10 differences between ssd and hdd. What is the difference between SSD and HDD and which is better? Which SSD Company to Choose

In modern personal computers and laptops, two types of hard drives are used: traditional disk drives (HDD) and solid-state drives (SSD). How do they differ from each other? Which is better SSD or HDD?

How HDD differs from SSD

HDD (often called "hard drive") is a disk drive in which information is digitally recorded on aluminum disks. To read data from them, the disk spins up, and the magnetic head moves along its surface.

An SSD is a hard drive that has no movable parts. The data in it is recorded in memory chips (in their structure, they are similar to ordinary flash cards or microcircuits that are located in RAM). At the same time, a higher memory bus bandwidth is provided (and, accordingly, access to stored data), and due to the absence of a spindle in the design, such disks are more energy efficient than HDDs, which makes them optimal for use in portable laptops.

Modern SSD manufacturers are doing everything to make these devices work even faster and several times longer. This is achieved by compressing information or transferring it from one memory slot to another.

Table: Comparative characteristics of HDD and SSD

Video: HDD or SDD - which is better

There are pros and cons for both HDD and SSD. Traditional hard drives are reliable, inexpensive, but make noise during operation and are not energy efficient. SSD - the price is higher, consume a minimum of energy, provide high access speed.

A lot of people ask the question - "why do we need ssd?". Some 5-6 years ago, there was simply no alternative to a conventional hard disk drive (HDD). He coped with all possible tasks: storing huge volumes of video files is easy, recording hundreds of gigabytes of music is not a problem, remembering the contents of thousands of small files was also not something supernatural for him.

This was until a certain point, or rather, until 2009, when the technology for creating SSD drives appeared. And what then was the point in creating some kind of "other" technology, instead of a long-proven technology, you ask? I'll make a reservation right away, if you think that there is no difference between them, or it is insignificant, you are mistaken.

As it turned out, the hard disk has a number of disadvantages that cannot be solved simply by improving the technology for creating an HDD. Here a fundamentally different approach to the creation of a device capable of storing huge amounts of information suggested itself, and most importantly, to quickly write them down and also quickly give the ability to read information from oneself.

The impossibility of further improving the technology for creating HDD is primarily determined by it. Namely - the very "pancakes" that rotate at great speed create a tangible vibration (for a test, try to take a working "screw" in your hands). In addition, the read head is so close to these disks that the slightest blow to the case - and bad sectors may appear.

For the same reason, it is better not to work HDD in any position other than horizontal. Of course, we cannot say that hard drives are not improving at all now: manufacturers are constantly playing with different numbers of "pancakes" inside, hard drives themselves are becoming more high-speed (high-speed), read and write speeds have also increased compared to older models.

And their capacity has long stepped over the "psychological" mark of 1 TB (1000 GB). But, there is nowhere to move on. Even modern HDDs still do not like low temperatures (their "comfort zone" is between +18 and +45 degrees), they are afraid of shocks, get warm during operation, create noise and take up a lot of space in the system unit. And this is the main difference between an SSD drive - it has no moving parts at all.

That is, absolutely no mechanics, but by the principle of operation it is very similar to a USB flash drive, only several times better (more reliable). In this sense, it is quite rightly called - "solid state drive". It has many more advantages than disadvantages. For example, low power consumption, since there are no motors and electromagnets in the design of the device.

SSDs are not afraid of hard handling (accidental drops, for example, on the floor from a height), they are more resistant to sudden temperature changes - that is, they can work stably even in frost (down to -10). The SSD makes no noise at all. It can be recommended to various recording studios or just people who need to be free of any extraneous noise and vibration during their work.

With HDD, of course, everything is not so "rosy". Let's say that the operation of one hard drive is difficult to catch with the "naked" ear, but imagine what would happen if 10 hard drives were installed in one computer! And each of them will from time to time emit some kind of extraneous sound - for example, clicks, which is inevitable for hard drives (at the beginning of a read operation, or when exiting hibernation, etc.).

The small size of the SSD is another significant plus (it can be installed instead of a floppy drive, for example), since such devices are often installed in laptops, and even netbooks, where the case is only a couple of centimeters thick. And even in a regular PC, after installing the SSD, there will be more space for wiring inside the system unit, and, theoretically, ventilation should be improved.

