How to choose an SSD drive: main characteristics. Which is better: SSD or HDD? What is the difference between SSD and HDD

Today, on the computer components market, hard drives are represented by two main types - SDD and HDD. Which one is better? Let's look at this issue in detail.

HDD – classic hard drive

HDD is a classic hard drive, which is a box containing round magnetic plates and read heads. Data is stored on magnetic plates, and read heads, accordingly, read this data. The principle of operation of an HDD is similar to a gramophone, except that the spindle speed is much faster. The HDD spindle spins magnetized plates at speeds of 5400 and 7200 rpm. These are the most common spindle speeds for HDDs intended for consumer computers. The spindle rotation speed can be much higher - for example, 10,000 or more revolutions per minute, but these are already server equipment standards.

HDD inside / forumrostov.ru

What does the HDD spindle rotation speed give? This indicator often measures the speed of reading and writing data from a hard drive - the higher the spindle speed, the faster the speed of reading and writing data. But this is not entirely true, since the performance of the HDD is also affected by its other indicators - recording density and random access time.

The higher the recording density, the faster the HDD will be. The recording density of modern HDDs is 100-150 GB/sq.in. With the random access indicator, the opposite is true, because this is the time during which the hard drive will read or write data on any part of the magnetic plate. Therefore, the shorter this time, the better. The range of this parameter is usually from 2.5 to 16 ms.

Thus, in computer operation, the difference between two HDDs with a spindle speed of 5400 and 7200 may not be noticeable.

HDDs also differ in physical dimensions and in the technical characteristics of models are designated according to their width. This size is 3.5 inches - the standard HDD size for PC assembly - and 2.5 inches - the HDD size for laptops.

SSD – new format hard drive

SSD– in the technical characteristics of computer devices you can also find its other name “solid-state drive” - in fact, it is a voluminous flash drive with enormous data reading and writing speeds compared to HDDs. SSD is 3-4 times faster than HDD. It will take no more than 10 seconds to fully load Windows installed on the SSD, while this operating system on the HDD will load in about two minutes.

What is the secret to SSD performance? The HDD, for example, when Windows starts, spends time searching for sectors on the magnetic platter and moving the read heads. When running exactly the same version of Windows with exactly the same functionality at startup, the SSD simply reads data from the specific block of the matrix where this data is located. The operating system, programs, and individual files launch faster on an SSD drive.

SSD inside / fotkidepo.ru

SSDs do not add much weight to laptops, because they weigh no more than 100 g. While a 2.5-inch HDD weighing 700-800 g clearly will not make it easier to carry the device on a daily basis.

Unlike HDDs, SSDs are not susceptible to shocks or falls. But if you accidentally drop your laptop, you can add to the hassle of both replacing the HDD and restoring data.

SSDs operate silently, while a good high-speed HDD can even interfere with sleep if the computer is left turned on at night.

By the way, about data recovery, in this matter the SSD loses to the HDD. Recovering data from an SSD is problematic. If, for example, there is a power surge, the SSD will burn out completely and all data will be destroyed. But in an HDD in exactly the same case, only a small board will burn out, while all the data will remain on the magnetic plates. If desired, IT specialists can restore this data. The same applies to the recovery of data previously deleted by the user using special software. On most SSD drives, it will not be possible to recover deleted files after emptying the Recycle Bin. But SSD manufacturers are already working on this issue; moreover, some models of solid-state drives may not physically clear the matrix blocks from the recorded data at the time the user command is received, but do it later, when it becomes necessary.

But this is far from the most vulnerable point of solid-state drives. Their disadvantages are as significant as their advantages over HDDs.

Firstly, this is the price. SSD is very expensive. For the price of a 60 GB SSD, you can buy a good HDD with 1 TB of disk space.

Secondly, this is a small volume - SSDs with a capacity of 512 MB are quite rare in the computer components market; much more common standards are volumes of 128 GB or 60 GB. As we can see, such arrangements do not make an SSD a full-fledged device for the user’s needs, and if we are not talking about an ultra-thin ultrabook, a laptop or PC will still have to be equipped with an HDD for file storage. Using only an SSD for data storage, we repeat, can result in a decent amount of money.

