Choosing the right storage isn’t just about comparing capacity and cost. The type of storage your computer uses matters for performance, including power usage and reliability. Solid state drives (SSDs) and hard disk drives (HDDs) are the two main storage options to consider. Here’s a quick guide on the best use for each and how to compare.

What Is an HDD?

An HDD is a data storage device that lives inside the computer. It has spinning disks inside where data is stored magnetically. The HDD has an arm with several “heads” (transducers) that read and write data on the disk. It is similar to how a turntable record player works, with an LP record (hard disk) and a needle on an arm (transducers). The arm moves the heads across the surface of the disk to access different data.

HDDs are considered a legacy technology, meaning they’ve been around longer than SSDs. In general, they are lower in cost and are practical for data that does not need to be accessed frequently, such as backups of photos, videos or business files. They are available in two common form factors: 2.5 inch (commonly used in laptops) and 3.5 inch (desktop computers).

What Is an SSD?

SSDs got their name—solid state—because they use solidstate devices under the hood. In an SSD, all data is stored in integrated circuits. This difference from HDDs has a lot of implications, especially in size and performance. Without the need for a spinning disk, SSDs can reduce to the shape and size of a stick of gum (what’s known as the M.2 form factor) or even as small as a postage stamp. Their capacity—or how much data they can hold—varies, making them flexible for smaller devices, such as slim laptops, convertibles, or 2 in 1s. And SSDs dramatically reduce access time since users don’t have to wait for platter rotation to start up.

SSDs are more expensive than HDDs per amount of storage (in gigabytes (GB) and terabytes (TB)), but the gap is closing as SSD prices decline at a faster pace that HDD prices year over year.

SSD vs. HDD: Speed

What makes SSDs an increasingly popular choice is their speed. Across the board, SSDs outpace HDDs because they use electrical circuitry and have no physical moving parts. This leads to shorter wait times when you’re starting up and fewer delays when opening apps or doing heavy computing tasks. For example, the Intel SSD D5-P5316 is a 15.36TB enterprise-grade SSD that offers over 7000 MB/s in bandwidth. The 14TB Seagate Exos 2×14, a compatible HDD, offers only up to 500 MB/s in bandwidth. That’s a difference of 14x!¹

These faster speeds lead to performance benefits in several areas, such as when logging in and waiting for apps and services to start up, or when performing storage-intensive tasks such as copying a large file. With an HDD, performance slows significantly, while an SSD can continue to work on other tasks.

Speed is also influenced by the interface used in an SSD vs. HDD that connects to the rest of the computer system when transferring data back and forth. You might have heard of these interfaces—SATA and PCI Express (PCIe). SATA is an older, slower, legacy technology, while PCIe is newer and faster. SSDs with PCIe interfaces will typically be much faster than HDDs with SATA because PCIe contains more channels to transfer data. Think of it like the number of cars that can go down a one-lane country road compared to a four lane highway.

Although no one ever complains that their computer is too fast, there are times when an HDD can make sense. If you have terabytes of files that you want to store, HDDs are still a less expensive option, although that’s changing with increasingly lower SSD prices and newer NAND technologies driving bit densities higher per NAND die. Computer storage decisions can be simplified by thinking of data as either cold or hot. “Cold” data might include the years of photos you want to keep on your laptop but don’t look at every day and don’t need quick access to. HDDs can be an excellent, cost-effective choice for cold data. At the other end of the spectrum, if you’re a business running real-time transactions, editing videos and photos and need fast access to a database of files, video clips, or models, or even just running the operating system, that’s referred to as “hot” data. The fast performance of SSDs makes them an ideal choice for when speedy access to your data is what matters most.

SSD vs. HDD: Endurance

The degree of write wear to a NAND SSD depends partly on the state of data already on the drive, because data is written in pages but erased in blocks. When writing sequential data to a relatively new SSD, data can be efficiently written to successive, free pages on the drive. However, when small blocks of data need to be updated (as in revising documents or numerical values), the old data is read into memory, revised, and then re-written to a new page on the disk. The old page, containing deprecated data, is marked invalid. When free pages are no longer available, those “invalid” pages are freed up for use in a background process called “defragmentation” or “wear leveling.” All existing valid pages in a given block must first be copied to other free locations on the drive so that the original block only contains invalid, deprecated pages. The original block can then be erased to free up space for new data to be written.

