drive use to store data in fragments. That means, while saving data, files were scattered in contiguous blocks throughout the sectors and blocks. But Solid state drives are completely different and doesn’t needed fragmentation as it’s has no physical read heads, which makes it more faster in storing data, launching application etc.

Price
Price are also the decisive factor for which, HDD becomes the winner over SSD. Solid state drives are much more costly than HDD, for ex. You can buy a 1TB of hard drive by spending in between $100 tp $150, but SSD takes 8 times more than the normal hard drive prices of the same storage capacity.

Reliability
SSD are made up with a series of flash drives instead of any physical equipment. Flash drives are completely different from the one which is used in thumb drives and may store more than 16 times of data in compare to thumb drives.

Both HDD and SSD are designed to fight well against failure but SSD can operate more efficiently in harsher environment without failing where HDD does fails. Since most HDD’s are fail while doing read operation, rather than SDD which often fails during write operation. Your data is more likely to corrupt due to fail read operation, so we can say that SSD’s are very rare cases of failure in compare to HDD’s.

Capacity:
As with growing storing needs, normal user demands up to 250 GB to 1 TB of hard drive but SSD’s are less likely to fill that gap right away. The maximum storage capacity of recently launched SSD of 128 GB which didn’t seems to fulfill the current storing needs and once again HDD’s shines at the top.

Speed:
This is where SSD’s become the first choice among users who wants to make their PC even faster. SSD’s are significantly fast in booting Windows, transferring files, launching application etc.

Availability:
Since, SSD’s are still in its development phase, they are hardly available in the market. Moreover, there is no chance to get any more eventful news until 2014 as flood effected the hard drive markets in Thailand (Major Production Center).Whereas, hard drives can be easily available and can be distributed whenever you want.

Conclusion:
For me the conclusion is obvious, both! For desktop and laptop use I recommend a SSD as the boot / application drive and a traditional hdd for storage / backup needs. For a laptop the same setup can be accomplished by removing the dvd/cdrom drive and moving a large capacity traditional hdd into that bay, then use a smaller but faster SSD as the boot / application drive.

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