Thirdly, SSDs have a clearly defined service life. You can rewrite data on an SSD up to 10,000 times. HDDs do not have such restrictions, and it is rare that users change their hard drive for this very reason. As a rule, this is either mechanical damage, overheating, or modernization. Given the high cost of SSDs, the computer device must be equipped with at least 8 GB of RAM to be able to disable the Windows page file. After all, constantly overwriting the data in this file will help the SSD resource run out faster.

SSD or HDD: which is better to choose?

Which is better HDD or SSD? If you have free funds, of course, an SSD as part of a PC build or in a laptop will not hurt. Despite all the technical shortcomings of a solid-state drive, it is beneficial for using it as a system partition for Windows. If your income is not yet particularly conducive to serious spending, a good high-speed HDD is a much more practical option.

Photo on the main page: HDD hard drive next to an SSD drive / 123rf.com

We compared the performance of HDDs and SSDs. Let me remind you that in synthetic applications the SSD turned out to be significantly faster. However, the theoretical advantage does not always manifest itself in practice. In this part, we'll look at how much faster an SSD is in everyday work and, most importantly, whether it's worth trying to replace your hard drive with a newfangled drive.

Comparing the performance of clean and working systems

However, since we are talking about “real” life, we will start with one interesting aspect, namely, comparing the performance of a clean system and a system with a large number of installed programs. It’s no secret that a freshly installed system without installed programs always works very quickly, and tests are performed on such systems. But we work on completely different systems: in which many applications are open, there are resident programs and modules, and the OS itself is far from ideal. I tried to simulate such a system and compare how much worse the performance of test participants would be in it.

For comparison, the results were taken from the preliminary run, when I determined which applications to install and how to run tests. Therefore, the system turned out to be slightly different in terms of software composition; accordingly, the test results may differ slightly from those given below in the main testing. The measurements were carried out on a Seagate 5400.6 drive.

Let me remind you how the numbers were obtained. At startup, the time was measured from turning on the laptop (i.e. it included the BIOS test time, this time is always 4 seconds) to the moments when the blue welcome screen appears, the desktop appears, the hourglass next to the cursor disappears, and, finally, the time when the system stops actively working with the hard drive. Therefore, the results show four numbers.

When exiting sleep mode, we measured the time from the system startup until the Welcome message and a window with the user icon appeared, and completed the measurement when the system stopped actively working with the hard drive.

When entering sleep mode and shutting down, everything is simple: the time from pressing a button on the screen until the moment when the laptop turns off (the indicators go out) is measured.

The test was carried out in the following order: the system turns on, then enters sleep mode, wakes it up and turns off. This was done two or three times and then two more passes after other tests were taken.

The scatter of data was everywhere, and somewhat strange. So, for example, when measuring the time to go into sleep mode for the first time, it was 13 seconds, then about 10-11. As a rule, the time of others for measurements also dropped a little, for example, launch for the first time 1.03, second and further 57 seconds. By the way, in cases where the results are unstable, I tried to give the most different figure in brackets. Let me emphasize that these are the results that differ most from the average.

Let me also remind you (I already talked about this in the first part) that Windows 7 is better optimized in terms of working with the hard drive. Once the desktop appears, the system can be used, although it continues to load data from disk. HR in such a situation is practically uncontrollable, while the “seven” adequately responds to commands, although it takes a little longer to execute them. The same applies to waking up from sleep mode: although the system continues to work with the disk for a long time, it can still be used.

So, let's see how the system's performance changes after a large number of applications are installed on it, incl. applications with resident modules (antivirus, Nokia software, etc.). By the way, they made the partition significantly heavier from about 17 GB (pure Windows 7) to 32.5 GB.

The start has become slower by an average of 10 seconds, but the disk continues to spin for a very long time - two minutes instead of one. Seven can optimize the boot process, unlike XP, which tries to load “everything at once” and goes crazy (this is just a textbook case when the disk works, but data transfer from it is minimal).

Going into hibernate is predictably longer: after all, quite a lot of the programs that I installed use different agents and resident modules, plus they probably just clutter the system. However, the difference is impressive - the system takes twice as long to fall asleep. Shutting down has also become longer - after all, you need to send a command to close to all resident programs and wait for a response. I would like to draw your attention to the fact that when closing programs, no window appeared indicating that the system could not stop this or that program; everything closed on its own. In my opinion, this difference is critical, because... all this time you have to wait for the system to finish working in order to assemble the laptop. 10 seconds is to get up and collect the rest of your things, 31 get up, get ready and wait twenty seconds.

