There is a trend that has seen the use of Solid State Drives (SSD) replacing traditional hard drives in many types of electronic devices. There are as many advantages to doing this as there are disadvantages making it difficult to choose a clear winner. So let’s take a closer look at the pros, cons and a few challenges between SSD and HDD.
Advantages of (SSD) Solid State Drives
1. Speed
Probably the overall Number 1 advantage that SSD has over HDD is speed. There is no argument that the SSD, which contains no mechanical parts, is between 25 and 100 times faster than a traditional hard drive disk. What can you use all that speed for? It means boot times are greatly reduced, file transfers are much quicker and a there’s lot more bandwidth.
2. Durability
We mentioned that SSD has no moving parts. This means that drops and rattling that can result in physical or external trauma won’t always mean data loss. There are exceptions (see below) but generally speaking SSDs are durable. The trusty HDD however, can suffer damage from trauma because it has moving parts. Damage to a hard drive can result in data loss.
3. Energy-Efficient
Once again, the no moving parts vs. moving parts comparison can be used to argue the energy efficiency point. SSD does not require mechanical manipulation to become operational. HDD uses more power in order to spin the magnetic platter used to read, write and store data. As a result, HDD can overheat where SSD stays cool as a cucumber in all functions.
Disadvantages of (SSD) Solid State Drives
1. Lifespan
The top disadvantage to SSD over HDD is how long they last. It is known as the write cycle and there are only so many times you can erase and rewrite data on a solid state drive. Each time this process is completed, cells in the SSD decay. They continue to decay until the drive cannot be used anymore. Most likely, it will not last as long as your desktop machine will.
2. Cost
If you were measuring the cost per GB of space, the SSD is a lot more expensive than HDD. The simple math points to SSD being twice the cost of the same amount of HDD storage space. In other words, computers equipped with Solid State Drives are going to be more expensive than conventional hard drive systems.
3. Storage
The current marketplace has SSDs with limited storage space. The capacity of computers with Solid State Drives is typically 128GB-480GB. Solid state drives can go up to 4TB, but the device cost goes up considerably in relation to the SSD storage capacity.
We Said There Were Challenges, Too
The most difficult challenge of SSD over HDD is related to data recovery. Samsung SSDs are one of the most challenging simply because many of them have encrypted onboard controllers. If the controller fails, data recovery is impossible. Based on our experience with data loss, we would say that HDDs are better than SSDs.