The tech experts at Backblaze are in the middle of a 7-year-test comparing SSD and HDD drives. If you aren’t familiar with the terms, both refer to storage on your computer. SSD – stands for Solid State Dive and HHD for Hard Disk Drive. Though, you’ll often see the term hard drive used to refer to both of them as hard drive is sometimes used to refer to any internal drive on a PC.
The difference between an HDD and SSD is that an SSD has no moving parts. SSDs are a more complex version of memory cards and flash drives.
I think we all have heard the sound of an HDD spinning or starting up. An HDD uses a mechanical arm to write and find data on the disk. SSDs have an embedded processor, basically a brain, that finds and writes data. SSDs can usually open data around 30% faster than HDDs.
However, there has generally been the idea that HDDs are more dependable. But according to four years of extensive tests on thousands of drives, that’s just not the case.
In the fourth year of the test, SSDs had a failure rate of 1.05% compared to 1.83% for HDD. Not bad for either, but the SSDs are close to twice as reliable. You can take a deeper dive into their results at this link: https://www.backblaze.com/b2/hard-drive-test-data.html
But since SSDs are much lighter than mechanical hard drives and don’t require an external power source, they make for a much more portable external drive. Due to the small size, they also make it possible to have lighter and more compact computers.
SSDs have traditionally been way more expensive than HDDs. The prices have dropped, but you’ll pay roughly double for 1TB SSD vs. an HDD.
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