SSD vs HDD Comparison

SSD vs HDD or Hard Drive is a Question that I get a lot, so I took a few minutes to answer it for you. Enjoy 😎!!!

Which is better, an SSD or an HDD? Honestly, it’s sort of like asking which is better between a motorcycle and a semi-truck. Alright, so you might be sitting there going that it is a weird thing to say! Why would you say something like that - the answer is because they are really not that comparable! They are just different.

Performance.

When it comes to raw speed, SSD’s are faster. I see many folks comparing the sequential speed of an SSD to the sequential speed of a hard drive and say they are kind of similar but the reality of it is that unless you copy large files back and forth all day, this specification if pretty less meaningless! Am serious, it has nothing to do with the way that they will perceive the performance in the real world.

SSD’s are all about little data transactions that happen all the time all over the whole place when you are running something like an Operating System on them, an instant message come through, a program launches and needs to access a ton of little files over the place. These are the times where not haven’t to physically move a head across a disk allows an SSD to orderly destroy a hard drive in terms of performance. In system responsiveness, any modern SSD will be easily several times faster than any hard drive and sometimes much more than that. But when you have lots of data to store – that is your main concern. It’s not like playing back video or music files or looking at your archive of pictures requires blazing fast performance, so this is where hard drives still excel and by the time of writing this article $160 buys you a 256GB SSD or a 4TB hard drive. Yes, a 16 times larger hard drive. For that kind of difference in price per GB, you could literally build 2 hard drives based storage boxes and have one of them set up as an offsite backup with the money that you saved by not using an SSD based backup solution.

For mass storage of data, we are a long way away for hard drives being replaced by SSD’s.

Reliability

Hard drives are pretty reliable these days but as devices with moving parts, they will die eventually. The good news is they usually give warning signs like if your hard drive is making clicking noises right now for example, first check to make sure it hasn’t turn into a dolphin then replace it if it is still a hard drive but the bad news is that any kind of use will wear them out. For SSD’s, reading from them a lot won’t really wear them out very much especially if you keep them running cool but if you write to them heavily, you can kill a consumer grade model relatively quickly. In an environment where shock is an everyday occurrence such as in a notebook or tablet, I will choose SSD every time. In an environment where that is not the case, then reliability to me is a secondary factor after I determine my performance and storage needs which leads us to the in-between solution Hybrid Drives. These leverage the technology of hard drives and SSD’s at the same time.

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