SSD vs HDD: What's the Difference and Which Should I Get?
Solid-state hard drives are newer, faster, and sometimes smaller than older traditional hard drives. If you've ever owned a computer, you've probably noticed they come with this tiny little spinning disk drive thingy--the one that makes all those annoying noises when you're trying to type up an awesome new blog post.
Even though these things have been around for quite some time now, we still get a lot of questions about them specifically. It's understandable: it's not your monitor slowing down your computer or your graphics card getting all hot and bothered; it is this piece of hardware hogging valuable resources and making funny noises intermittently.
The Hard Disk Drive vs The Solid State Drive
A hard disk drive (aka HD or HDD) is made up of moving parts -- a spindle that spins around and reads/writes data on little magnetic plates which are located inside a metal cage that protects the data. The spindle can break, and moving parts are more prone to failure than non-moving parts. Plus it has a mechanical motor that gets hot over time and will need replacement eventually. What's so great about solid-state drives? They use no moving parts at all. Instead, they store your data on flash memory chips -- millions of them! Flash memory is really neat
because while Solid State Drives are orders of magnitude faster than HDs where you have to wait for mechanical parts to move -- this means your computer boots up FASTER and programs startup FASTER . It's truly remarkable!
This newfangled solid-state drive (SSD) technology is one of the major advancements in the last few years. SSDs are faster and more reliable than their older counterparts. The reason an SSD is so much faster than a hard drive has to do with how data is stored. Hard drives store data on platters that spin around really fast--a lot like vinyl records or CDs that you play at home. This causes some problems: because these "records" are spinning, they will sometimes glitch by skipping over or repeating parts of your song/movie. In technology terms they're called "head crashes", and a computer suffers from this type of crash whenever it loses power unexpectedly or when it's just trying to read/write data super-fast.
Another reason that SSDs are faster is with a hard drive you have to write data on one single layer of the disk--this means that when files go missing, they stay gone for good (or until you run an expensive program to see if it can recover them). With an SSD, you're able to "map" sections of the entire drive and move things around so there's no loss in efficiency or speed. That means all your files will be easily accessible at all times because they're always where they need to be. And as far as reliability goes, solid-state drives use less power and are more reliable than hard drives due to their lack of moving parts and much smaller size.
SSDs, unlike their predecessors, are more resistant to physical damage because there aren't any moving parts. If you've ever dropped a laptop or desktop before, SSDs won't break, because there are no sensitive moving parts to get thrown out of place.
Hopefully, by now you know that SSD's are going to outperform hard drives whenever it comes to speed--but what about storage? SSD's have the same storage capacity options that HDD have. And although SSD's have come way down in price over the years, they are still a bit more expensive than their HDD counterparts.
So faster? check!
whatever storage space you need? check!
Solid State Drives are the clear winner here, even if they're a little more expensive on average.
Conclusion: Get the Solid State Drive, your future frustration tolerance will thank you!
Choosing between Solid State Drives and Internal Hard Drives is easy: if you're building your computer, get an SSD for your operating system and a traditional HDD for storage because the price is right! Call us now or book a diagnostic appointment to see if a solid state drive is right for your computer.