SSD vs HDD, if you’re upgrading, building or buying a new PC or laptop, you’re probably trying to decide what’s better, SSDs or HDDs.
First, let’s define both of them to get a better understanding of what we’re dealing with. SSD stands for solid-state drive and HDD stands for hard disk drive. Up until the last few years SSDs did not exist for the average computer user, but now they are becoming more and more available.
Hard disk drives or HDDs work almost like DVD drives because they have a disk inside of them that spins and gets information written onto it. Sometimes, you can hear your HDD spinning, this is often the loudest part of a computer. Inside these drives are a lot of moving parts, which is why sometimes these will fail if impacted.
Solid-state drives or SSDs have zero moving parts inside of them and are therefore completely silent. Also, because of their lack of moving parts they are very durable against impact.
SSD vs HDD, The Pros and Cons
SSD pros-
They’re durable against impact.
They weigh less.
They last a long time because they do not use any moving parts. Something without moving parts will obviously break down a lot less than something with moving parts.
They’re extremely fast. One will experience very fast boot up times and loading programs will be extremely fast.
They’re very quiet, in fact, they’re silent.
SSD cons-
Well, there really is only one con, they are very expensive. There’s no doubt that these are the wave of the future and will eventually replace hard disk drives, but that might be a while because per gigabyte they’re very expensive compared to HDDs.
HDD pros-
They are very cheap compared to SSD’s.
Because of their low price per gigabyte you can easily store pretty much anything you can possibly imagine on one fairly inexpensive hard disk drive.
Two or more of them can be hooked together and run in RAID mode for very fast setup.
HDD cons-
Some of them can be very noisy; the clicking noise that you hear while running your desktop or laptop is your hard drive spinning to retrieve or record information.
They’re not nearly as fast as solid-state drives.
They’re not nearly as durable as solid-state drives and are very susceptible to damage from impact.
SSD VS HDD – What Is the Conclusion?
SSD vs HDD, Which one Wins?
The only thing that should stop you from buying and SSD vs HDD is the price because solid-state drives are superior in nearly every way. If money is not an issue for you then simply buy and SSD. If money is an issue then consider your options carefully. For instance, if you’re planning on buying a laptop that you will be carrying around constantly all day long then you might want to consider putting an SSD in it because they are very durable against impact. This can save you from losing all of the information on your drive.
I should note that solid-state drives have been around since the 50s and have been used heavily by the military since the 1990s. So, the technology is quite old. This goes to show that it might be a while before solid-state drives come down in price.
Eventually we’ll all be using SSDs, but until that day many of us will still have to suffer with the good old-fashioned hard drives.
So, who wins the SSD VS HDD debate? It’s almost like asking who wins the DVD versus Blu-ray debate, the answer is in the eye of the money holder.
SSD VS HDD Price Comparisons in 2011
Just so you can get a feel of the price differences between solid-state drives and hard disk drives I will do some comparisons from Newegg.com.
The first SSD I’ll look at is from ocz – It has 200 GB of storage and is priced at $340. That seems expensive, right? 200 GB of storage is not a heck of a lot these days.
Now, just to get extreme, I’ll review another SSD from OCZ that is 960 GB. Currently, there are only two available, one is priced at $2420 the other is priced at $3200, wow!
Just for comparison, and to get extreme, let’s look at some 3 TB hard disk drives. Keep in mind that these have three times the amount of storage as the previous two solid-state drives. The first one I’m looking at is from Hitachi and is priced at $250. In fact let me just go down the list on the page and ramble off some prices of these 3 TB hard drives: $209, $184, $399, $169, and $194. So, even the best and fastest 3 TB hard drives available are nearly one 10th of the price of the solid-state drives that have three times less storage. Do you see what I mean when I say HDDs are a lot less expensive?
SSD vs HDD, or Maybe Not?
I should also note that some companies are making hybrid drives that include an SSD and HDD in one unit. The idea behind these drives is that the SSD part of it handles frequently used tasks and HDD is simply used for storage. These are still much more expensive than HDDs, but a lot less expensive than a dedicated SSD. My guess is that these will go mainstream long before SSDs do, so this might be something that you’ll eventually want to try.
In the end the SSD vs HDD debate will go on until the prices of SSDs settle down, at which point we can wave goodbye to our old friend, the HDD.