Hard Drive V/S SSD, Know The Difference

Until now, while purchasing a computer or laptop, we only had one choice when it came to storage, a Hard Drive. But if you have bought a slim MacBook Air, ultrabook or just a traditional desktop but with a different storage: SSD- Solid State Drive. More likely your system partition(C Drive) might be installed in SSD for faster performance. In all different devices you can use hard drives or SSDs to install the operating system and in many cases, you can use both! But how? How do you choose the right storage device? What is the difference? Follow along and we will help you understand the difference and pros and cons.

HDD and SSD explained

the old and gold hard drive (HDD) is the basic storage device on a computer. Unless like RAM, the data stored on it doesn’t disappear after a restart. Hard drives are basically metal platters with the magnetic cover on it. And that cover coating is where the data is stored. Whether it’s your valuable data, family photos or 7 seasons of Blue-ray quality Game of Thrones! It stores everything. Platter inside spins and a head arm aligns along with platters reading the data.

An SSD does a similar job but here the data is stored on small flash memory chips rather than spinning platters. These chips are capable of storing the data when the power is not there. SSD chips can be permanently fixed soldered on board as it comes in small laptops. Or in PCI slots. And sometimes comes in shape and look of traditional hard drives that fit in hard drive slots. SSDs are not similar to USB flash/thumb drives as SSDs are much faster and more reliable. Also in comparison to price, SSDs are much costlier too.

A History of HDDs and SSDs

Hard drives are pretty old. You might have seen pictures of 24inch wide IBM 350 RAMAC drive, a picture from 1956. IBM drive that time managed to store 3.75Mb of data in 24inch wide platters. 3.75mb is normally a 128kbps song size today. And physically 2 refrigerators would occupy the same space. IBM was only used by big organizations and government and by the year 1969 it was obsolete. The progress level is amazing, isn’t it?
In the early 1980s, standard form factor hard drives were introduced. The desktop hard drive was 5.25inch, 3.25inch and 2.5 inches came as desktop and laptop class. The internal cable interface also changed by time following Serial-IDE-SCSI-SATA. The technique has remained the same as the hard drives still fixed on motherboards but the capacity and performance increased from megabytes to Giga and now terabytes. Today, the maximum capacity of a 3.5inch HDD is 10Terabytes and 2.5inch drives are max out at 3TB.

SSDs are yet very recent. Nonmoving storage has always been an obsession since the beginning of computer era. Flash memories usually store your data and it doesn’t require extra power to store it. the first SSD was introduced in 2007 with OLPC XO-1 which used 1GB SSD storage. Then Asus PC 700 enabled 2GB of SSD storage and so on technology advanced with time.
SSDs used in OLPC XO was mSATA which was soldered on motherboards. Today, SSDs are also coming in 2.5inch form factor with the maximum capacity of 4TB.

Following is the picture of OLPC XO-1

Pros and Cons:

Both HDD and SSD does the same job! Data Storage, boots your operating systems and applications. But while choosing a data storage, SSDs are costlier than HDDs. Talking about the capacity as seen earlier SSDs are available until 4TB only(That too rarely!). But in terms of speed, SSDs are lightning fast. Having no moving parts makes it secure from physical harm and is faster than a normal hard drive. Again in the price of the 500GB Hard drive, you might only get 128GB of SSD.

Conclusion:

HDDs are leading in Price, size, and availability, but if you are looking for great speed and durability than SSDs are for you!
No matter what drives we use, Data loss is inevitable. So either it’s an SSD or HDD, if you lose your files or your storage, stops working and making weird noises. Contact us today for Professional Data recovery help or visit www.ittech4all.com