Oh yes, I forgot to say, SSDs practically do not heat up during operation, and if they do heat up, this does not affect their work in any way, so you can forget about additional cooling. And the "fattest" plus SSD - the best read / write speed... Here it is several times higher than even on the fastest HDD. An ordinary hard drive can handle large files, such as HD movies, quite easily.

Even if it is almost completely filled with such files, it will not be difficult for him to open any of them in a second. But, try to upload several hundred small files (pictures, text documents) and you will be unpleasantly surprised. After some time, the hard drive will become "pensive", will freeze, and the write speed will drop. The problem lies in the phenomenon of "fragmentation".

The fact is that the hard drive writes to magnetic disks sequentially in each cell, and the cells, in turn, are combined into sectors. Let's say you recorded 200 photos on it, then edited them, and some of them were completely deleted. At the same time, let's assume that the hard drive was already almost filled to capacity with something else.

It turns out that in the place of the deleted photo there will remain, as it were, an “empty” place (breakage). Over time, when you want to upload a couple of hundred more photos to this disk, instead of forming a single chain, information will begin to be recorded a little bit into these “empty spaces”.

As a result, when trying to find your photo, the reading head of the hard drive will start to rush chaotically over the entire area of ​​the "pancake", from sector to sector, collecting your file (photo) piece by piece, because there is no clear sequence, the file is as if scattered throughout the hard drive.

To eliminate this phenomenon even at the stage of development of the OS (operating system) Windows, in particular, a utility was developed that is designed to carry out the defragmentation process. That is, joining different parts of one file together. It is recommended that you periodically perform a defragmentation operation on all hard drives. regardless of their volume - to speed up the computer (unless, of course, you have the OS on this hard drive).

So, there is no need to do defragmentation on an SSD. It is in the case of SSDs that instead of defragmentation, you will not have to do anything, literally. Even smart Windows 7 disables this feature (only for this volume) as soon as it sees that an SSD has been installed in the computer. In addition to NAND memory modules, the SSD has a controller that allows you to write any data to any sector of the memory, after which it instantly displays information.

These were all pluses, but, oddly enough, the SSD also has its minuses. Any SSD disk has a limited number of write (rewrite) cycles of memory blocks.

If you copy, then delete, then copy gigabytes of information to your SSD every day, you can quickly ascertain his death. However, as mentioned above, SSDs are equipped with a controller that, among other things, takes care of the even distribution of information across all memory blocks, instead of concentrating on any one block (which will lead to its breakdown).

Thus, with the use of all technologies, it was possible to increase the number of write / rewrite cycles on average up to 10,000 times, and this is ≈8-13 years of work, which, frankly, is a very decent result, and it makes no sense to demand more. Let’s even take 5 years, after which time an average SSD drive bought today will most likely be already a museum piece, or something like that.

However, long-term operation is guaranteed, provided that there will be no daily rewriting of tens of gigabytes of information - HDD is better suited for these purposes. The second disadvantage of SSD is its low maximum capacity (2TB models have already appeared) and the high cost of one gigabyte, compared to HDD. How do you know how much one gigabyte of memory costs?

Yes, we just divide the cost of the device by its capacity = the price of one gigabyte. This is all about, of course, however, even according to such calculations, the difference in the cost of one gigabyte of memory can be 10 or more times! Most people take an SSD to install an OS on it, and for this, an SSD with a capacity of 60 GB or more will do.

As you can see, the difference in design between these two types of devices is enormous. I think, after reading this article carefully, everyone will decide for himself what is better - HDD or SSD.

We compared the performance of hard drives and SSDs. Let me remind you that in synthetic applications, the SSD turned out to be significantly faster. However, the theoretical advantage does not always manifest itself in practice. In this part, we'll take a look at how much faster an SSD is in day-to-day use and, most importantly, whether it's worth striving to replace your hard drive with a newfangled drive.

Comparison of performance between clean and working systems

However, since we are talking about "real" life, we will start with one interesting aspect, namely, comparing the performance of a clean system and a system with a large number of installed programs. It's no secret that a freshly delivered system without installed programs always works very quickly, and tests are taken on such systems. But we work on completely different systems: in which many applications are open, there are resident programs and modules, and the operating system itself is far from ideal. I tried to simulate such a system and compare how much worse the performance of test participants would be in it.

