what’s the difference between Solid State Drives and Hard Drives.
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The fundamental technology on which they operate.
Hard drives use spinning disks which get magnetised in patters by a moving head to record ones and zeroes.
Solid state memory, be it a drive, SD cards, RAM etc., use gates composed of transistors, just like the processor, but arranged in such a ways that they allow for storing bits rather than just operating on them. In fact, the processor has its own integrated memory too.
Traditional Hard Drives use spinning disks covered in magnetic material (rust) to store information. They are mechanical devices and are relatively slow due to the nature of their physically moving parts. You have to wait for the hammer to move back and forth over the spinning disk to read and write information.
SSDs store information electronically. The Circuit boards have a series of electronic cells that can each contain information. SSDs are much much faster than Spinning Hard drives because of the nature of how they operate. There’s no moving parts, so there is no delay in reading and writing information.
SSDs are very fast but cost more per GB, and are generally very small. They are ideal for laptops, and using them in PCs considerably improves performance.
While HDDs are slower but cost a lot less per GB, and are fairly large and heavy by comparison to an SSD. Traditional Spinning disks are ideal for long term storage of files, movies, pictures etc that need a lot of space but don’t need a lot of performance
But in time the cost of an SSD will continue to go down where they will eventually replace HDDs entirely.
The biggest difference between the two is that hard drives have moving parts whereas SSDs do not. Hard drives store data magnetically through the spinning disk while SSD stores data in integrated circuits, which is why SSD is faster and doesn’t require defragging.
Solid State Drives are newer and faster than Hard Drives. Hard Drives store data on a spinning disk, which can make them slower. Solid State Drives don’t have a spinning disk, so they can work faster.
Think of the hard drive (HDD hard *disk* drive) as a rewritable CD or DVD. You can read from it and save to it, but doing so it needs to spin around like an old record player (although what is happening is closer to a cassette tape). The SSD (Solid State Drive) is like Ram memory in your computer or a thumb-drive. It doesn’t require mechanical motion like spinning disks to operate.
If you’re familiar with the “save” icon, the floppy disc. A hard drive is like a stack of those.
The SSD is more like a huge version of the SD card you put in your phone.
The hard disk is more fragile cause it’s made up of discs that spin around like a vinyl record.
I’ll focus on the differences to the consumer.
SSDs are much, much faster. They can be 10 to 1000x times faster. Your computer will run silky smooth.
HDDs will store a little more data for the cost. Maybe 2-4x.
SSDs shouldn’t be filled up, as it reduces write speed, but not read speed. 50% is fine, but I won’t go over 75%.
Personally I’m using an SSD and being careful not to overload it with stuff. I delete stuff that I download when I no longer need it.
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