Internal NAND housekeeping processes like wear leveling lead to write amplification, where the total internal writes on an SSD are greater than the writes required to simply place new data on the drive. Since every write slightly degrades individual NAND cells, write amplification is a primary cause of wear. Built-in processes help NAND SSDs distribute wear evenly across the drive. But the bottom line is that write-heavy workloads (random writes, in particular) cause NAND SSDs to wear out faster than other input/output (I/O) patterns because they result in greater write amplification.

Good news is SSD drive level endurance is always specified while keeping the worst case random write patterns in mind. For example, when you hear a drive can do one Drive Write per Day, that means you can write at least one full drive worth of data using that random write usage everyday during the drive’s warranty period (typically 5 years).

Head-to-Head Comparison: SSD vs. HDD

When it comes to capacity, SSDs for computers are available in 120GB to 30.72TB capacities, whereas HDDs can go anywhere from 250GB to 20TB. When measuring cost per capacity, HDDs come out on top, but as SSDs drop in price, this will become less of a differentiator for HDDs. However, with SSDs, you get much more work done per server which results in fewer devices deployed to get the same output as an HDD. The result? SSDs have a lower TCO (total cost of ownership).

Reliability is defined as whether data is stored as intended, in an uncorrupted state. SSDs in general are more reliable than HDDs, which again is a function of having no moving parts. That’s because without movement, SSDs aren’t affected by vibration or related thermal issues.

SSDs commonly use less power and result in longer battery life because data access is much faster and the device is idle more often. With their spinning disks, HDDs require more power when they start up than SSDs.

SSD Cost Savings over HDDs

It is well understood that SSDs perform significantly better than HDDs. Almost as well understood is the reliability advantage of SSDs. Given these intrinsic advantages, SSDs do not need replication for performance, and they generally require much less replication for reliability. Higher SSD performance also lends itself to much more efficient data-reduction methods than HDDs. Data reduction is the ratio of host data stored to physical storage required; a 50 percent ratio would be equivalent to a 2:1 data-reduction ratio. Because data reduction allows the user to store more data than is on the physical hardware, the resulting effective capacity is increased. Compression and deduplication technologies can greatly decrease the required raw storage capacity needed to meet a “usable capacity” requirement.

Modern algorithms are optimized for SSDs, taking advantage of their performance to enable a high data-reduction ratio (DRR) while delivering high application performance. For example, the Zstandard compression algorithm from Facebook achieves compress and decompress speeds much faster than HDDs can read/write, thus allowing the use of the algorithms on SSDs in real time.² Another example is VMware vSAN, where compression and deduplication are only offered in all-flash configurations.

SATA

As we said, SSDs are divided into three general categories, the first category is SATA, which is somehow the most popular and most widely used type of SSD. This type of hard drive became one of the most popular options for home and office systems due to its lower price than other SSDs and also having the general features of SSD memory. Also, this type of drive won’t demand any special or new technology, like old traditional

HDDs this SSD need a SATA and a power cable to works, so almost all kind of old or new motherboard support it.

M.2

These types of SSDs were faster, much smaller, and more resilient, but at the same time they cost twice as SATA SSD drives, to connect this type of hard drive to your motherboards, they had to support the new M.2 sockets, this type of interface was used as ports for adding Bluetooth modules or WiFi modules.

mSATA

One of the most popular types of SSDs among laptop and notebook users is the mSATA drive, which is very popular over all other SSDs due to their very small size. Also, adding this type of socket on the motherboards of laptops was not a difficult task, also many mid-range laptops produced from 2016 until today, support this type of drive.
These types of drives were slower than their predecessors but still did not differ much in price due to their small size.