For comparison, the results were taken from the preliminary run, when I determined which applications to install and how to remove tests. Therefore, the system turned out to be a little different in terms of software composition, respectively, the test results may slightly differ from those given below, in the main testing. The measurements were carried out on a Seagate 5400.6 disk.

Let me remind you how the numbers were obtained. At startup, the time was measured from turning on the laptop (i.e., the BIOS test time was included in it, this time is always 4 seconds) to the moments when the blue welcome screen appears, the desktop appears, the hourglass next to the cursor disappears and, finally, the time, when the system stops actively working with the hard disk. Therefore, the results show four numbers.

When exiting the sleep mode, we measured the time from the start of the system until the appearance of the Welcome message and the window with the user icon, and ended the measurement when the system stopped actively working with the hard disk.

When going into sleep mode and turning it off, everything is simple - the time is measured from pressing the button on the screen to the moment when the laptop turns off (the indicators go out).

The test was carried out in the following order - the system turns on, then it is put into sleep mode, removed from it and turned off. This was done two or three times and then two more passes after removing other tests.

The scatter of data was everywhere, and somewhat strange. So, for example, when measuring the time to go into sleep mode for the first time, it was 13 seconds, then - about 10-11. As a rule, the time of others for measurements also dropped a little, for example, launch for the first time - 1.03, the second and then - 57 seconds. By the way, in cases where the results are unstable, I tried to give the most different figure in parentheses. Let me emphasize that these are the most deviating from the average results.

Let me also remind you (I already talked about this in the first part) that Windows 7 is better optimized in terms of working with the hard drive. After the desktop appears, you can work with the system, although it continues to load data from disk. XP in such a situation is practically uncontrollable, the "seven" responds adequately to commands, although it takes a little longer to execute them. The same with exiting hibernation mode: although the system continues to work with the disk for a long time, it is still possible to use it.

So, let's see how the performance of the system will change after a large number of applications are installed in it, incl. applications with resident modules (antivirus, Nokia software, etc.). By the way, they made the partition much heavier - from about 17 GB (pure Windows 7) to 32.5 GB.

The start has become slower by an average of 10 seconds, but the disc is spinning for a very long time - two minutes instead of one. The 7 can optimize the boot process, unlike XP, which tries to load "everything at once" and goes crazy (this is just a textbook case when the disk works, but the data transfer from it is minimal).

Going to hibernate is predictably longer: after all, a lot of programs that I installed use different agents and resident modules, plus, they probably just clutter up the system. Nevertheless, the difference is impressive - the system sleeps twice as long. Completion of work also took longer - after all, you need to send a close command to all resident programs and wait for a response. I want to draw your attention to the fact that when the programs were closed, the window did not appear, that the system could not stop this or that program, everything closed by itself. In my opinion, this difference is critical, since all this time you have to wait for the system to finish working in order to assemble the laptop. 10 seconds is to get up and collect the rest of your things, 31 is to get up, get yourself together and wait twenty seconds.

Thus, a clean system performs basic activities about twice as fast as a working one. The difference is especially noticeable when you put the system “from scratch”, and then put applications on top of it. In my opinion, various kinds of optimizations (defragmentation, transferring data to the beginning of the disk, etc.) help slightly, but it is difficult to achieve a significant difference. There is also a more radical way: manually prohibit the start of some programs and operating system modules, then the loading time will be reduced.

File copy speed

Transferring and copying files is perhaps one of the main tasks, where you can clearly see how fast a particular disk is. In addition, one of the most noticeable: here most often the user sits in front of a laptop and waits for the copying to be completed. In addition, these figures can be used to indirectly estimate the download speed of programs. Data taken from basic benchmarks of the Seagate 5400.6 drive, hereinafter C and D stand for partitions on the drive.

Let me remind you that resident programs are running on the working system, including antivirus. The film (a single file) was copied in almost the same way, when copying archives, the difference is already noticeable, for documents the difference is even more noticeable. Moreover, a difference appeared on the working system, from where and where the files are copied, it is also noticeable for all schemes. We will not draw any conclusions about the unzipping process for now, because very wide spread on the working system.

