Hey whats up guys, today we’re going to answer a question that maybe you already answered yourself. Should you get an SSD? Are they better than hard drives and what ways? What are the advantages and disadvantages of both and well, spoiler alert! I’m going to answer the question right now and that is yes you should get an SSD (Solid State Drive). They are amazing. We’re going to answer all that because that’s just as important. So we’re going to look at four criteria comparing solid state drives SSD and hard drives HDD and those criteria are performance, reliability, capacity, and cost of course.
Performance
So let’s begin with performance, probably the most important factor that anyone’s going to look at next to price and the truth is that; solid state drives almost always are just going to blow hard drives out of the water in terms of performance and hard drives are usually going to be the bottleneck of a computer that’s the slowest part of any computer and even with a SSD, they’re a lot better, but they’re still going to be kind of a bottleneck with your computer, because if you think about it, the memory bandwidth for your RAM is multiple gigabytes a second. Your computer can handle a lot of info, but it has to read off the hard drive and maybe 100 megabytes a second and with a SSD, you’re going to get about 500 megabytes a second, which means that you’re going to be able to access all the stuff on your computer a lot faster.
Everything’s going to load faster, you’re going to be able to write things faster. Everything is going to be faster. And the reason it’s faster is that a solid state drive uses flash memory. It doesn’t have to use a mechanical device to search through the drive platters and get the data. It’s all electronic it can go right to any point of data, grab it off instantly. You don’t have to even worry about fragmentation on solid-state drives because the files could be spread out all over the drive it doesn’t matter. It’s going to be accessed just as fast as if they were right next to each other, physically on the drive, whereas on a hard drive that is a problem because there is an arm that has to physically move to and from each piece of data. So that means it’s going to take time and you don’t have to worry about that with the solid state. This also means that even if you install a ton of programs you fill up that drive with a bunch of junk. It’s not really going to run any slower, no matter how long you use the drive with some caveats we’re going to talk about. With a hard drive you use, it tons you with fragments all over the drive data spread out the arms going to be going crazy trying to load one program. A SSD, it doesn’t even break a sweat. And I should mention, even in the case of high RPM hard drives like 10 K or even 15 K RPM drives; those are still not going to be as fast as a solid state because you still have to move the drive. It’s just not going to be able to compete, no matter how fast it’s been that drive. It’s really the arm I think that is going to be a limiting factor in any case.
Reliability (SSD vs HDD)
Now really tying in with a lot of the stuff I just talked about is reliability for the same reasons that a solid state drive is very fast. It’s also very reliable. So like I said, there’s no moving parts in a solid state drive which means there’s very few points of failure, whereas on a hard drive you got that spinning platter, you got multiple those, you got the arm moving, it can vibrate and throw things off. A lot can go wrong with a hard drive. Whereas a solid state, there’s nothing moving. There’s nothing that can get jostle around to an extent obviously. If you bash it with a hammer, it’s probably gonna break but you know what I mean. Theoretically, if you just have a SSD just sitting there, there’s not really a reason, it would ever fail, whereas a hard drive will maybe wear down the metal components brushing up against each other. It’s going to eventually fail hard drives, you must expect them to fail. They will fail. They always do. There’s no invulnerable hard drive, whereas a solid state; everything breaks down over time. But you can probably get by without expecting your solid state drive to die. Although it is possible. So of course, always back up.