NVMe

One of the problems that users always face is being deceived by computer parts vendors, NVMe memory is very similar to M.2 memory, so it is better to be more careful when buying this form of drives because in terms of Support and performance they are very different from each other.

If you are not aware of the differences in appearance and function of these two types of memory, you may be deceived when buying.

NVMe memory is now the latest generation of the SSD family because it comes with the same small appearance as M.2 memory, but is almost 3 times faster than M.2 memory, and this type of memory is much more expensive. They are often used in industrial and expensive systems because old motherboards do not support this type of hard drive.

In the early 1990s, hardware innovations caused SSD prices to drop. However, the lifespan and size were still an issue: An SSD had a lifespan of roughly 10 years. It wouldn’t be until the late 2000s that SSDs would start to become more reliable and to provide decades of continuous usage at acceptable access speeds.

The memory chips on an SSD are comparable to random access memory (RAM). Instead of a magnetic platter, files are saved on a grid of NAND flash cells. Each grid (also called blocks) can store between 256 KB and 4MB. The controller of an SSD has the exact address of the blocks, so that when your PC requests a file it is (almost) instantly available. There’s no waiting for a read/write head to find the information it needs. SSD access times are thus measured in nanoseconds.

Note that the era of traditional hard disk drives is far from over. Shipments of SSDs are not expected to overtake HDDs until 2021. Among our own Avast users, a vast majority still have old-school mechanical drives.

So, in this Article we are going to discuss about these Issues

• What are solid-state drives use for?
• What are the different types of SSDs
• How SSD works?
• Get the best performance from your SSD

What are solid-state drives used for?

SSD adoption began in high-performance technology areas and in enthusiasts’ PCs, where the drives’ extremely low access times and high throughput justified the higher cost. But they have since become an accepted option — or even the default choice — in lower-cost mainstream laptops and PCs.

SSDs have specific benefits in the following areas:

1. Business:Companies working with huge amounts of data (such as programming environments or data analysis) often rely on SSDs, as access times and file-transfer speeds are critical.
2. Gaming: Gaming computers have always pressed the limits of current computing technology, justifying relatively expensive equipment for the benefit of gaming performance. That is particularly true for storage, as modern blockbuster games constantly load and write files (e.g. textures, maps, levels, characters).
3. Mobility:SSDs have low power requirements, thus contributing to better battery life in laptops and tablets. SSDs are also shock resistant, which reduces the chances of data loss when mobile devices are dropped.
4. Servers: Enterprise servers need SSDs to get fast reads and writes in order to properly serve their client PCs.

What are the different types of SSDs

When you shop for an SSD, you’ll encounter a number of different terms such as mSATA or PCIe. So what does it all mean? Here’s a primer on what you need to know.

To attach an SSD to your system, you need to connect it using a specific interface.

Common interfaces are:

• PCIe and NVMe SSDs
• mSATA III, SATA III, and traditional SSDs

PCIe and NVMe SSDs: PCI Express (PCIe) is normally used to connect graphics cards, network cards, or other high-performance peripherals. This interface gives you high bandwidth and low latency, making it ideal when you need blazing-fast communication between the SSD and your CPU/RAM. SSDs that use this connection type are based on the Nonvolatile Memory Express standard (NVMe), which offers higher input output per second (IOPS) and even lower latency than SATA (which we’ll get to in a moment). NVMe boasts up to 16 GBits per second of raw throughput which, thanks to multiple parallel channels, runs at up to 4,000 MB per second.

mSATA III, SATA III, and traditional SSDs: Serial Advanced Technology Attachment (SATA) is an older interface that was designed specifically for storage, with speeds up to 6 GBit/s or about 600 MB per second. SATA is slowly being phased out by NVME, which is significantly faster. However, older PCs or laptops with a hard disk drive would still benefit from an upgrade to a SATA-based SSD.

Storage Capacity of SSD

SSDs are available in all sorts of storage capacity, starting at around 32 GB and ranging up to 5 TB in the consumer space. (Of course, capacity is significantly higher for enterprise grade storage, with commensurately higher prices.)