Finally, a very strange and incomprehensible situation with erasing files. In this situation, it is difficult for me to draw conclusions, below we will look at the results of other participants. Moreover, the situation repeated itself, but with incomprehensible quirks, sometimes erasing took 20 minutes, sometimes 30. The conductor erases everything quickly, in seconds.

Comparison of hard drives and SSDs in performing work tasks

Well, let's see how the participants of our test behave in real applications, and whether the SSD will be able to maintain its advantage over hard drives.

Create and deploy a disk image

As a first test, I could not resist and took what I had to do during testing - creating and deploying archived images of a disk partition. The test is performed outside the operating system, plus archiving ... In general, let's see who is faster here.

7200.2 is a bit faster than 5400.6, for some reason it is significantly ahead when archiving. SSDs are twice or more faster than hard drives. He is especially good at deploying a clean system, here he is almost three times faster.

Starting up, shutting down the system, and leaving and waking up from sleep mode

Now let's see how much time it takes to start and shut down the operating system on various media. For some reason, many consider the system start time to be the most important indicator. It seems to me that these are relics of the times when people worked in the office at stationary computers and turned them off at night (however, this practice is still widespread now). Indeed, the standby and hibernation modes are not needed in this case, the shutdown speed is not important, because by starting the shutdown process, you can go home. All that remains is the loading time, since when you come to work and start your computer, you have to wait until you can play solitaire.

When it comes to laptops, and it is about working with them, the situation is a little different. I personally turn off my laptop about once every two weeks, when the system starts to behave badly from constant sleep and hibernation. And even then, more often not “I rebooted the laptop”, but “the laptop rebooted” (and goodbye data from running applications). In all other cases, I put the laptop into standby (when it is running on AC) or hibernating (when running on battery power, so as not to waste it). Accordingly, the time of entering and exiting sleep mode is more important for me. In addition, this mode has two important advantages over shutdown: firstly, the system starts up much faster, and secondly, all the necessary applications are already open, and work is exactly where you left off last time. This is very convenient and saves significantly more time than migrating from hard drives to SSDs.

However, we have an article just about their comparison, and this is what we will do. First, let's compare how a clean system got started here.

SSD is significantly faster at system startup. Moreover, as I already noted, the disk access indicator does not light up all the time (unlike the HDD), i.e. the SSD is not the bottleneck, the system takes some time to digest the data. The first time he had a failure for unknown reasons, the rest of the times the system started in the same time - 24 seconds. SSD is faster in other disciplines as well, somewhere significantly, somewhere not very much, if we assume that it is "not very much" by a third.

In the struggle of disks, 7200.2 finally got ahead a bit. As you can see, with it the system will start up and exit hibernation a little faster. Moreover, the advantage is stable, albeit small - you will save 2-4 seconds.

Let's see what happens if we use a working system.

I’ll make a reservation right away that “long” means more than two and a half minutes. It felt like in different cases this time was somewhere from three and a half to five minutes. But the activity of the disk has almost no effect on the work.

The hard drives are very close, the difference in performance is impossible to notice. It is possible that the new 7200 rpm hard drive will give slightly better results, but how much? Give me a sec? At the same time, the spread of results sometimes reached 5-6 seconds. That is, as you can see, on a production system, the difference in disk performance is leveled. Perhaps it will manifest itself in some specific tasks (they say that in some cases of encoding a video disc is very important), but when performing standard tasks, the difference in numbers is insignificant.

SSD starts up quickly, goes into hibernation quickly (plus, which is important, at the time when the system writes data to go into hibernation, the laptop can already be collected in a bag, no need to wait), it turns out ... not much faster in numbers, but that's all for me it seemed that the system was working faster with him. Plus, if the hard disk is spinning constantly and you can hear a crunch from work, then from the SSD the data is read in portions and with pauses. Shutting down the system is about the same everywhere, but I think that the process is just not so dependent on the disk subsystem.

Let's bring all the data into a single table. For each drive, the first column is a clean system, the second is a working one.

Everywhere time has approximately doubled. Moreover, it is exactly twice - regardless of whether the initial value is small or large. Therefore, if you want to get the fastest possible system, then you need to not only upgrade the drives, but also pay attention to optimizing the system itself, and most importantly, select applications that will work. It's much cheaper and can also pay off pretty good dividends.

