When it comes to reads, it beats the HDDs by staggering numbers. That’s because out of the factory the SSDs have blank pages you can write to but overtime for your write operations, it takes a lot more time as there’s the task of finding blocks of memory that can be used, flushing out and then writing on to it. In the real world scenario when you purchase an SSD it’s going to be fast for both reads and writes but over time it will degrade. First, yes SSDs are faster, but that’s for reads. When considering the speed of both the options you really have to consider a few things. Now that we have the basic ground laid out, let’s get to the comparison. The SSDs look like a RAM with a grid of electrical cells on it to facilitate fast data transactions. They are just like your RAM (which is faster than your secondary storage device) but they have the added bonus that they don’t lose your data when power isn’t supplied. Instead of being made of a magnetic core, the SSDs rely on semiconductor chips to store data. SSDs or Solid State Drives, on the other hand, have no moving parts (compared to the rotating head on the HDDs) and are based on the Flash Storage technology which makes them inherently faster than HDDs (hold your horses as I’ve still not made the final call). And there’s a rotating head which locates each smaller unit (or sector) and reads original writes to it. The idea is that the single unit is divided into smaller units where data actually gets stored. What does HDD stand for? HDDs or Hard Disk Drives store data in the magnetic core (the disk) and that core is divided into tracks and sectors which is mostly the nerdy stuff that you can read up on yourself. Let’s Get Started by Talking What HDDs and SSDs Actually Mean?
So what really are the areas that you need to compare flash storage vs hard drive to make a purchase decision?Īnd these are the ones that we’ll compare the both against. And judging by the title of this post I’m sure almost all of you would have made a biased decision that it’s the SSD which win. When looking into the storage space, there are some key things that you must be considering. The initial adopters generally have to pay a greater price to use the new technology and then the prices go down gradually.
This aspect holds true for almost everything in tech, be it your smartphones, LED Panels, and everything imaginable.
And then you obviously have the good old memory cards and USB sticks which also come under flash storage.Īt first, the per-gigabyte cost of even hard drives was too high, but as the technology got more mainstream and accessible, the prices came down. To name a few we started way back with the floppy disks then the optical drives, then came hard drives and then the faster flash storage options. Now, with the ever going changes in technology, this space of data storage has had numerous options come in and go. While your RAM and Processor Registers are mostly used for computation and loading up applications, the secondary storage devices are used to persist data or store data in laymen’s terms. That’s where secondary storage devices come in. Also, if you turn off the power supply, it’s gonna forget everything that it was doing or holding on to. Unless you explicitly specify what it must do, it just sits around using power. So your computer is the dumbest thing ever. What’s an SSD and What’s an HDD?īefore answering that question let’s get to some fundamental Computer Science stuff.
We’ll get into the nitty-gritty details but first, let’s get to the basics. While there are so many things that fit this description, we’ll limit our scope to SSD vs HDD. Storage is one of the primary needs for computing and every evolution that technology has undergone, has brought with it a newer, faster, and more performant variant of the same component in a smaller package.