New Tech Storage Device

These days while buying laptops you have to make the decision between getting either a Solid State Drive (SSD) or Hard Disk Drive (HDD) as the storage component.

So which is best to get, a SSD or HDD?  There’s no straight forward answer to this question, each buyer has different needs and you have to make decision based on those needs, your preferences, and of course budget.  Even though the price of SSDs has been falling, the price advantage is still strongly with HDDs.  But if performance and fast bootup is your top consideration, and money is secondary, then SSD is the best to go with.

What is a SSD? 
      
       You might be shopping for a computer and simply wondering what the SSD actually means? 

SSD stands for Solid State Drive.  You’re probably familiar with USB pen drive, SSD can be thought of as an oversized and classier or can say Modern version of the USB memory stick. Just like a memory sticks, there are no moving parts to an SSD, information is stored in microchips. Whereas, a hard drive uses a mechanical arm with a read/write head to move around and read information from the right location on a storage platter.
This difference is what makes SSD so much faster.

Just like, what’s quicker, having to walk across the room to retrieve a book to get information or simply magically having that book open in front of you when you need it?  That’s how an HDD compares to an SSD, it simply requires more physical work (mechanical movement) to get information.

A typical SSD uses what is called NAND-based flash memory, this is a non-volatile type of memory.  What does non-volatile mean you ask?  The simple answer is that you can turn off the disk and it won’t “forget” what was stored on it.  This is of course an essential characteristic of any type of permanent memory.  During the early days of SSD rumours floated around saying stored data would wear off and be lost after only a few years.  Today this is not true, you can read and write to an SSD all day long and the data storage integrity will be maintained for well over 200 years.  In other words, the data storage life of an SSD can outlive you!

An SSD does not have a mechanical arm to read and write data, it instead relies on an embedded processor (or “brain”) called a controller to perform a bunch of operations related to reading and writing data.  The controller is a very important factor in determining the speed of the SSD, decisions it makes related to how to store, retrieve, cache and clean up data can determine the overall speed of the drive.  We won’t get into the details of the various tasks it performs such as error correction, read and write caching, encryption and garbage collection , good controller technology is often what separates an excellent from simply good SSD.  An example of a fast controller today is the SandForce SATA 3.0 (6 Gb/s) SSD controller that supports up to 500 MB per second read and write speeds.

Finally, you may be wondering what an SSD looks like and how easy it is to replace a hard drive with after market.  If you look at the images below you’ll see the top and underside of a typical sized 2.5” SSD, the technology is encased inside either a plastic or metal case and so it looks like nothing more than a battery might look like:

 The form factor of the SSD is actually the same as a regular hard drive, it comes in a standard 1.8”, 2.5” or 3.5” size that can fit into the housing and connectors for the same sized hard drives.  The connector used for these standard sizes is SATA, there are smaller SSDs available that use what’s called mini-SATA (mSATA) and fit into the mini-PCI Express slot of a laptop.








What is an HDD?
                
                 Hard Disk Drives, or HDD in technical term.  HDDs were first introduced by IBM in 1956,  Its nearly 60-year old technology.  An HDD uses magnetism to store data on a rotating platter.  A read/write head floats above the spinning platter reading and writing data.  The faster the platter spins, the faster an HDD can perform, typical laptop drives today spin at either 5400 RPM (Revolutions per Minute) or 7200RPM, some server based platters can spin at up to 15,000 RPM.
The major advantage of an HDD is that it is capable of storing lots of data cheaply.  These days 1 TeraByte (1,024 gigabytes) of storage is not unusual for a laptop hard drive, and the density continues to grow.  Cost per gigabyte is only around  5.30 INR / GB these days for an HDD, that’s amazing when you compare it to the near 94.10 INR / GB cost for an SSD.  If you want cheap storage and lots of it, using a standard hard drive is definitely the more appealing way to go.
HDDs mostly use the SATA interface.  The most common size for laptop hard drives is the 2.5” form factor while a larger 3.5” form factor is used in desktop computers.  The larger size allows for more platters inside and thus more storage capacity.  Some desktop hard drives can store up to 4TB of data! HDDs look essentially the same from the outside as an SSD, below is an example of what an HDD looks like.

If You need lots of storage capacity, up to 2TB
Don’t want to spend much money. Don’t care too much about how fast a computer boots up or opens programs then get a hard drive.

But If You are willing to pay for faster performance. Don’t mind limited storage capacity or can work around that then get an SSD.



             Hard Disk Drive             Vs             Solid State Drive