If earlier drives for laptops were chosen in fact only by the criterion of their capacity and the level of fame of the manufacturer, then today the owners of PCs and laptops often when upgrading the hardware or buying a new device raises the question of what to prefer: HDD or SSD. This article is designed to answer this difficult question, reveal the features of both types of drives and help the user to decide on the final choice.
What is hdd and ssd?
First you need to figure out what each type of drive is.
HDD is a traditional and, in the opinion of many, somewhat outdated type of hard drive. In the mechanical design of the device, a magnetic head is used, which reads and writes information to a magnetic disk. Most often there are several disks, and the total volume of the device directly depends on their number.
SSD - a more innovative type of solid-state drives, which has recently become more and more popular. Inside such a disk there is no magnetic head, and its “stuffing” consists mainly of controllers and microcircuits. In simple terms, SSD is a “flash drive” with a huge amount of memory and increased speed.
What is the difference between hdd and ssd?
In order to identify other features of these two types of drives, in addition to those already voiced, it is worth comparing their advantages and disadvantages. So, HDD, according to experts, has the following advantages:
- Enough large possible memory
- Attractive price
The disadvantages of the HDD are currently more than advantages. Among them:
- More (compared to SSD) power consumption
- Low "performance" (in most modern laptops and PCs, HDD is the most technically weakest link)
- Heating during operation
- Vulnerability to mechanical damage
Reference! HDDs are especially afraid of shocks during operation. Having received such damage, the disk can instantly fail, so laptop owners should be especially careful with them.
As for the SSD, it is customary to single out among their positive qualities:
- High speed data writing and reading (on average no less than 4 times in comparison with hard drives HDD)
- High reliability
- Lack of extraneous noise in work, vibrations, etc.
- No need for cooling due to low heat even under heavy load
- Low power consumption, positively affecting laptop battery life.
- Low weight
Reference! Such solid-state drives are more resistant to falls, however, even they can be damaged by a strong impact.
With all its advantages, however, SSDs have a number of disadvantages, among which are:
- High price (the price tag grows even more with the growth of the volume of stored information)
- Not too long service life in case of non-compliance with the basic rules of operation
- The difficulty of data recovery in case of damage to the disk or its failure
What to choose?
In addition to the volume and the final price tag, there are a number of other (no less important) criteria for choosing the type of carrier for a laptop. First of all, attention should be paid to the data transfer interface (on modern models, this is most often SATA, on more obsolete ones - IDE). The SATA interface on the market is already encountered in several “generations”, for example, version 3.0, released back in 2009, has a data transfer rate of up to 6 gigabytes per second.
If the laptop has a non-standard size, then the size of the "slot" for a hard disk in it may be different. For example, the standard form factor for most laptops is 2.5 inches, and for PCs it is 3.5 inches. In addition to differences in width, there may also be differences in the thickness (height) of the device. Currently the most common models are 7 and 9 mm thick.
It is worth remembering that the amount of memory is an important, but not fundamental parameter, and you should definitely not rely on choosing a drive solely on it. If we are talking about the HDD, the parameter is important spindle speed. Relatively speaking, the higher this speed, the more “nimble” the device itself will be, since the hard disk, as mentioned above, is one of the most “sagging” parts of computer equipment in speed.
Reference! When purchasing a device with a high speed of rotation of the head, the user should not forget that the increased rotational speed implies a greater heating of the device, and he may need additional cooling, otherwise constant overheating can significantly reduce the service life of not only the hard drive, but also the adjacent nodes .
Another important parameter when choosing is the cache size. In this case, everything is quite simple: the larger the amount of cache memory, the better. This type of memory is used to capture information from magnetic heads and transfer it to the motherboard.
If we talk about a significant increase in the power characteristics of a laptop, then the best option would be to buy an SSD carrier. A large number of users, in addition, use SSD-drives as an additional device, embedding it with the help of special parts instead of CD-rom. This allows, with proper installation and correct operation, not only to increase the amount of laptop memory, but also to improve its performance.
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