Solid State Drives Vs. Hard Disk Drives

Solid State Drives or SSDs are becoming increasingly popular in everyday computers. A solid state drive is a storage device that uses solid state memory to store information. Solid state memory is non-volatile memory. When you turn your computer off at night, you do not lose all of your information. In contrast to hard disk drives, solid state drives do not store information on a disk. However, SSDs emulate hard disk drives(HDD) allowing most HDDs to be replaced in certain applications.

Standard HDDs today are made of heads, platters(or disks), magnetic surfaces, spindles and numerous complex moving parts. All of which wear down in time, causing slower performance over the lifetime of the HDD.

Solid state drives eliminate the use of moving parts all-together. Information is stored as memory in an SSD. There is no spin-up time or seek-times associated with accessing or storing this information. The easiest way to think about this is to look at Random Access Memory or RAM. Information is constantly being stored in RAM. However, RAM is volatile. When you turn your computer off, you lose the information stored in RAM. The behavior of an SSD is similar to that of RAM except SSDs are non-volatile.

Advantages of SSD Technology:
- Faster start-up time, no spin-up required.
- Very low latency times. The seek-times of an SSD are much lower than the best HDDs available today.
- No noise when an SSD is storing or retrieving data.
- Much higher reliability, no moving parts, no slow-down over time.
- Larger range of operating temperatures.
- Size and weight along with low power consumption make SSDs ideal for future use. (Smaller is always better right?)


Disadvantages of SSD Technology:
- Cost is the biggest current issue. SSD technology is still a fairly new technology and you will pay more per gigabyte of storage compared to HDDs.
- Low storage capacity compared to today's HDDs.
- Slower write speeds
- Write fragmentation (splitting of information).
- Depending on which type of memory cells are used in an SSD, there is a limited number of write/erase cycles.


The most common use of SSDs is in laptops. Ultra portable and lightweight, SSDs make for a great alternative to standard HDDs in laptops.
If cost and capacity are non-issues, don't hesitate to build for the future with an SSD.