Today, when you have different hardware options for storage for your machine the challenge has only become complicated whether SSDs are more reliable against the traditional HDDs. In the following article, we will discuss some of the points to consider when you choose a drive for storing your important data on it. Either way, SSDs, and HDDs will both have the same end result of storing your data. However, the details of how they perform and how reliable are they are mentioned in the following article.
Let us discuss what benefits and drawbacks each of these technologies hold.
Hard Disk Drives
Hard Disk Drives also commonly known as HDD are generally thought that they are more reliable in the long run with reads/writes because of the high precision mechanically moving discs used for storage. Typically, if you are looking for backup drives or larger storage devices, you will find HDDs may fit better within your budget because HDD price can be very affordable compared to SSDs.
In theory, an HDD has infinite write/read lifetime, because HDDs do not damage their storage medium when writing/erasing like the SSDs which physically degrade their NAND flash when erasing/writing. Since HDDs have been the primary storage device, manufacturers have been building thinner and smaller rotational drives, as well as improving and advancing the way they store data. While the performance will never match up with SSDs, standard HDDs are still able to perform the same task of storing and accessing data.
Having said that, HDD has some of the disadvantages that you may face.
- HDD is slow because of the mechanically moving read/write heads. Due to this movement, it increases the time it takes to locate files. This will also increase the time it takes actually boot and start your computer.
- The mechanical movement also causes more power to be drawn to operate the drive, as well as vibration and heat produced from the moving parts.
- The HDDs are highly prone to damage due to weather conditions and can lead to data loss from moisture in case of low temperature or humid condition. They are also very sensitive to vibrations.
Solid State Drives
Generally, SSDs are more sturdy than HDDs because they don’t have any mechanically moving parts such as actuator arms or disks. SSDs can withstand accidental drops and other shocks, vibration, extreme temperatures, and magnetic fields better than HDDs. Add to that their small size and lower power consumption, and you can understand why they’re a great fit for laptop computers and mobile applications.
SSDs physically degrade their NAND flash when erasing/writing. This may worry you that SSDs have a limited number of reads and writes, but in reality, a Solid State Drive’s read/write limit lasts an extremely long time under normal use.
If you’ve upgraded an older computer with an SSD, you must have instantly seen the benefits. Your computer took less time to boot, your applications loaded faster, everything was much snappier. The downside of using solid-state storage is the price difference which is more than 4 times of a standard HDD.
- Apparently, there are more benefits compared to the cons of using SSDs
- SSDs draw very less power to operate and does not produce any vibrations or heat. Due to faster file copy and write speed, SSDs also decreases boot times and are highly effective for laptops or servers.
- There are no mechanical moving parts in the SSD drive that makes them significantly faster than a rotational drive (HDD). Their technology is similar to USB flash storage, and hence it offers much faster read/write speeds.
Conclusion
By far, the SSDs have much more advantages compared to an HDD. The price can only be a worrying factor when it comes to choosing between the two. There may be a concern that SSDs have a limited number of reads and writes compared to HDDs due to their flash type memory cells which can only be programmed and erased a limited number of times. But in reality, SSDs can last an extremely long time under normal conditions. It has been observed that an average read/write limit of an SSD can be around 700TB or more data. So, to reach the threshold of 700TB of data, you will have to write about 40GB of data in a day, for next 17,500 days which would be approximately 50 years.
So if you are worrying that your SSD will die because you are using it too much? Don't!
