How do they differ and how does the ssd work faster. Trying to wrap my mind around it for next gen consoles.
In: Engineering
The HDD is a spinning disc of metal with exotic coatings on it. It is speed limited, because no matter how fast the circuitry is, you still have to wait for the part of the disc with the data you want on it to come around. Let’s say it spins at 6000 RPM, that 100 revolutions per seconds of 10ms worst case before you can get the first byte of the data you want. SATA drives (in either format) can transfer 500MB/sec, so in that 10ms of HDD waiting the SDD has already transferred 5MB of data.
short hdd means hard drive disk, this can read the drive like you read a book, one part at one time, so they need to read all parts in a row to get anything together.
ssd means solid state drive, they dont have moving parts, so they can access more data at the same time by reading, that makes them faster.
afaik thats it.
A hard disk drive is a spinning disc that uses little heads to read and write information on it. Think of like a vinyl record being played on a phonogram – the needle “reads” the data. A faster spin speed usually means faster read/write times which means it can support faster installation, faster downloading and faster loading of files.
A solid state drive is more or less like an SD memory card you’d use on your digital camera. These are significantly faster than a disk since there’s no moving parts – the specific information that needs to be loaded can be directly loaded without needing to read around a spinning physical disk.
The difference is solid state vs physical platters. SSD work at the speed of ram (no, not really, but access times are orders of magnitude faster than HDD). HDDs on the other had are still just a spinning disk, and you have to deal with seek times (the amount of time it takes for the read head to move into position and wait for the platter to spin around to where the data is. In addition to seek time, another related item is rotational speed, the faster a drive is (5000rpm, 10000rpm, 15000rpm) the faster it can find the data (and the more the cost goes up). Another factor that plagues HDDs is file fragmentation. As read/write/erase tasks accumulate on the drive, the chance the drive will have to split up files in order to write them (when you have a 100mb file to write, but only 3, 35mb spaces to write it in) increase. This further slows down the HDD because it increases the time it takes to access the file if it has to hunt around the drive to find all of the pieces.
SSDs don’t have to deal with any of that. It’s essentially just a USB flash drive with a really really fast interface on it. There’s no spinning platter, no seek times (worth mentioning). There is fragmentation, but since there’s no measurable seek times, it doesn’t matter.
SSDs can also increase their speed because behind the logic, because they use technologies like TRIM, and Garbage Collection which don’t specifically increase the speed of the drive, but they do relegate tasks that would otherwise occupy the drive to times of idleness.
In an HDD information is stored on metal platters that spin around while read/write heads mounted on arms sweep over them – it kind of looks like a record player. Because the whole device depends on moving parts there’s a huge bottleneck to how fast information can be read or written.
An SSD nixes all of that and instead the information is stored in a bank of computer chips. There’s no moving parts so information can be read/written extremely fast.
nobody actually ELI5 so I’ll try :
HDD is actual, very tiny, written stuff, on the surface of a tiny metal disk. The tiny writing is actually the information the computer reads. It takes a lot of time to read and write everything so small, on a hard surface, with a tiny needle.
SSD doesn’t actually have tiny writing to read and write when using it. It writes instantly using electricity, and it just logically knows what the data is.
Basically, an HDD is an old vinyl record, SSD is an mp3 file.
edit : formatting is hard
A HDD is like public transportation, you have to wait for the train you need to come around and even then, it doesn’t go that fast.
A SSD is like owning your own car, you go directly where you need to go and get things done.
Simply put: an HDD is an electro-mechanical device involving spinning metal plates, magnets, etc. Consequently, there are more ways it can fail, degrade over time, etc. And it’s slow.
An SSD is purely electronic. It can also fail and has a limited lifetime (writing too much data too many times wears it out), but otherwise it’s superior to HDD in every way.
A hard disk has to spin to reach the information it’s trying to read. That’s a lot of wasted time. Solid state drives can grab the right information almost instantly. It’s like a CD vs an MP3 player. Imagine having to change the CD after every song. Yikes.
Hdd is like you walking to the finish line…ssd is like your running to the finish line. You will finish faster if your running so loading games and apps finish faster because your running.
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