Which is better HDD or SSD - when you are going to upgrade your computer or assemble a new system unit. Then at such a moment you are probably faced with a choice of what to choose from the accessories of a solid-state drive SSD or a hard drive HDD. How do you determine which is the best of these storage components? This question cannot be answered unequivocally, so it will be easier to deal with this task together with you.
What is the difference between these devices?
We hope that almost any computer owner has an idea of \u200b\u200bthe hard drive and knows what functions it performs. This mechanism on hard magnetic disks is designed to store the accumulated information in electronic form. It is made in a small metal case, inside it is a spindle motor for rotating a set of magnetic plates.
It is from these plates that information is extracted or it is recorded on them using a block of magnetic heads. The rotation speed of standard discs is 5400 and 7200 rpm, depending on the type of device. Winchesters come in two formats, 2.5, which is mainly installed in laptops and 3.5 inches for personal computers. In addition, there is also a solid state drive SSD, which we will talk about below, so nevertheless, which is better than HDD or SSD?
Positive and negative characteristics of these storage devices
Let's try together to find out the advantages of SSD over HDD:
1. The main advantage of a memory-based SSD is its high speed of information conversion. Conventional hard drives have write / read speeds in the range of 120 Mbps, while solid state hard drives can reach speeds of over 550 Mbps. Especially when the SSD works in a PCI Express parallel bus interface. The speed of obtaining information from a solid-state device is within 0.25 ms, and from a standard hard disk it is about 4 ms. Here you can see for yourself what a big difference between them.
2. In the design of hard drives, there are parts of a movable read head. Therefore, during operation of the device, they make quite a lot of noise, in contrast to absolutely silent solid-state drives. In addition, after a while of hard work, it starts to heat up decently. While a storage device based on a microcircuit works without any heat generation at all. Already now, without going too deeply into the differences between these two devices, one can compare which is better than HDD or SSD.
3. The negative aspects of the HDD include intolerance to vibration and sharp shocks. Mechanical influences of this type can erase some part of the information or the device will stop working altogether. "Solid state", however, perfectly resists all kinds of vibrations, which is due to its special design.
4. Therefore, we can conclude from this: for a laptop - this is a great option, especially when you often travel in a car. Although, if we approach the comparison in principle, then unambiguously state which is better than HDD or SSD not worth it. Subject to simple operating rules, avoiding power surges, both of these devices can work for a long time.
5. As for the solid-state information keepers in terms of weight, they are practically weightless, somewhere in the region of 50 grams. Meanwhile, hard drives on magnetic disks have a significant weight. In addition to this, this feature is very relevant for portable computer models. What's more, SSDs do not require a lot of power consumption, unlike a standard computer hard drive.
Comparative characteristics of HDD and SSD
| Parameter | HDD | SSD |
| The cost | One of the cheapest memory options. | High cost (3-4 times higher than that of a traditional hard drive). |
| Reliability | The average lifespan of the hard drive is 5 years, it is resistant to power surges, but not resistant to vibration. | Depends on the number of write cycles, but with active use, the service life is lower than that of HDD, unstable to power surges, and vibration resistant. |
| Access speed | About 250 Mbps. | There are models with access speeds over 1 Gbps. |
| Energy efficiency | Low, since working with the disc is accompanied by its rotation and the operation of an electric motor. | When there is no access to the disk, it practically does not consume electricity, in the active mode the consumption is 10 times lower than that of the HDD. |
| Heat dissipation | Moderate, heats up to 50C ° with active work. | Practically does not heat up during operation. |
| Noisiness | No less noise than the cooling system. | Quiet in any operating mode. |
| Dimensions and weight | Quite cumbersome. | It weighs 2–4 times less than HDD. |
| Capacity | You can buy the 8-16 TB model. | Mostly there are 64-512 GB models, models over 1 TB are very expensive. |
One would assume that HDD drives are losing ground in favor of modern SSDs in all characteristics, but here you can still argue:
- computer hard drives cost significantly less than solid-state drives and have much higher storage capacity. If we compare these devices in terms of volume, then this is the picture. Hard with a storage capacity of 2TB will cost within five thousand rubles. And a solid-state one with a capacity of 500 gigabytes will pull 10,000 rubles;
- if you need a drive for storing data, then on sale you can purchase a device with a volume of 1 TB to 1.2 TB. Although by today's standards, this is quite small. Hard disks on magnetic platters are available with capacities of 8, 10, 12 TB, there are even more, such disk space is too much for an ordinary user;
- in case of careless actions, you erased any file on your hard disk, then using special programs you can restore it without any problems. Such manipulations cannot be performed on an SSD.
