The Knockdown, Drag-out Fight Between Hard Drives and Solid State Drives

We've talked about hard drives in the past, and what causes them to fail. Today, we're going to discuss the difference between the standard spinning drive and a newer technology, solid state drives (or, SSDs).

Spinning hard drive on the left, solid state drive on the right.

Your hard drive in your desktop, and most likely laptop, is a platter of magnetic discs that spin with a laser that reads back and forth to capture the data. The spinning hard disk drive is ancient technology in computer terms; in fact, the IBM computers from the late 50's used twenty inch platters that held an incredible 3.25 megabytes of data -- about the size of a three-minute mp3. Though our storage capacities have increased since then, the technology remains the same. Now, most desktops have a 3.5" hard drive, and laptops generally contain a smaller 2.5" drive.

In the early-2000's, solid state storage became more capable and now your iPads, smartphones, tablets and even some laptops use what is called solid state or SSD storage as their main drive. Solid state drives contain no moving parts with the storage based on flash memory chips, much like what you find in thumb drives (except faster and more stable than thumb drives, but that's another discussion entirely). 

Because SSD's do not have to spin a disc to read data, you find response times much faster than a hard drive. Some computers with SSD's installed can boot in under 10 seconds! If you've ever had a hard drive fail because of the read/write mechanism, and lost all your files, you know how frustrating that is. However, because SSD's have no moving parts, your device can survive a tumble without worrying about the hard drive failing.

Unfortunately, it's not all roses and rainbows -- solid state drives do have their downfalls. Namely, price and storage capacity. Whereas hard disc drives can be had in upwards of 4,000GB (or 4TB), SSD's currently top out at about 1TB, and even then they are incredibly expensive. It's a newer technology, and it's harder to increase storage capacity in flash memory chips, so solid state drives are unfortunately much more expensive than their spinning disc counterparts as well. It's not uncommon to find a 1TB (1,000GB) hard drive for under $100. Most 256GB sold state drives run close to that price point. For people who need to store a lot of data, such as people who do a ton of video editing, HDD's are still the way to go.

For others, though, SSD's can give their existing system markedly improved speeds in boot-up time and data reading. It really depends on your individual needs on which storage solution you should use in your PC.