SSD & HDD: Are You Still Confused By The Differences?

Hello guys,

By now you've probably heard of Solid-State Drives, you may have seen them when shopping for computers or maybe just read about them or you might even own them but I'm gonna explicate about what exactly is the difference between a solid-state drive and a hard drive.

_[1]

There are advantages to both and if you are trying to decide which type to get for your computer, I'm gonna help you decide.

What’s Solid-State Drive? How does it work?

A solid-state drive (SSD), also incorrectly known as solid-state disk is a solid-state storage device that uses integrated circuit assemblies as memory to store data persistently. SSD technology primarily uses electronic interfaces compatible with traditional block input/output (I/O) hard disk drives (HDDs), which permit simple replacements in common applications.
_source

Basically solid-state drives use what's called flash memory, there are no moving parts in a solid-state drive. This is different from a hard drive where you have different metal platters that are magnetized and you have an arm that actually reads from the hard drive and this moves back and forth so that means that solid-state drives are way less prone to failure.
Theoretically, they cannot fail, whereas hard drives over time because they're mechanical, they're just gonna wear out and they will fail eventually. Even sitting on a desk for years without even being touched, a hard drive can still fail because they have to be booted up every once in a while.

That problem does not happen with solid-state drive, so that's probably one of the biggest advantages. In terms of reliability, solid-state drives win out a hundred percent.

There is one thing to keep in mind about solid-state drives

The cells of the flash memory can only be written to a certain number of times. The longer you use a solid-state drive, the slower it will become. That's not necessarily a tragic thing because the software in the hard drive will disable those cells so you're not gonna lose any data from them, it'll stop those cells from being used but that will mean that it will slow down over time.

_{[2]
[A typical SSD flash memory fixmypcfree.com]}

If you're writing a lot of files to your solid-state drive very quickly or you're gonna be transferring a lot of files, it's probably best to not store those kinds of files on your solid-state drive, a hard drive is better for really dynamic files that you're going to be moving a lot.

Performance

In general, a solid-state drive will outperform a hard drive, this is because the solid-state drive doesn't have to have the arm that the hard drive has to search for the data, it's kind of all in one place that it can just read instantaneously so even the cheapest solid-state drives will probably be at the same performance level as a 10000 rpm hard drive and the higher-end solid-state drives will just blow any hard drive completely out of the water.

_{[3]
[Benchmark showing SSD reading speed up to 230 megabytes per second Wikipedia]}

Capacity

Solid-state drives right now are a lot smaller than hard drives, I think maybe right now the average capacity solid-state drive you can get is probably around 250gb to 500gb without spending several thousands of dollars.
Hard drives on the other hand, you can easily get one 3 terabytes for not even a couple hundred dollars so if you need a lot of storage, you definitely need a hard drive.

Price

Solid-state drives are more expensive and out of that, you get reliability and speed mostly.
Hard drives are cheaper per gigabyte and they can hold a lot but they do fail. Some people buy both for their computer maybe a small high performance solid-state drive to boot up their operating system and then use a large hard drive to store all their files on. It's pretty much the best of both worlds.

I hope this article helps you decide what type of hard drive you need to get or maybe even both.
Do you already have a solid-state drive? What’s your computer configuration right now? Are you looking to buy a new computer with a solid-state drive in it? Leave a reply and don’t forget to smash that upvote button.

---

---

References: 1 - 2 - 3

Image sources: 1 - 2 - 3

---

---

_{GIF made by @foundation}

---

---

Thanks to @camzy & @samstickkz for this amazing toon.