For years hard drives have been problematic for some. Breakdowns and file fragmentation are major concerns that affect or could affect all users. Since hard drives have moving parts, they are prone to mechanical failure. File fragmentation can lead to a performance issue as the hard drive needs to move its read/write head to find the pieces of a file. A new type of hard drive that is gaining more recognition will solve some issues with the current technology.
In this post I will examine this new type of hard drive, called SSD (solid state drive), as well as some advantages and disadvantages to this type.
What is a Solid State Drive?
Many of you are familiar with flash memory cards. These are the little cards you insert into your digital camera that will store your photos. Unlike some traditional storage devices, such as hard drives, these cards contain no moving parts.
Along those same lines, a SSD (solid state drive) hard drive is comprised of memory that emulates a hard drive. Although these hard drives don’t use flash memory, they use SRAM or DRAM instead.
The image below shows a current hard drive on the left, and a SSD hard drive on the right.
There are both advantages and disadvantages to SSD hard drives, which I will discuss in the next few sections.
Advantages of SSD
There are several advantages to SSD hard drives:
- No moving parts. This means that a SSD hard drive is more durable than a regular hard drive as there is a huge reduction in mechanical failure.
- No noise. Since there are no moving parts, there is no noise generated by the drive, unless a cooling fan is used.
- Faster start up time. Since the drive doesn’t need to spin up, the drive can start up much faster.
- Fast random access for reading. Unlike traditional hard drives that move a read/write head, SSD hard drives don’t use a read/write head.
- File fragmentation doesn’t reduce performance. The seek time on a SSD hard drive is known, and constant, so having to read pieces of a file from different locations won’t decrease performance.
The above lists some of the advantages to SSD hard drives. There are, however, disadvantages to these hard drives as well, which are listed below.
Disadvantages of SSD
The following lists the disadvantages of SSD hard drives:
- SSD hard drives are much more expensive. As of this post, a SSD hard drive costs roughly $3.50USD per gigabyte compare to $0.40USD per gigabyte for a traditional hard drive.
- Lower storage space. Since the SSD hard drives are newer, the maximum capacity of these drives is 250GB, compared to 1TB for current hard drives.
- Slower write speeds. Some SSDs have slower write speeds compared to current hard drives.
- Limited write cycles. Some SSD hard drives have a limited number of write cycles that can easily be reached on very active machines.
Summary
This post discussed SSD hard drives and compared these new hard drives to the current hard drive. Although it will take many years before they become standard, it looks like in the future all computers will use these hard drives instead of the traditional ones.
Have Your Say
- Do you have an SSD hard drive? If you do, how does it compare with current hard drives?
- If price wasn’t an issue, would you install a current hard drive or a SSD hard drive?