By the way, here's an informative video overview on the topic:
HDD or SDD - which is better
Final conclusion
What decision can be made on this topic when comparing outdated and modern technologies? AND which is better than HDD or SSD? In the event that you are not going to store a large amount of electronic data, then a separate advice. Provided the rational use of free disk space. That is, by watching a movie, for example, or finishing a game, you simply delete them.
Under such conditions, it would be quite advisable to purchase an SSD with a capacity of up to 256 GB, this volume will be enough to install the OS and the necessary files. If you really love games, then you definitely need a solid state drive. It is great for this, while providing high loading speed for games and all related modules.
There is an opinion, of course, purely personal, that at present, the most optimal option for the average user is the purchase of an SSD and HDD. If you get yourself a small solid state device with a capacity of 120-240 GB, you will have the opportunity to put an OS and a couple of games there.
On the hard drive, in turn, you can store a film library, music files and other data. This variation will cost you significantly less than purchasing one SSD with capacities from 500GB to 1TB. Here, of course, it all depends on your budget, if the funds allow, then it will be possible to take all drives in SSD format for a PC.
Do you need expensive SSDs?
Which to choose: SSD or HDD? We compared the two types of drives and found the advantages of each type of device.
HDD and SSD: different principles of work
HDDs and SSDs function in completely different ways.
Classic HDDs consist of one or more magnetic disks and readheads. The magnetic disks rotate during operation. The reading head (mounted on a lever) moves over the surface of the disc and recognizes the stored data.
An SSD, on the other hand, consists of a large number of separate Flash drives that are built into the drive in the same way as in USB sticks. This means there are no moving mechanical parts in the SSD.
SSD advantages
It seems that for several years now, SSDs have been slowly but surely bypassing classic HDDs in all respects. This is due to the large number of advantages:
HDD advantages
In addition to many advantages, SSDs also have some disadvantages. We've put together a piece of information about how HDDs are superior to popular SDD drives.
- HDDs are currently much cheaper than SSDs. However, you can also save money by purchasing a new type of storage device. To do this, just take a look at ours and sort the models by price-quality ratio.
- Classic hard drives offer much more storage space. Here volumes up to 10 TB are possible, while SSDs are still limited to 2 TB.
- If data is lost on the HDD, as a rule, there is some hope of salvation: it is often easy to recover information with the help of special utilities. When it comes to SSDs, data can be very difficult to rescue.
Our tip: use SSHDs that combine the advantages of HDDs with the speed of an SSD.
Greetings!
HDD vs SSD - how are they different and which one is better?
Surely, when buying a new PC or laptop, many noticed that the type of storage device installed in it - HDD or SSD - can have a significant impact on its price. What is their difference?
Is it worth taking an ssd drive for a computer and what are the advantages of such drives? In this article I will try to answer the questions related to choosing a hard drive for different systems and needs.
The main differences between HDD and SSD
For starters, it should be noted that despite their common purpose, SSD and HDD are completely different technologies. In fact, the difference between the two is as great as the difference between a CD and a USB stick. But what is really there, by and large, the HDD - this is a kind of CD, only made of a different material and installed in its own drive. And an SSD is a large, roomy flash drive, with an especially fast data exchange rate, increased capacity and, if we are not talking about an external drive, then with a slightly different way of connecting to the motherboard.
