Hard Drive is an essential element of our Computer. It does the work of saving the Non-Volatile memory. That means the memory will still be there when you turned off the computer. But, did you know that Hard Drives are also of two types:
1. HDD (Hard Disk Drive)
2. SSD (Solid State Drive)
The HDD is traditional spinning Hard Drives. They are made of metal platters with magnetic coating. This is the most common hard drive we see these days.
The SSD do the same work as HDD but, instead of using metal platter with magnetic coating, it uses flash memory chips. The main advantage of SSD is that, it can retain the data even when there is no power. These are mostly found in Ultra-books, Gaming Laptops and in Mac Books.
Let’s see how the above two hard drives are different:
1. Speed:
By speed, I mean the data transfer speed in the above two hard drives.
In HDD, since it uses the metal platter, hence it requires electrical power to fetch the data. It is the reason that, the booting of time of computers using HDD will be more than those computers which are using SSD. Other than that, its overall data transfer speed is lower than SSD.
SSD was made to overcome the data transfer limitation of HDD. Since they do not require power to fetch the data, hence the computers who uses them boots faster. The data transfer speed of SSD is very high and it also increase the performance of the computer.
2. Price:
The HDD is quite cheap. They are easily available at a very nominal price. That is why most of the computer have the HDD in them. SSD are very expensive than HDD. The price difference between HDD and SSD is too large. The price of 128Gb of SSD is similar to 2Tb of HDD.
3. Noise:
Due to the presence of metal platter with magnetic coating, HDD makes some noise. Even the best HDD will produce a small noise, when they are working. It is due to the spinning of the disk while reading the data. SSD does not have these type of problem. Since, SSD does not use the disk, hence it does not make any noise.
4. Availability:
HDD is very easily available. There are many companies like Toshiba, Seagate, Samsung, Kingston and many others which make the HDD. But, in case of SSD, it is not easily available. Since, SSD are not used by many computers owners, hence it is hardly available.
So, which one to choose?
Choose HDD if:
- You are using the computer for normal work.
- You want a large amount of storage.
- You have a tight budget.
Choose SSD if:
- You are using the computer for some research or for Gaming.
- You do not want a large amount of storage.
- You have a good budget.
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