What's the difference & most importantly which one should you go for?
Computer storage drives basically have 2 variants, namely: SSD (short for Solid State Drive), and HDD (short for Hard Disk Drive).
What are HDDs
HDD in general uses conventional magnetic discs and has moving components inside. These storage drives rely on the performance of spinning disks or platters to read and write data which is directly proportional to the power usage and the resulting sound.
What are SSDs
SSD on the other hand is also a storage hardware for computers that was first developed in 2005 by Apple for its products. Over a period of time, SSDs were developed by various other parties.
These drives provide faster speed and lesser power consumption benefits. On SSDs data is not stored in a magnetic layer but on an interconnected flash memory chip. These chips are embedded permanently on the motherboard. So you won't find any moving parts in an SSD. Not surprisingly, SSDs are less noisy than HDDs and much lighter.
Both of these computer storages come with their advantages and disadvantages. So let's understand them quickly:
Advantages of HDDs
- these generally have a high storage capacity and are commonly used for storing data and performing backups
- most commonly used and most accessible
- these are much affordable (& I really mean much affordable) compared to SSDs
Advantages of SSDs
- these drives use flash memory to store information and don't have any moving components so are more resistant to shock
- comes with superior performance and improved durability, compared to HDD hard drives
- runs applications and do file transferring at a much faster speed
- less energy consumption which translates to several minutes/hours of extra battery life for your laptop
- much expensive (here too I really mean much expensive) compared to HDDs
The Conclusion
The main difference between HDDs and that of SSDs is in the technology that they used to store and retrieve data. Yes, we can agree that HDDs are in fact much cheaper and you can easily get more storage space. But SSDs, however, do provide a faster, lighter, more durable experience, not to forget the lesser energy consumption benefit that comes with them.
So, it all comes down to your needs and budget, which will dictate which storage drive will work best for you. For e.g. if you have a strong budget then you can definitely go for SSD or can still consider it if your work requires you to work on some heavy graphic processing software and applications.
Other than that if you are low on budget and also don't require the use of some heavy applications then HDD should be more than sufficient. But again consider every point and your requirement and accordingly take the decision.
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