Unlike a hard drive, an SSD does not carry any moving parts. HDD devices are old, analog technologies, while SSDs are new, digital ones.
So what are the advantages of more expensive, modern SSDs versus older hard drives?
At firstThe SSD is smaller and lighter, which is especially useful when assembling compact systems such as laptops and tablets.
SecondlySSDs have a much higher data transfer rate than analog drives, because nothing needs to be recorded or searched for by mechanical action. HDD takes time to distribute data on the plane of the plate, as well as to find information already recorded on it. Especially if you are searching in parts of the disk that are very distant from each other. For this reason, loading the operating system is somewhat slower, files open longer and the response speed of programs is slower. But saving and reading data from a solid state drive occurs almost instantly.
The speed is usually limited only by the bandwidth of the interface. Gamers may find this useful so that they do not have to wait for a long time to download and install games, as well as load levels in them.
ThirdlyAs mentioned earlier, there are no moving elements in SSDs. As a result, solid state drives are quieter and more reliable - they are shock and drop resistant. This means that an SSD is better suited as an external storage device for people who want to use one drive for multiple systems, or as a second hard drive for laptops.
Fourth, SSDs are characterized by lower power consumption, and there will hardly ever be any unnecessary energy savings.
It's time to talk about the disadvantages of these "big sticks"
First drawbackwhich may seem like a serious problem to many - the limited lifespan of an SSD. The point is that flash memory has a certain number of rewriting cycles.
The rewriting cycle is the moment when the amount of downloaded data reaches the size of the drive's memory, or rather, when all the memory cells on it are full. But not in the literal sense of the word - nothing will change from the fact that you delete data and leave some space on the disk.
What matters is the total weight of the data written to it during its entire service life.
For example, I downloaded a 1 Gigabyte file, then deleted it and uploaded a 2 GB file - and that 3 GB was already written to the disk, even if some of them were deleted.
In addition, due to the peculiarities of SSD operation, when counting, you need to multiply the amount of data recorded on it by 9-10 times. Those. 3
A gigabyte is almost 30, almost a quarter of the rewriting cycle of a 120 Gigabyte disk. However, these are not exact figures, I took with a margin. In fact, it all depends on how the space on the drive was spent.
Do not be alarmed at once, on average SSDs are designed for 3 years, or even 5 years of service. Unless, of course, you download hundreds of gigabytes of data to them every day.
Unfortunately, I cannot say with certainty which drive is more durable - SSD or HDD. There are many other nuances that affect their lifespan. But in terms of resistance to external influences, the SSD clearly wins.
The second drawback is the price.
The price of an SSD can be several times higher than the cost of a hard drive of the same capacity. Surely, over time, the situation will change a little, but today it is more profitable to take such a disk for a PC as an additional one, install an operating system and some applications on it, and store everything else on the HDD.
And finally, the last problem with SSD, which will probably be solved soon, is the maximum amount of memory. SSDs appeared much later than hard drives, and so far even the best available models cannot hold as much data as a high-end HDD can fit. But this is most likely just a matter of time. You can, simply, use several storage devices at once.
This loan costs $ 11.000
Here are the characteristics
Conclusion.
At the moment, I don't think that buying a PC or laptop with an SSD would be a good idea for the average user. After all, its price is several times higher than the cost of a good old hard drive. Someone will consider the differences between these two types of drives important for themselves. For example, gamers are very fond of purchasing expensive equipment, even with a slight gain in system performance.
However, the presence of an SSD drive should not affect the speed of games, that is, the frame rate.
In general, without special need, I do not recommend buying an SSD as the only internal hard drive. But as a second drive, it may well justify itself.
Write in the comments what you have chosen or what are you going to choose ssd or hdd for yourself?