File copy tests

Well, let's move on to the most, in my opinion, interesting tests - tests for copying data. We are interested in these tests for two reasons: firstly, this is exactly the case when the speed of the disk subsystem determines the time spent, and secondly, from these data it is possible to indirectly determine how quickly applications will start and open files: after all, these are also operations reading from disk. They can be used to estimate the speed of disks and SSDs in daily mode, when, for example, they launch an application or open a file.

Let me remind you that files were copied from one disk partition to another, i.e. disk and read and write data.

* This is from D to C. C to D copied for 3.45
** This is in C. It will unzip to D at 5.11.
*** the conductor erases everything in a second or two

Honestly, I don’t know why we got such numbers when erasing files on 5400.6. Moreover, the results jump very significantly. I have an idea that software (for example, antivirus) is to blame, but, on the other hand, the system is identical for all drives. Also, I could not explain why the 7200.2 copies faster from C to D, while the 5400.6 does the opposite. Finally, it is not clear why there is such a difference in copying archives from SSD.

In general, it can be seen that for all drives the speed depends on the file size, although the SSD has almost no difference between a movie and a set of archives (only a strange dependence on where it is copied has appeared). The closer the process of reading and writing to linear, the higher the speed. In absolute numbers, the SSD drive is in the lead by a wide margin: we are talking most often about three to four times the superiority. Everything that is called "flies". In the most difficult category, a set of documents, the gap is even more significant.

By the way, since we are talking about comparison, please note that 5400.6 copies a large volume much faster, almost for a minute. Yes, and unzipping is faster on average (although unzipping the time jumped a lot). In copying files 7200.2 failed to come out ahead, although I was counting on it.

However, the schemes under consideration have a peculiarity: data is read from the disk and immediately written to it - from one partition to another. But what if you look at the cleaner case: is the data read-only or write-only? To do this, we have created a virtual disk in the computer's RAM and will check how the numbers differ when working with a obviously very fast drive in RAM.

Figures are given in film / archive / documents format

The results of copying data from a virtual disk to a physical one raise the darkest suspicions: is writing consistently faster than reading? It seemed to me that this does not happen. Moreover, the SSD even loses to the 5400 in this test.

If we compare the data with the table above and accept (well, suddenly) that caching has nothing to do with it, then we get funny data: how much faster is it to first copy the entire file into RAM, and then write it to disk, compared to simply copying from disk to disk. A movie on 5400.6 using a virtual disk was copied in 12 + 5 = 17 seconds (that is, it was first read entirely, and then completely recorded), and when it was copied from partition D to partition C, it took 26 seconds, i.e. ... we lost 9 seconds out of 26. When copying documents, the difference is generally more than two times. I would assume that this difference is due to the fact that the disks "drive heads" back and forth when reading and writing. It remains to understand why the SSD in the scheme with copying via a virtual disk is also twice as fast, it seems to have nothing to reposition.

Well, that is where we conclude our study of file copying speed. Let's look at another aspect where it is very important to us how fast our drive is. Namely, for the installation and operation of applications.

Installing and running applications

So, let's see how big the difference is in everyday work, namely, in tasks such as installing and running programs. Basically, I tried to pick, on the one hand, applications that are used relatively often, and on the other - large packages, where the difference in installation time is significant, and which require a relatively long time for breakfast. Let me remind you that readers can offer their own versions of applications for tests.

Since most of the tests on the 5400.6 did not run, the comparison will be mainly between one hard drive and an SSD. In general, as we can see, the advantage of SSD is two to three times. True, there are some exceptions, for example, Acronis was installed in about the same time, and the difference when installing Office is not that great. Either when installing these applications, working with the disk does not play a significant role, or the application is installed in such a way that the SSD is ineffective. Pay attention to games. When installing Crysis Warhead, the difference is small, moreover, the distribution of space among the hard drives is also very strange. But HawX demonstrates an almost classic scheme.

Let's look at launching applications. In other materials, I will once again try to retest disks in this discipline on a working system. However, everything starts up easily on the new system.

As you can see, in most cases, the advantage of the SSD remains. Nevertheless, we will continue testing exactly from the point of view of application speed and invite readers to make suggestions: what exactly and in what modes to test.

conclusions

Well, let's move on to the conclusions and see who is leading in what categories.

