Which is better to upgrade your computer's memory - a solid state drive (SSD) or a traditional hard disk drive (HDD)?

SSD

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by Joseph Whalen

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The reality is that most average consumers have no real understanding between the differences between solid state drives and hard disk drives. When making computer purchasing decisions the average consumer simply wants a product that works. As a result the benefits and downfalls of each of these technologies are often overshadowed by creative marketing and advertising hype. Given the major differences in the two technologies it is important for consumers to be aware of the two technologies and properly educated on both the pros and cons of each.

The computer market has been dominated by the hard disk drive since the early 80's. Using ferrous oxide coated platters and a magnetic head traditional hard disk drives store binary data by adjusting the magnetic polarity of the sectors on these platters. It's similar to how a CD or DVD player reads the embedded pits on a disk with a laser light to determine the sequence of zero's and ones that make up the binary data. In the case of hard disk drives instead of reading the light reflected by a laser the drive head instead reads the magnetic signature of the tiny parts of a disk.

As technology has progressed over the years various new standards have been made available in the hard disk drive market. As each new standard was introduced we saw a progressive increase in overall performance of speed, capacity and energy requirements. While most consumer grade hard disk drives perform as speeds far in excess of the needs of the user in most cases, these devices do not perform at the peak speeds that larger more industrial style hard drives operate at. These higher performance drives tend to be extremely costly and provide not only increased performance but also a much more acceptable lifespan in the professional sector.

When looking at the benefits of hard disk drive the most obvious is cost. Large capacity high speed drives are constantly dropping in price making high storage capacities readily available to the average consumer at exceptionally low prices. However the downfalls of this higher speed, higher capacity drives might outweigh the cost benefit to many people. Because hard disk drives have to physically spin a platter their power requirements and heat output tend to run fairly high, especially in laptop computers and other portable devices. This increase in heat also has an adverse affect on the lifespan of these devices. Given the sheer size of many drives, some up to 500GB on laptops the failure of drive today means the loss of a tremendous amount of data.

Solid state drives, while they are traditionally more expensive and lower capacity tend to offer a more stable platform on which to house your sensitive data. Being solid state electronics there are no moving parts in these storage devices. Instead of storing data on spinning magnetic platters SSD drives instead store data electronically in the memory chip arrays built into them. Just a few of the resulting benefits of this technology include significantly less power required to operate. Since there is no physical platter to spin there is less power drawn from the computers power source, which in turn results in silent operation and significantly reduced heat production.

Solid state drives also tend to be more durable than traditional hard disk drives. Because of the extremely fine tolerances associated with the moving parts of the platter and read heads hard disk drives are susceptible to unintended damages if they are handled roughly or dropped. While no device is immune to extreme trauma, solid state drives lack the sensitive moving parts that hard drives have and thus tend to be more durable and less prone to failure in the event of a minor accident.

Aside from the physical aspects of SSD versus HDD drives there is the performance. Because data on a hard disk drive is stored across the entire platform there is a certain amount of overhead associated with tracking the head across the platter to find and read data. Since SDD drives do not rely on a medium that requires physical movement there is a significant performance improvement in the average seek time to find data. Another limitation of hard disk drives that solid state drives are free of is the actual reading of data. A platter on a hard disk drive can spin only so fast and be read at such a speed that the physical limitations associated with a spinning platter cap the performance of hard disk drives at a finite level. Alternatively solid state drives perform direct reads from the physical memory chips at or near the speed of light with the transfer of electrons across the circuit boards providing exceedingly high data speeds presently, with performance only increasing as more advanced manufacturing processes are introduced.

Clearly the death of the hard disk drive is not on the immediate horizon. However we are likely to see hard disk drives filling the role archival media more and more as the performance advantages of the solid state drives are capitalized on to improve overall system performance. Still limited in their total capacity, solid state drives are not the ultimate solution to the personal computer storage needs of the average public. Instead a hybrid association of both solid state and hard disk drives will likely be the path of migration for the foreseeable future until technology advances to the point where solid state drives can effectively replace traditional hard disk drives, which is ultimately what is going to happen eventually.

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