The article is devoted to the analysis of the performance of solid state drives and hard drives. An article has already been presented on our site, which details the pros and cons of an SSD. But this time I would like to focus on comparing the speed characteristics of these devices and tell in detail how great the advantage of solid-state drives is.
Quite often we hear that the superiority of SSDs in performance is not so significant - "only" by 3-4 times. For example, the maximum speed of advanced hard drives is about 160-170 MB / s, while an SSD can show about 550 MB / s. A simple calculation gives a difference of almost 3.5 times. However, the processes occurring when reading information from a carrier are much more complicated, and it is incorrect to directly compare the maximum speeds.
Test results for SSD Vertex 3 and HDD Seagate 3 TB
(clickable)
Take a look at the benchmark results for two devices using the popular CrystalDiskMark software. It will allow you to compare both types of drives in different operating modes. The first drive is an SSD from OCZ called Vertex 3, which has very high performance. The second is a modern Seagate 3TB hard drive with very high performance. We can say that some of the best representatives of each market segment are compared.
The upper left digit is the linear read rate when data is read sequentially. In this mode, almost all types of media show their maximum capabilities. The hard drive does not have to constantly move the heads, and most of the time is spent reading and transferring data. The solid state drive, in turn, transmits data in large blocks, using all channels. This behavior of devices is usually observed when copying huge files - movies, archives, DVD images. The speed difference between the two devices is 3.27 times.
The second row of numbers is read in 512k blocks. The hard drive starts to spend more time moving the heads in search of each block, so the speed decreases. SSDs have to do more computation to access different flash memory locations. Please note that the performance of an SSD is 92% of the maximum, while a regular hard drive has only 37%. This behavior corresponds to copying a set of small photographs and illustrations or audio files.
The next row is reading in very small 4 KB blocks. It is in this test that the speeds sag the most. A classic hard drive spends the lion's share of the time moving the heads in search of the necessary pieces of information, and the solid-state device performs a huge amount of calculations to find the necessary cells. As a result, the speed of the hard drive dropped 220 times, while that of the SSD only 15 times. The speed difference between the two tested devices on 4K blocks is 52 times... This mode of operation corresponds to the process of loading the operating system, launching applications and copying text documents - that is, the most frequent operations on a PC.
Now it's time to talk about parallel execution of operations. While working on a computer, many processes are running in the system - programs and applications, system utilities, services that can access the drive at any time. It turns out that several read requests can come at the same time. The hard disk is forced to process them one at a time - the heads can read only one file at a time. But an SSD has several memory chips that store information. Therefore, you can process several requests at once, and they will all be executed in parallel.
The last line just shows the speed of work on 4K blocks with a request queue equal to 32. That is, the situation is simulated when 32 files of this size need to be read at once. As you can see, the hard drive has almost no differences in parallelization, since it can receive only one file at a time, and the SSD reads data in several threads, which allows for a 5.25-fold increase in performance. The slight difference in speed for a hard drive with and without a queue is explained by the presence of the NCQ technology, which somehow orders this queue so as not to "run back and forth twice".
For the sake of objectivity, it should be noted that such a deep queue almost never occurs in real conditions. For example, when the operating system boots, the queue value is approximately four.
In other words, if in theory (according to the documentation) the devices differ by 3.5 times, then in real operations during computer operation, the difference can reach much larger values.
The right column in the program window is the results of the recording for which all of the above is true.
Comparison of the speed distribution of SSD (bottom) and HDD (top)
But that's not all. Take a look at other graphs made by HD Tune. They show the distribution of speeds over the space of the drive (blue line). The left part corresponds to the beginning of the disc, the right one to the end. If the SSD gives out the same speed on almost the entire volume, then the hard drive seriously sags by the middle of the space, and at the end it drops by more than 2 times. In practice, this means that if the operating system was installed on a full disk, or the last partition on a device, then the drive performance will be noticeably lower than declared. The same goes for the access time (yellow dots), which increases as you move towards the end of the disk space.