Speed

Key Takeaway: In the vast majority of cases, SSDs are significantly faster than traditional hard drives. The advantage is from two to three times - this is a lot, the gap is simply huge. Thus, the results of synthetic testing were generally confirmed, although the advantage of SSD there was even more significant. However, this is normal: the operating system and many other factors contribute to smoothing out the difference in the speed of different types of drives.

When applied in real life and in real tasks, SSDs, as you can see above, provide significant benefits. So large that no measurements are needed: it is very clearly visible and "by eye". Applications start and run faster, and the operating system is also significantly faster. Moving the system to an SSD immediately feels that it responds much faster than before. True, there is also a relative disadvantage: if earlier it was possible to turn on, for example, copying and go to do other things, now it ends too quickly to be able to switch over in time. I personally immediately noticed that the system began to go into hibernate faster and much faster - to exit it. Moreover, the difference is visible, as they say, with the naked eye. Launching applications has become faster, but "catching" it is not so easy, because for the most part, they got started quickly enough before.

In general, if speed is critical to you, and all other considerations (see below), including the ultra-high price, are irrelevant, then an SSD will eliminate one of the known bottlenecks in the system.

The size

As for the size, in absolute terms, the SSD is far behind. At the moment, even 128GB models cost a lot of money, besides, the price depends very much on the capacity: the more space, the more expensive (and much more expensive) the drive. At the same time, a 500 GB hard drive can be purchased very inexpensively.

But do you need a lot of space? In principle, 128 gigabytes should be enough for a working system, especially if you have a home computer or an external hard drive where you can drop archives and multimedia data. Well, if your work is not associated with something resource-intensive: for example, active video editing. Several working applications, a text archive, a mail database, some music, and no (or quite a bit) games and films. And when purchasing a drive with a capacity of 64 GB, you need to prepare for the economy mode. In my tests, the OS with installed applications already took 35 GB, and at the same time I did not install everything I wanted. There will be very little space left for work.

If we are talking about a home multimedia laptop, and even the only one (that is, without external storage media), then an SSD will definitely not work: its capacity will very quickly cease to be enough. In this case, the SSD will bring a speed boost, but you will have to have an additional external hard drive for data storage. However, I would venture to suggest that for most home users, the use of SSD is simply redundant.

Reliability

Another huge plus of SSD: increased reliability in everyday work. After all, it is insensitive to shock and vibration, and if you often carry your laptop with you, shock resistance is a huge plus. True, I was lucky with laptops - despite repeated drops, none of them failed. But all the laptops I had with hard drive protection, as a rule, with an accelerometer that turns it off when it falls - this could play a role. But I dropped the external disk once (unsuccessfully pulled the wire), after which a bad area appeared on it. But it worked fine after that. However, this is my personal example, of stories when, after a laptop crashed, the hard drive stopped working or lost some of the data on the Internet.

The SSD has another operational plus - you don't have to worry about shaking your laptop at all. For example, when a laptop goes into hibernate (and at this time it is actively writing to disk), you can already close the lid and pack it in a bag. It is highly discouraged to do this on laptops with a hard drive - you can damage it.

However, it was not in vain that I made a reservation about my daily work: after all, the long-term reliability of an SSD is in question. Cheap first-generation SSDs (on the same EEE PCs) are already starting to fail slowly. I think that expensive and newer SSDs will last longer, but how long? Unlike hard drives with their hard-to-predict mechanical wear and tear, SSDs have well-defined aging criteria associated with writing to a disk.

Price

The most difficult aspect, because modern fast SSDs are very expensive. About 3-4 times more expensive than a hard drive, which is also three times more capacious. Those. how much faster, so much less and just as much more expensive. Is the game worth the candle? In my opinion, it is worth it if you are actively working with a laptop. The higher speed of the laptop allows you to save precious minutes of life and nerve cells, which are wasted with the exclamations of “Why is it all that slows down ?!”. Do not forget about the greater reliability of the drive and the safety of data. In this sense, for a working system, an SSD is able to make work more comfortable, and the increased reliability of the drive is also worth something. As for general and home use, it is worth buying an SSD if you are ready to put up with the price difference: the performance will pleasantly surprise you.

When choosing a new computer, many users are faced with an abbreviation unknown to them. This abbreviation is SSD. Some computers are equipped with an SSD, some do not, and some also have an SSD and a more conventional HDD.