Thus, a clean system performs basic actions about twice as fast as a working one. The difference is especially noticeable when you install the system from scratch, and then install applications on top of it. In my opinion, various types of optimizations (defragmentation, moving data to the beginning of the disk, etc.) help a little, but it is difficult to make a significant difference. There is also a more radical way: manually prohibit the start of some programs and operating system modules, then the loading time will be reduced.

File copy speed

Transferring and copying files is perhaps one of the main tasks where you can clearly see how fast a particular drive is. In addition, one of the most noticeable: here, most often, the user sits in front of the laptop and waits for the copying to be completed. In addition, these figures can be used to indirectly estimate the download speed of programs. The data is taken from the main tests of the Seagate 5400.6 drive. Hereinafter, C and D mean partitions on the drive.

Let me remind you that resident programs are running on the working system, including antivirus. The film (single file) was copied almost exactly the same, when copying archives the difference is already noticeable, for documents the difference is even more noticeable. Moreover, on the working system there is a difference in where files are copied from and to; it is also noticeable for all schemes. We will not draw conclusions about the unzipping process yet, because... very large scatter on the working system.

Finally, a very strange and incomprehensible situation with erasing files. In this situation, it is difficult for me to draw conclusions; below we will look at the results of other participants. Moreover, the situation was repeated, but with incomprehensible twists, sometimes erasing took 20 minutes, sometimes 30. The conductor erases everything quickly, in seconds.

Comparison of hard drives and SSDs in performing workloads

Well, let's see how the participants in our testing behave in real applications, and whether SSDs will be able to maintain their advantage over hard drives.

Creating and Deploying a Disk Image

As a first test, I couldn’t resist and took what I had to do during testing - creating and deploying archived images of a disk partition. The test is performed outside the operating system, plus archiving... In general, let's see who is faster here.

7200.2 is slightly faster than 5400.6, significantly ahead for some reason when archiving. SSDs are twice or more faster than hard drives. It is especially good at deploying a clean system; here it is almost three times faster.

Starting up, shutting down the system, and going into and out of sleep mode

Now let's see how much time it takes to start and shut down the operating system on various media. For some reason, many people consider the system startup time to be the most important indicator. It seems to me that these are relics of the times when people worked in the office on desktop computers and turned them off at night (however, this practice is still common). Indeed, standby and sleep modes are not needed in this case, the shutdown speed is not important, because after starting the shutdown process you can go home. All that remains is the loading time, because... Arriving at work and starting the computer, you have to wait until you can play solitaire.

When it comes to laptops, and specifically about working with them, things are a little different. I personally turn off my laptop about once every two weeks, when the system begins to behave badly due to constant sleep and hibernation. And even then, more often than not “I rebooted the laptop”, but “the laptop rebooted” (and goodbye data from running applications). In all other cases, I put the laptop into standby mode (when it is running on mains power) or sleep mode (if it is running on battery power, so as not to waste it). Accordingly, the time to enter and exit sleep mode is more important to me. In addition, this mode has two important advantages over turning it off: firstly, the system starts up much faster, and secondly, all the necessary applications are already open, and the work is exactly where you left off last time. This is very convenient and saves much more time than switching from hard drives to SSDs.

However, our article is just about comparing them, so that’s what we’ll do. First, let’s compare how the clean system started here.

At system startup, the SSD is much faster. Moreover, as I already noted, the disk access indicator is not on all the time (unlike the HDD), i.e. The SSD is not the bottleneck; the system takes some time to “digest” the data. The first time he failed for unknown reasons, the other times the system started in the same time - 24 seconds. SSD is faster in other disciplines, in some cases significantly, in others not so much, if we consider that by a third this is “not very much”.

In the battle of disks, 7200.2 finally took a little lead. As you can see, with it the system will start and exit hibernation a little faster. Moreover, the advantage is stable, although small - you will save 2-4 seconds.

Let's see what happens if we use a working system.

Let me clarify right away what “long” means: it’s more than two and a half minutes. It felt like on different occasions this time was anywhere from three and a half to five minutes. But disk activity has almost no effect on operation.