Now that being said SSD are not perfect. There are a few disadvantages compared to hard drives, but I think those are outweighed by the benefits. One of the main ones is that a flash memory cell can only be written to a certain number of times. So as you use the SSD more and more and more, it could theoretically slow down. If a lot of those cells get used those are going to slow down and it might not perform as good as it did when he first got it. However, there is typically software built into the drivers for these drives that handles all that and distributes the data evenly in such a way that not any one of the particular cells is going to slow down or if one of the cells, maybe does break, then it writes that off and says don’t use that cell anymore kind of like what you get with a bad sec or on a hard drive. It does the same thing, so you don’t really have to worry about those bad sectors unless you’re writing a ton of data and just using up every single cell. And some tests have shown that typically a SSD is going to start to get problems after you write about maybe 100 or several hundred terabytes worth of data. So you would have to write as much data to fill up that hard drive hundreds of times before you would ever see any issues from just writing to it for it being flash memory. So even though it is something to keep in mind, I think for most people for the average person, it’s a non issue. You’re never going to even notice the slow down. But there is one exception maybe I can think of like if you’re editing huge video files or you’re doing a lot of work in programs that need a scratch disk if you’re not familiar with that. It’s basically a drive where a program will use to really rapidly write and read data from just to have kind of a cash. And if you’re using a ton of data with video file, there’s something that can be quite massive then yeah that program might be writing and reading a lot. And in that case, you probably do want a hard drive as a scratch disk because it can handle a lot more rewrites than an SSD. But other than that, I don’t think you’d ever see a problem. Another small disadvantage of SSD is which can affect reliability is because it’s flash memory that flash memory has to be receiving power. If it goes too long without being booted up, you could start to lose data. This flash memory cells aren’t going to be able to store that information, whereas a hard drive uses magnetic fields and that is a physical property using a permanent magnet. And even though hard drives do start to lose magnetic property I believe it’s going to be much faster on a solid state drive. Still, I believe there’s things built into the drive like maybe batteries that would mitigate that, you’d probably have to leave the SSD unplug for a year or more before you’d ever see a problem but again it is a thing you have to consider.
Size
Now the next main category is size. Size is another one where hard drives are typically going to win out. If you need a lot of storage, you have to go with a hard drive. There’s no other way around it.
Price
SSDs can maybe go up to about four terabytes I think right now that’s the biggest you can get and those are going to cost you $1,000 Plus. Whereas hard drives, I think the biggest one is made by Seagate now at 12 terabytes a cost just under $500. So obviously if you need a ton of data storage a hard drive is the way to go. Solid State Drive. I mean, you could theoretically buy a bunch of them but you’re just gonna have to pay an unreasonable amount of money when you could get the same job done with hard drive and unless for some reason you need a ton of extremely fast storage, which, in that case, you could probably go with a RAID configuration with a hard drive anyway, and maybe get around the same performance. And that kind of also ties in with the next section price; because if you get a solid state drive that isn’t huge enough to handle your files well that’s an extra cost you need to get another hard drive. And like I said solid state drives are already going to be a lot more expensive. But if you think about it, I would consider that the usual situation anyway where you would buy both you’d have the SSD as the boot drive maybe put your big heavy hitter programs on there that take forever to load and then for everything else you just shove it on the hard drive. I don’t think if you’re using a desktop computer, it probably is best to get both I don’t know. If you would really want to get just a SSD unless you know you’re not going need that data or, maybe you do already have a hard drive you don’t want to get a big SSD, you could get a very small one that’s just big enough to hold windows and just use it to boot windows purely and get that fast boot up and operating system will run fast and they just have the programs run off the drive.
Conclusion
Now there are a couple other benefits to solid-state drives that I’ll mention the form factor. Usually, you see these in 2.5-inch form factor which is smaller than typical 3.5-inch form factor on a hard drive. And that also means that they’re going to fit in really any laptop. So if you need a very fast storage, you don’t have to worry about getting the right form factor. They’re all going to be 2.5 inches you could pop it in your laptop no problem. Also a solid state drive because it’s smaller and just because of the nature of it, it’s going to generate less heat, whereas a hard drive, you know, if you have a ton of them on your computer or you have one that’s working all the time; it’s going to generate more heat and might not be a problem if you have a lot of airflows, it’s just something to consider.
So finally, I think yes you should get an SSD. I don’t think there’s anyone who could not benefit from one. I think an SSD is the best upgrade you can make for your computer better than ram better than a better CPU even literally I’m not kidding. If you have only been using hard drives your whole life and when you switch to SSD, it’s going to be like night and day, believe me! So in summary, the answer is yes. So let me know down comments section what you thank do you have an SSD, was it somehow maybe not up your expectations, I would really be surprised. So thanks so much for reading. We’ll see you next time. Have a good one!
Comments
Post a Comment