This confusion makes it much more difficult to choose a computer. In this article, we will try to explain in as much detail as possible how an SSD differs from an HDD and which one is better.

Difference # 1. An SSD is a solid state drive and an HDD is a magnetic disk drive.

SSD is an abbreviation of the English phrase "solid-state drive". This phrase translates as solid state drive, and it means that this drive works exclusively on the basis of microcircuits. Actually, there are no "disks" in it. There are only chips that are used to store information, a chip controller and a board.

While HDD is an abbreviation of the English "hard (magnetic) disk drive". This phrase translates to hard disk drive. It was on the hard disk, because there used to be drives and soft disks, also known as floppy disks. In the HDD, information is recorded on a magnetic disk. At the same time, a large number of additional equipment is placed in the HDD to service this magnetic disk. This is a motor for rotating the disk, a drive for moving the read heads, and a board for controlling all this equipment.

Internal SSD and HDD

In general, SSD and HDD are drives that operate on two completely different principles and their principles and follow their other differences, which we will discuss below.

Difference # 2. SSDs are much faster than HDDs.

Due to the fact that SSD works exclusively on microcircuits, these disks are distinguished by their high operating speed. An SSD drive writes and reads data much faster. Now even the most expensive and advanced HDDs cannot provide read or write speeds of more than 150 MB / sec. While even mid-range SSDs can deliver 550MB / sec, which is over 3.5 times faster than HDDs. More expensive models of SSD drives that work through PCI Express lanes can deliver more than 1000 MB / s, which is completely incomparable to the speeds of HDDs.

Thanks to this speed of reading and writing data, the SSD drive can significantly speed up the entire computer. If an SSD is installed on the computer, then such a computer turns on faster, launches programs faster and responds faster to all other user actions.

Difference # 3. The SSD can handle shock and shock better.

Everyone knows that HDD drives do not withstand shock, shock or any kind of overload. It should be dropped on the floor and you can carry it to the trash, or to a data recovery specialist. An average HDD can survive a 70 G overload during operation and a 350 G overload during storage. While for an SSD drive, even 1500 G is not a problem.

It might seem like it doesn't matter, because you don't throw your computer on the floor. But, if we are talking about a laptop, then such increased reliability will not be superfluous. The laptop is constantly exposed to minor shocks and in some cases this leads to hard drive failure.

Difference # 4. An SSD uses a lot less power.

Another important difference between SSD and HDD is power consumption. An average HDD consumes about 4W during idle time and 6W during active operation. While an SSD drive consumes about 0.5 - 1.3 W during idle time and about 0.5 - 3 W during active work. The difference is very significant, especially when it comes to a laptop.

Difference # 5. The SSD does not make any noise.

An SSD drive is powered entirely by chips and has no moving parts. Due to this, the SSD works absolutely silently.

Difference # 6. An SSD weighs a lot less than an HDD.

Heavy weight is another disadvantage of HDDs, which is especially noticeable on laptops. The weight of an average laptop hard drive is about 100 grams, while an SSD drive is at least 2 times smaller.

Difference # 7. HDD is more reliable.

But, HDDs also have advantages over SSDs. For example, HDD drives are more reliable. There is an opinion that HDD is much more reliable than SSD. In fact, this is not the case. There is a slight advantage in reliability, but the difference is not as critical as it is sometimes said. Now there are SSD drives on sale, the manufacturer of which gives them a 10-year warranty, and this already says something. In any case, you need to back up important data regardless of the type of your drive.

Difference # 8. HDD is much cheaper.

Another big difference that HDD wins is price. If we compare the cost of SSD and HDD, taking into account the amount of information they store, then HDD drives will always be cheaper.

When buying a new PC or updating the disk system of an old electronic computer, the question arises without fail: "Which is better - SSD or HDD?" Five years ago, this question did not arise. There was no alternative to an ordinary hard disk (its second name is "hard drive" or simply "screw"). Therefore, such devices were used everywhere. But now the situation has changed dramatically. Increasingly, users are paying attention to solid-state drives, which, although they are more expensive, have much higher performance.

Story

Before we find out what is the difference between SSD and HDD, let's take a short historical excursion and understand the data storage technologies that are used in each type of device.

