There are many things you should consider before upgrading or purchasing an external hard drive. You should also consider the type of hard drive that you would like. Your operating system and data are stored on your hard drive. An external hard drive can be purchased that allows you to store your data and bring it along with you. Is it better to go with a traditional hard drive or a solid-state drive instead? This article will explain the differences between an HDD and an SSD, including their speed, performance, price, and other important details.
What’s an HDD?
How an HDD looks from the inside
Hard disk drives (HDDs) store data on magnetic platters or disks. These platters are topped by an arm that reads and writes data at speeds up to thousands of revolutions per minute (RPM). Your hard drive’s performance will depend on how fast these platters spin.
HDDs typically store 40GB (gigabytes), 16TB (terabytes), or more. These days, many hard drives are connected to computers via a SATA III connection. This connection can also affect a hard drive’s performance.
What is an SSD?
How an SSD looks from the inside
An SSD is not like an HDD. It has no moving parts. It is composed of flash memory chips that have limited write cycles. An SSD can store data only between 3,000 to 100,000 times. An SSD’s storage capacity will increase the more chips it contains, the longer it will last.
Although solid-state drives may have terabytes or more storage space than internal drives, they typically only have 120GB to 512GB. SSDs can be connected to the motherboard via a SATA III connector. However, many SSDs also have PCIe and M.2 connections.
SSD vs HDDSpeed
Hard drive speeds can be measured in megabytes per second or MBps. There are many factors that can affect SSD speeds vs HDD speed.
How fast your HDD can read or write data is determined by the RPM. The faster your hard drive will perform, the higher its RPM. Most hard drives have an RPM rate between 5,400 and 15,000. SATA III data connections can transfer up to 600MBps, but the RPM rate of the HDD will determine the final output. A hard drive running at 5,400 RPM will achieve speeds of about 100MBps. An HDD with 7,200 rpm will achieve speeds of around 150 MBps.
It would take 40 minutes to an entire hour to transfer 50GB of data to an HDD.
An SSD has no moving parts and therefore doesn’t need to be concerned about RPM. An SSD can read data at 550MB/s and write at 525MB/s using a SATA III connection. However, speeds will be limited to 600MBps due to the maximum transfer speed of a SATA III connector.
It would take approximately 15 minutes to transfer 50GB files using an SSD.
However, speeds up to 1.4GBps can be achieved if you connect your SSD via an M.2 (or PCIe) connection to your motherboard. This means that you can transfer 50GB of data in just 5 minutes.
SSDs also have faster application opening times. An SSD can open a 400MB TIF file in Photoshop CS5.1 in just 8.4 seconds. GamingScan shows that it takes 25.9 seconds to open a 400MB TIF file on CS5.1 if you have an HDD. This is more than three times slower than the GamingScan .
SSD is better than HDD?
An SSD next to an HDD
An SSD is quicker than an HDD but traditional hard drive drives are cheaper and last longer. It all depends on the purpose of your SSD. To back up all your documents, movies and photos, an HDD is the best choice. An SSD can be used to speed up your operating system and other programs.
HDDs are less durable than SSDs due to their moving parts but they last much longer if you don’t drop them. An SSD can last for up to five years, while an HDD can stay functional for as long as ten years.
A HDD is also cheaper than an SSD when we think about cost. A 1TB HDD costs between $40 and $75. A SSD of the same capacity costs $100-200 depending on the model.
