Solid State Drive Vs Hard Disk Drive

Solid State Drives (SSD) are straight substitutes for the hard disks or standard disk drives in your personal computer. This applies to all computer types including desktops, laptops, notebooks and net books. In addition many SSD drives can also be connected to any of these computers as an external drive for extra storage using a USB port.

Unfortunately hard disk drives use a spinning platter, which stores your computer data, and a mechanism to read and write this data as required. This means they have several different mechanical moving parts that mean today's hard disks can easily be damaged if they suffer a knock when being carried or moved.

The consequences of this can be catastrophic if the computer is powered up and active at this time. Solid state drives on the other hand have no moving parts at all and are therefore much more robust and they will not be susceptible to damage even if they are knocked or even dropped during use!

A SSD drive is built entirely from memory chips and a controller to perform the read/write functions to retrieve and store your computer data. Capacity of the commercial version of solid state devices has already reached 512 gigabytes, so they can easily store as much information as the hard disks (HDD) that they can replace.

The more popular sizes of SSDs are 64, 128 and 256 gb and as this technology gets further developed ssd drive capacity will inevitably continue to increase. Also as the price of the NAND Flash memory that they use continues to decrease in price then these drives will continue to become even cheaper.

Because of their solid state memory SSDs can be made in smaller sizes than hard disks and they are therefore well suited to mobile computing applications and have already become the standard storage medium for many of the new Net book computers that have become so popular recently. Now you can basically take your ssd drive or the computer in which it is installed anywhere you want without the worry of it getting damaged so easily.

A hard disk drive (often shortened as hard disk, hard drive, or HDD) is a non-volatile storage device that stores digitally encoded data on rapidly rotating rigid (i.e. hard) platters with magnetic surfaces. Strictly speaking, "drive" refers to the motorized mechanical aspect that is distinct from its medium, such as a tape drive and its tape, or a floppy disk drive and its floppy disk. Early HDDs had removable media; however, an HDD today is typically a sealed unit (except for a filtered vent hole to equalize air pressure) with fixed media.

For the time being, conventional hard drives will still win every comparison with flash SSDs once cost and capacity are added to the equation. Most SSDs are still limited to 32 and 64 GB capacities, and if you go for fast SLC flash drives, the price tag will have more than three digits. MLC-based flash reaches 128 GB today, which can be considered an acceptable capacity, but not all of these drives can be recommended, as they usually have some disadvantages like low power efficiency or slow write performance.

On the other hand, conventional hard drives offer up to 500 GB of capacity today, and are holding up rather well when it comes to throughput, as you will see in the benchmark section of this article. Access times are an issue, though: HDDs can’t compete here. However, many HDD products are much more efficient than previous generations, and price is the killer argument. A 320 GB conventional drive costs less than $100, and if you go for high performance at low cost, you can get 80 to 120 GB at 7,200 RPM for less than $70.