The hard drives are very close, the difference in operation is impossible to notice. It is quite possible that a new 7200 rpm hard drive will give slightly better results, but by how much? Give me a sec? At the same time, the spread of results sometimes reached 5-6 seconds. That is, as you can see, on a working system the difference in disk performance is leveled out. Perhaps it will manifest itself in some specific tasks (they say that in some cases of video encoding the disk is very important), but when performing standard tasks the difference in numbers is insignificant.

The SSD starts up quickly, goes into hibernation quickly (plus, which is important, while the system is writing data to go into hibernation, the laptop can already be packed into a bag, no need to wait), it turns out... in terms of numbers, it’s not much faster, but that’s all for me It also seemed that the system worked faster with it. Plus, if the hard drive spins constantly and you can already hear the crunching noise from operation, then with an SSD the data is read in portions and with pauses. Shutting down the system is about the same everywhere, but I think that this process is simply not so dependent on the disk subsystem.

Let's summarize all the data in a single table. For each drive, the first column is a clean system, the second is a working one.

Everywhere the time has approximately doubled. Moreover, it is exactly doubled, regardless of whether the initial value is small or large. Therefore, if you want to get the fastest possible system, then you need to not only upgrade the drives, but also pay attention to optimizing the system itself, and most importantly, select applications that will work. It is much cheaper and can also bring good dividends.

File copy tests

Well, let's move on to the most, in my opinion, interesting tests - tests for copying data. These tests are interesting to us for two reasons: firstly, this is precisely the case when the speed of the disk subsystem determines the time spent, and secondly, using these data we can indirectly determine how quickly applications will launch and files will be opened: after all, these are also operations reading from disk. Using them, you can evaluate the speed of disks and SSDs on a daily basis, when, for example, they launch an application or open a file.

Let me remind you that the files were copied from one disk partition to another, i.e. The disk both read and wrote data.

*This is from D to C. C to D is copied for 3.45
** This is on C. On D it will unzip in 5.11.
*** the conductor erases everything in a second or two

Honestly, I don’t know why such numbers turned out when erasing files on 5400.6. Moreover, the results vary very significantly. I have an idea that the software (for example, antivirus) is to blame, but, on the other hand, the system is identical for all drives. Also, I could not explain why the 7200.2 copies faster from C to D, and the 5400.6 does the opposite. Finally, it is not clear why there is such a difference in copying archives from SSDs.

In general, it can be seen that for all drives the speed depends on the size of the files, although with SSD there is almost no difference between a film and a set of archives (only a strange dependence on where it is copied has appeared). The closer the reading and writing process is to linear, the higher the speed. In absolute numbers, the SSD drive is in the lead by a wide margin: most often we are talking about three to four times superiority. Everything that is called “flies”. In the most difficult category, a set of documents, the gap is even more significant.

By the way, since we are talking about comparison, please note that the 5400.6 copies a large volume much faster, almost by a minute. Yes, and unzipping is faster on average (although when unzipping, the time jumped a lot). In copying files, 7200.2 was not able to get ahead, although I was counting on it.

However, the schemes under consideration have a peculiarity: data is read from the disk and immediately written to it from one partition to another. But what if we look at a cleaner case: data is only read or only written? To do this, we created a virtual disk in the computer’s RAM and will check how different the numbers are when working with an obviously very fast RAM drive.

The figures are given in film/archive/document format

The results of copying data from a virtual disk to a physical disk lead to the darkest suspicions: is writing consistently faster than reading? It seemed to me that this could not happen. Moreover, in this test the SSD even loses to 5400.

If you compare the data with the table above and accept (well, suddenly) that caching has nothing to do with it, then you get some funny data: how much faster is it to first copy the entire file into RAM and then write it to disk compared to simply copying from disk to disk. A movie on 5400.6 using a virtual disk was copied in 12+5=17 seconds (i.e., it was first read in its entirety and then written in its entirety), and when it was copied from partition D to partition C, it took 26 seconds, i.e. . we lost 9 seconds out of 26. When copying documents, the difference is generally more than double. I would assume that this difference is due to the fact that the drives “drive the heads” back and forth when reading and writing. It remains to understand why the SSD in the scheme with copying through a virtual disk is also twice as fast, it seems there is nothing for it to reposition.

Well, this concludes our study of file copying speed. Let's look at another aspect where it is very important to us how fast our drive is. Namely, for the installation and operation of applications.

