Until recently, PC buyers had only a few choices for selecting what kind of storage device to use with their laptop or desktop and the form factor had just a hard disk drive (HDD). But now, you have a choice to configure your system with either an HDD, SSD, or in some cases both. How will you choose between them? What are the major differences between normal HDD and SSD? Here are a few differences between SSDs and HDDs that might help you with this, Read further to know all of them.
What is an HDD?
Hard drives are considered traditional spinning hard drives (HDDs). It is the basic non-volatile storage device on a computer. Hard drives are metal platters that come with a magnetic coating that stores your data. It has a read/write head that is located on an arm that is used to access your data while the platters are spinning inside a hard drive enclosure.
What is SSD?
SSD, which stands for Solid State Drive, is also a non-volatile storage device that uses NAND-based flash memory to store your files. Even though they perform the same function as HDDs, it does not use a magnetic coating on the platters like HDDs to store data. Instead, SSD utilizes interconnected flash memory chips that could retain the data even when there's no power present. This is the major difference between HDD and SSDs.
SSD Vs HDD
Here are some major differences between the SSD and normal HDD:
Speed
Most solid-state drives are considerably faster at reading data than hard drives. The main reason is that there are no moving mechanical parts on an SSD as in HDDs and due to this the seek time has been significantly reduced on SSD.
Storage Technology Used
Normal Hard disk drives store all your data in the form of fragments i.e. your files will be split into chunks and will scatter in contiguous blocks throughout the hard dive sectors and blocks. However, Solid-State drives are completely different from HDD and don’t need fragmentation to store data. Hence, it has no physical read heads making it faster in storing data or launching applications, etc.
Cost
SSDs are much more expensive than an equal-capacity HDD. Generally, the cost of 1GB of an SSD can be four to eight times costlier than the 1GB of a hard drive.
Capacity
When speaking about the storage capacities of the drives, hard drives still have the advantage in storage capacity since it is available as 1TB to 2TB drives that are readily available to the consumers. But, SSDs fail to meet the current storage demands since these are only available with 256GB to 512GB capacities and a 1TB version is still in testing.
Durability
An HDD's moving parts make the drives significantly more liable to lifetime wear, shock, vibration, and heat than the SSDs which run very quietly and consume little power when compared to HDDs.
However, hard drives may have a longer lifespan, because SSDs have a finite number of times each "cell" can be written to. But, the moving parts of a hard drive might wear out over time which SSDs don't have. In general, the durability of both types of the drive will be good, and can run easily for several years or more!
Reliability
Even in the case of reliability both technologies i.e. both HDD and SSD are designed in order to fight against failure but SSD can operate more efficiently in harsher environments than the HDD. Commonly these solid-state drives fail when data is being written to them, while most of the hard drives fail when data is being read.
Actually, if any drive fails when data is being written, the computer's operating system attempt to write the data elsewhere. But if it fails while reading the data, there are more possibilities of losing your vital data from the drives. However, there is no need to get tensed; in such cases, you can make use of the Remo Recover Windows / Mac Software that can easily recover the entire lost data when your HDD fails. Not just from HDD even if the SSD fails resulting in data loss this utility helps you to perform SSD recovery.
Additional Information: In case you lose data from your SSD you can recover data from your SSD using the best SSD recovery software.
Conclusion
On a Whole, it’s all up to the users and their needs which matter while selecting a drive. For an average computer user, hard drives would be a good option as they are much cheaper, reliable, and provides a handful of options and capacities. However, SSDs are great if you are performing time-critical work like video editing, and such, as they are faster in reading and writing data to disk. But they are quite expensive and aren’t completely proven. Finally, it’s the user who should decide according to their requirements on which one to choose.