It turns out the initial superiority of 3.5 times in practice can result in both 100 and 200 times... And this is in comparison with the best samples of hard drives. There is nothing to say about ordinary discs with average characteristics. Therefore, buy an SSD as soon as possible.
What is SSD vs. HDD? Of course, these are beautiful numbers in various test applications, an opportunity to show off to friends and interlocutors. It has been proven by practice: solid-state drives really allow you to "revive" the system quite well. However, there are very few real "living" values. In principle, it is understandable: it is convenient to record the difference in applications specially tailored for this, and not in games and so on.
advertising
SSD models are different: slow versus fast, cheap versus expensive. And it is not always possible to equate the pairs "cheap" and "slow", "expensive" and "fast", it is enough to compare, for example, the prices for Samsung 850 EVO 1 TB and Kingston V310 960 GB. But is there a difference between SSDs of different categories in practice? The question is quite interesting and sometimes causes a lot of very heated disputes on various Internet forums.So, our task today is: no "synthetics". Absolutely. Well, so that life does not seem like sugar, the specified condition will be supplemented with one more: the processor in the test bench will operate in two modes - at the nominal frequency of 3.3 GHz (fixed, Turbo Boost is disabled) and overclocked to 4.5 GHz. As a result, thanks to our partner - Regard company, we will not only compare different drive models with each other, but also check the dependence on CPU overclocking.
Test participants
Several different drives were selected for practical testing. First of all, hard drives, where can we go without them? The final list of participants included two HDDs and four SSDs.
- HDD Western Digital Red 4 TB (WD40EFRX-68WT0N0)... Of course, the choice is not the most representative, but on the whole it may well illustrate the situation with most modern hard drives;
- HDD Toshiba MQ01ABD050 500 GB... Quite old, but still quite relevant model of the "notebook" class. Usually among users it is considered that 2.5 "form factor HDD is slower than its counterparts in" desktop "version 3.5". Its testing, apparently, is complicated by the presence of BMG car parking, which is not disabled by the usual settings of the operating system: during measurements, "outliers" were found much more often than usual - indicators significantly differing from the average, and for the worse;
- SSD GK K3 120 GB... The so-called "Chinese" SSD: one of those that can be found for sale on the well-known trading platform AliExpress and the like. Extremely tempting price tags: about 2600-2700 rubles for 120 GB, while more eminent brands "start" from the bar of 3100 rubles and above (at the time of this writing). But the level of its performance is very disappointing, judging by our tests. At that time, a conclusion was made about the suitability only for a user who does not operate with large amounts of data, let's see how correct it is;
- SSD Kingston V300 120 GB (SV300S37A / 120G)... This drive is much better known to the general public, not least thanks to the scandal. On various Internet forums, to this day, everyone who is not too lazy has been chuckling at the V300. However, it is one of the cheapest SSDs on the market and is therefore in good demand. But how much he is inferior in reality, or is it more unfounded fears, will become clear during the review;
- SSD OCZ Vector 180 240 GB (VTR180-25SAT3-240G)... This is already a solution of a class higher: the latest model, new algorithms in the microcode of the controller for data protection, an updated platform in the hardware, high speed characteristics even in conditions where others are losing ground. More details can be found in the corresponding review;
- SSD Kingston HyperX Predator 480 GB (SHPM2280P2H / 480G)... His review was released under the headline "Shaking the Foundations": unexpectedly for the masses, Kingston turned away from its beloved SandForce platform and in January this year released the high-speed M.2 NGFF drive with PCI-Express interface on a Marvell controller. Yes, not anyhow, but 88SS9293. And it is unique: the only solution on this controller available on the market.
And let Plextor show its M7e at various exhibitions for a long time, but that's all. According to the latest rumors, the M7e will start selling in the fall - when it will no longer be needed by anyone: the demand will be covered by HyperX Predator and the even faster Samsung SM951 launched at retail just a month and a half ago (it is not yet available on the Russian market).