Installing and launching applications

So, let's see how big the difference is in everyday work, namely, in tasks such as installing and launching programs. In principle, I tried to select, on the one hand, applications that are used relatively often, and on the other hand, large packages where the difference in installation time is significant, and which require a relatively long time for breakfast. Let me remind you that readers can suggest their own versions of applications for tests.

Since most of the tests were not run on the 5400.6, the comparison will mainly be between a single hard drive and an SSD. In general, as we see, the advantage of SSD is two to three times. True, there are some exceptions, for example, Acronis was installed in about the same time, and the difference when installing Office is not so great. Either when installing these applications, working with the disk does not play a significant role, or the application is installed in such a way that the SSD does not work efficiently. Pay attention to the games. When installing Crysis Warhead, the difference is small; moreover, the space among the hard drives is distributed very strangely. But HawX demonstrates an almost classic scheme.

Let's look at launching applications. In other materials I will once again try to retest the disks in this discipline on a working system. However, everything starts up easily on the new system.

As you can see, in most cases the advantage of SSD remains. Nevertheless, we will continue testing specifically from the point of view of application speed and invite readers to make suggestions: what exactly and in what modes to test.

conclusions

Well, let's move on to the conclusions and see who is leading in which categories.

Speed

Key takeaway: In the vast majority of cases, SSDs are significantly faster than traditional hard drives. The advantage is two to three times this is a lot, the gap is simply huge. Thus, the results of synthetic testing were generally confirmed, although the advantage of SSD there was even more significant. However, this is normal: the operating system and many other factors contribute, smoothing out the difference in the speed of different types of drives.

When used in real life and in real tasks, SSD, as can be seen above, provides significant benefits. So big that no measurements are needed: it is very clearly visible “by eye”. Applications launch and run faster, and the operating system is also significantly faster. Having transferred the system to an SSD, you immediately feel that it has become responsive much faster than before. True, there is also a relative disadvantage: if previously you could turn on, for example, copying and go do other things, now it ends too quickly for you to have time to switch. I personally immediately noticed that the system began to go into hibernate faster and come out of it much faster. Moreover, the difference is visible, as they say, with the naked eye. Launching applications has become faster, but it’s not so easy to “catch” it, because... for the most part, they started work quite quickly before.

In general, if speed is critical to you and all other considerations (see below), including the ultra-high price, are unimportant, then an SSD will eliminate one of the known bottlenecks in the system.

Size

As for the size, in absolute numbers the SSD loses a lot. At the moment, even 128 GB models cost a lot of money, in addition, the price very much depends on the capacity: the more space, the more expensive (and much more expensive) the drive. At the same time, a 500 GB hard drive can be purchased very inexpensively.

But do you need a lot of space? In principle, 128 gigabytes should be enough for a working system, especially if you have a home computer or an external hard drive where you can dump archives and multimedia data. Well, if your work is not related to something resource-intensive: for example, active video editing. Several working applications, a text archive, an email database, some music and no (or very little) games and films. And when purchasing a drive with a capacity of 64 GB, you need to prepare for saving mode. During my tests, the OS with installed applications already took up 35 GB, and at the same time I did not install everything I wanted. There will be very little space left for work.

If we are talking about a home multimedia laptop, and even the only one (that is, without external storage media for the archive), then an SSD is definitely not suitable: its capacity will very quickly cease to be enough. In this case, an SSD will provide a speed boost, but you will have to have an additional external hard drive to store data. However, I would venture to suggest that for most home users, the use of SSDs is simply redundant.

Reliability

Another huge advantage of SSDs: increased reliability in everyday work. After all, it is insensitive to shock and vibration, and if you often carry a laptop with you, shock resistance is a huge plus. However, I was lucky with laptops; despite repeated crashes, the disk in none of them failed. But all my laptops had hard drive protection, usually with an accelerometer that turned it off when dropped - this could play a role. But I dropped the external drive once (I pulled the wire unsuccessfully), after which a faulty area appeared on it. But it worked fine after that. However, this is my personal example, there are quite a lot of stories when, after a laptop crash, the hard drive stopped working or lost some data on the Internet.

An SSD has another operational advantage - you don't have to worry about shaking the laptop at all. For example, when the laptop goes into hibernation (and at this time it is actively writing to the disk), you can already close the lid and pack it in your bag. It is highly not recommended to do this on laptops with a hard drive; you can damage it.

However, it was not for nothing that I made a reservation about everyday work: after all, the long-term reliability of SSDs is in question. