Sunday, November 20, 2011

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

By Andrew Johnson


When buying or building a new PC, there are a lot of choices to make. One of these is weather to use a solid state drive or a hard drive. It is true that high capacity hard drives are cheap and plentiful, though SSDs have come a long way. Understanding the differences is important.

Spin up time is how long it takes the drives to get ready to work. While using SS units this is almost nonexistent as they have no real moving parts inside them. While hard disk drives can take up to a few seconds. HDDs also use about twice the power of their newer counterparts and should be staged if 2 or more are tied together in a system to prevent a massive power drain.

Random access time with a SS unit is around 1ms because it is accessed straight from the flash memory. With a HDD it may take 5 to 10ms because of the read/write heads movement to read the data. SS drives have no moving parts and make very little noise, where HHDs have varying levels because of the moving parts.

Most solis state units have a read latency time that is very low because any data in it can be read from any point inside the memory. This is not true with hard disk drives they use physical parts inside the drives that have to be lined up a certain way to read and another way to write. The weight of a HDD when compared to a SS device is much higher as well because of all the physical parts inside it.

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.

A solid state drive is very different from a hard disk drive. For this reason it is difficult to make any kind of meaningful comparison between them. What it really gets down to is what a person want and needs. Basically this is because the cost of HDDs has gone down, while SSDs have remained the same or gone up with their size.




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