During the short-lived era of netbooks (remember those? They were cheap, but slow and flimsy), the famous Asus Eee PC series used 1-4 GB of SSDs as storage, from which parts of the operating system were run for faster access. This was the first mainstream use of SSDs. From then on, ultrabooks and eventually desktop PCs started to adopt SSDs. Common sizes today are between 250 GB and 500 GB, which is plenty of space to hold your Windows operating system, the most common programs, and a lot of your personal files.

How an SSD works 

Like a hard drive, an SSD is used to store large volumes of data whether the system is on or off, for extended periods of time. But unlike hard drives, an SSD has no moving parts, and is more akin to a flash drive.

Instead of reading and writing data to a spinning platter. An SSD stores data on flash memory chips (sometimes referred to as NAND flash memory). In this way, an SSD is essentially no different than a USB flash drive, or the memory you’d find in a smartphone or tablet.

In addition to memory chips, an SSD also has a controller chip. The controller is responsible for knowing where data is stored on the device and can find requested data in nanoseconds — almost instantly — which makes SSDs very fast storage devices.

Get the best performance from your SSD

No matter how much money you spend, the hard disk is by far the slowest part of any computer system. Even a SATA SSD with 600 MB is slow compared to other hardware components.  Which may be capable of transferring 20-30 Gigabytes per second.

As a result, a faster NVMe SSD is probably the best investment for a new computer and a great upgrade to speed up your PC or your Mac.

To demonstrate the difference in speed. We upgraded a 6-year-old gaming PC by replacing its HDD with a SATA SSD, and we performed a series of tests. The results are astounding:

Boot time
Before: 79 seconds
After: 17 seconds

Gaming loading time (GTA V)
Before: 133 seconds
After: 25 seconds

But even SSDs need maintenance. If you have the equipment, you might as well get the best performance from it!

Our first performance tip is to never use a traditional defragmentation tool on an SSD; it’s not required and could actually be harmful.

Therefore we talked about SSD and all details about that and we hope you enjoy of reading it.

Durability of SSD:Since the SSD does not have any moving parts, it can keep the data safe in an event of dropping it. Unlike a mechanical HDD, which when subjected to a shock causes considerable manage, a SSD has the ability to withstand and handle shock better(like dropping the laptop bag). The absence of the moving parts also means that there is less occurrence of wear and tear in a SSD. Further, there is no mechanical failure in SSD meaning higher mechanical reliability. The SSD is lighter than a HDD and is resistant to shock and temperature changes.

Less Power Consumption of :A solid state drive consumes less power when compared to a HDD. This is primarily because a SSD lacks moving parts; especially does not have a motor. This is useful in storage computers and laptops where the power requirement is minimal. High-performance flash-based SSD requires only half to third of HDD power.

Better Reading and Writing Speed: Solid state drives have faster reading and writing speed. On a SSD, there is no necessity for the drive platter to spin as in a HDD. Also, there is no actuator arm for moving the read/write heads that physically seek data (for or add) to the drive. Further, data reading and writing to flash memory chips occur instantly in a SSD, allowing the SSDs to have better reading and writing speeds.

Permanent Deletion of Data: This feature is highly useful for people and situations where data security is highly cardinal. When data is either overwritten or deleted on a HDD, there is a chance of recovery. Since the new data does not fall in line with the old data, there exists a chance for some old data to remain. On a SSD, data is deleted permanently leaving no minute traces of the old data.

Less Noise: SSD produces less noise because it uses computer chips and not moving parts. Since it is non-mechanical, there is virtually no noise.

File Fragmentation: The constant read performance feature makes file fragmentation is simple and a non-issue in a SSD. Data can be accessed in an instant regardless of where it is stored.

Faster Boot and Better Computing Performance:  SSDs allow faster booting of computers as the drive is not required to spin up thereby improving the performance of the computer.

Less Heat: Because solid state drives lack motors, they generate less heat unlike HDDs. This is an important feature for people using laptops as it allows them to use their laptops with more comfort on their laps for longer time periods with the least worry about burns.

Although, the SSD had many advantages but there are certain disadvantages.