SSD Hard Drives vs HDD

What is an SSD hard drive and what improvements does it bring ?

First of all SSD stands for Solid State Drive and HDD stands for Hard Disk Drive. You are probably familiar with USB memory sticks, well SSD can be thought of as an oversized and more sophisticated version of a memory stick and a HDD…well a HDD looks inside like an old pick-up. A disk(platter) that stores the data and an arm that read/writes it.

a) An SSD hard drive has no moving parts.
b) SSD Drives are faster in Read and Write data

While HDD hard drives have the data stored on platters and use a mechanical arm with a read/write head to move around and read the data , SSD hard drive have the data stored in microchips thus improving the speed immensely.

Because of its mechanical limitations a HDD drive cannot perform a normal read/write operation as fast as an SSD hard drive which has no moving parts. Same like the platters on a HDD drive the data on a SSD drive is stored in a non-volatile NAND-based flash memory. What is non-volatile? It means that the data will still be there even after you shut down and start your computer again.

So what reads the data if there are no moving parts, thus no arms with read/write heads? The data is read by an embedded processor that works like a brain and which is called a controller. Its functions are to decide how to store, retrieve, cache and clean up the data. The way in which all of this is done and at what speed it can be done is what separates a high performance controller from a not so good one.

While there is no doubt about the performance that an SDD drive can bring to your system, you also need to take into account that this type of technology is still relatively expensive.

If you need a big size storage for your data, a good way of achieving nice speed and keeping the costs down is to buy a dedicated SSD drive that you will use only for the operating system and programs and to have a normal HDD to store your data.