The Benefits of Owning a Solid State Drive Versus a Hard Disk Drive
In today’s IT industry, Solid-State Drives (SSD) have become a major necessity and the next biggest upgrade to your average hard disk drive. Although most computers contain your basic hard disk drive, many laptop users are upgrading to the new type of storage device because of its reliability, stability, and processing speed. The SSD has become very popular amongst those in the IT industry and is beginning to overtake the basic hard disk drives that most of us have been using for years. In a nutshell, a solid-state drive is a data storage device which unlike a hard-drive, is non-magnetic and uses solid-state memory to store information. As opposed to hard drives, SSD’s have no moving parts because they use microchips which retain data in non-volatile memory chips. If you just so happen to be thinking about whether you should upgrade your laptop to an SSD instead of a Hard Disk Drive, you’ve hit the jackpot! This article will be discussing the battle between the solid-state drives and hard-disk drives and why so many people are shouting “solid-state drives for the win”!
When looking for a new device to store/retrieve your most valued information and data, it’s important to take note on the price, performance, speed, and reliability as well as how it compares to other types of disk drives. Here is a brief comparison between a solid-state drive and basic hard-disk drive that should be helpful in your mission toward a safer way of storage!
Reliability
What makes the solid-state drive so reliable is its ability to store data without having any mechanical parts and spinning disks like the components that make up your average hard-disk drive. If you are the type of person who works in demanding environments and need to transport your laptop to multiple locations as well as relying heavily on your hard drive to do major tasks, a solid-state drive will help to deliver high-performance as well as have the advantage of retaining information without even using power (NAND-based flash memory). In the past, I’ve heard stories about users who lost extremely valuable data due hard-disk drive failure simply by over-using or not handling their laptop with care, causing the electromagnetic disks to break.
Speed
When comparing the speed of a solid state drive to a hard-disk drive, SSDs are much faster due to a shorter access time than hard disk drives. Since 2010, Solid State Drives have been using NAND-based flash memory as well as good quality RAM (random-access memory). This means that they acquire faster access and can also retain memory without power. If you really want know the details on the difference between speed in SSDs and HDDs, solid state drives that are flash based are about 100 times faster than the moving hard disk drive. The average access time for a flash based SSD is about 35-100 micro-seconds, versus the moving disk from a hard disk drive has an average of 5,000-10,000 microseconds. If you really think about it, if a hard disk drive is not able to keep up with the performance of your PC, it can limit the potential of your entire computer system. So, purchasing a solid state drive would greatly improve your laptop’s accessing speeds!
Mortality Rates
For most laptop users, the most common-heard horror story usually consists of having valuable data lost and, in some cases, the fact that they are unable to retrieve part or all of their data from a regular hard-disk drive. The reasoning behind this is basically because of wear-and tear, just like a knife gets dull after frequent use. Due to the constant motion of the rotating disk and mechanical arms, its operation will only work well for approximately three years. In contrast, the makers of solid state drives have devised many ways to increase the mortality rates of their products. They typically design something called “wear-leveling algorithms”, in which an SSD controller will move the data in a block that has reached a certain percentage threshold into another block that has a read-only like characteristic in the background. This helps with the wearing off of blocks and degradation of the disk. SSDs usually last many years and also have a DRAM cache in its architecture that helps extend its lifespan. Solid-state drives also use much less power than hard-disk drives because no added power is needed to activate the moving mechanical parts from a hard disk drive.
solid state drives for the win!
Price
An average disk drive can range from around $2.00 per GB for NAND flash SSDs versus $0.10 perf GB for desktop and 0.20 per Gig for laptop hard drives. As far as size and storage of hard drives versus solid-state drives goes, most HDDs have 2 to 3 TB or less, whereas SSDs come in multiple sizes up to 2TB and are usually 512 GB or less. Due to solid-state drives becoming a much more reliable option for handling your laptops main storage requirements, their prices are higher than hard-disk drives but are still continuing to drop. Since the prices of solid-state drives average around $500 more than your traditional hard-disk drive, I would definitely say they are well worth those extra bills thanks to their great quality and reliability.