The first full-fledged hard disk drive (official name) was made by IBM in 1973. Then its volume was 60 MB (2 plates, 30 MB each). Over the past 40+ years, such devices have evolved, and their characteristics have improved significantly - both capacity and speed. But the essence of the technology has not changed. At the heart of any HDD (from the English words "hard" - hard, "disk" - disk and "drive" - ​​in this case, a drive) is a plate covered with a ferromagnetic layer. With the help of the head, a certain orientation is created in it ("north" and "south" poles, which correspond to the logical "0" and "1"). Solid state drives were first introduced in 1978. But their widespread use began relatively recently - the first PCs equipped with them as a main drive appeared in 2009. Solid state are built on the basis of semiconductor materials, which are composed of "cells". Only two values ​​"0" (no signal) and "1" (potential is present) can be written to such a "cell". Hence the difference between a hard drive and an SSD. The difference from HDD is that it uses a different material in production (silicon versus ferromagnet) and a completely different principle of information storage (microcircuits versus wafers). This must be remembered when choosing a new device of this class.

Classic version

In order to answer the question of which is better - SSD or HDD, we will consider each device for storing information separately. Let's start with the second one. This is a classic way of organizing a disk system. The main characteristics of hard drives are as follows:

• Capacity - the amount of stored information in decimal. At the same time, this indicator in the operating system will differ, since here the calculation is already carried out in the binary system. Now on sale are available drives with capacities from 250 GB to 8 TB.
• The connection interface can be IDE, USB and SATA. The first one is morally and physically outdated and is used only on PCs that were released 5 years ago and earlier. The second is great for portable storage of information. And the third, the main one - is now used almost everywhere. Its latest version has an index "3". All devices capable of working with this version of this interface allow data transfer at speeds up to 6 Gb / s. Also, SATA has a special version with the "m" index, which is used only on laptops and netbooks.
• As noted earlier, it depends on the type of interface being used. The higher it is, the better.
• Rotational speed of the plates. Now on sale there are models with 5400 and 7200 rpm. in a minute. The higher this indicator, the higher the performance.

These are the main ones. To answer the question of which is better - SSD or HDD, you need to consider the parameters of solid-state drives. Which will be done further.

Know-how

There is no other name for an SSD as know-how. These devices went on sale 5 years ago. Immediately constraining factors were their high cost and small size. But now the situation is gradually changing. Increasingly, they can be found on stationary computers and laptops. Their main characteristics are as follows:

• The capacity is the same as that of hard drives. Models from 32 GB to 1 TB are now available.
• Manufacturing technology can be from 19 nm to 26 nm. The smaller, the faster the performance, but at the same time, the number of cell rewriting cycles is reduced.
• Connection interface. All of them are similar to those previously shown for HDD, except for IDE, which is not used for SSD.
• The number of rewriting cycles. It can be from 1000 to 5000 cycles. The higher the value, the longer the SSD will last.

Based on the above, you can easily give an answer to how HDD differs from SSD and which one is better.

Drive Comparison

Comparing the performance of each of the drives, it can be noted that solid-state drives have a higher data transfer rate. This is provided by the technology itself. Microcircuits in this regard are better than magnetic plates. This is where the advantages of this type of device end. If we compare the cost and size of the drive, it turns out that at a price of 40-50 USD, you can buy either 32 GB

SSD or 160-250 GB HDD. Hence the choice of most users. For the same cost, more volume is better than performance. Also, the maximum capacity of a HDD is 8 times more (1 GB versus 8 GB).

What is better and where?

Now let's figure out which is better - SSD or HDD - in each case. For multimedia stations and office PCs, hard drives with a capacity of 160-320 GB are perfect. And the price is small, and this size will be enough for the tasks being solved. The situation is similar with netbooks and entry-level laptops. But high-performance mobile computers would be better equipped with a solid-state drive with a size of 128-256 GB. Gaming PCs and servers must be equipped with 2 drives. One for systems and programs is STS. And the second is a hard drive, which will store user data. This will allow you to get both high performance and the required volume for storing information.

Outcomes

Within the framework of this article, a comprehensive comparison of HDD and SSD was made, their main characteristics are indicated, recommendations for their use are given, following which, you can easily choose the storage device that suits your needs best.