The Hard Disk Drive (HDD)
Still the best bang for buck. Because hard drives have been around for so long, storage capacity continues to increase while costs are kept low. This constantly improving technology allows the traditional hard drive to get more storage packed in than ever before.
They’ve come such a long way from 1956 – 2 feet long with only a few megabytes, to now, cramming 10 terabytes into something that can almost fit in your pocket. The cost per gigabyte has decreased by a whopping 2 billion times in 60 years.
Inside the hard drive you’ll find lots of moving parts, they are essentially a mechanical device and will eventually wear out. In the meantime, the sizes are standardised for ease of repair, if something were to go wrong before d-day.
They can also be power hungry, produce heat, make a lot of noise and aren’t as fast as an SSD. However, with all the competition that exists, the future holds a cheaper, smaller, high capacity choice.
Solid State Drive (SSD)
Becoming much more common, standard even, in many devices is the solid state drive.
The main difference with the SSD is the fact that there are no moving parts. They have a massive performance advantage – faster to start up, shut down and transfer data.
SSD’s are smaller, require less power, are quieter and more reliable. Because of this, computers can be smaller, thinner, lighter and have a longer battery life than traditional hard drives.
Similarly, to hard drives, SSD manufactures are constantly working out ways to store more data on a smaller form with increased speeds.
SSD’s can fail, though for different reasons than your traditional hard drive. There are only so many times it can be written to and read from and each memory bank does have a finite life span. But, generally speaking, they should outlast the life span of your computer, it’s just worth knowing it could be a problem on occasion.
What does the future hold?
There’s so much research, so many improvements happening all the time and both have their benefits, but SSD’s are a lot more affordable than ever before. If you are using a computer with a traditional hard drive and it’s slow, you will notice a HUGE difference in performance if you upgrade to an SSD and it’s only a couple of hundred bucks.
Let us know if you’re running slow and we can make some suggestions.
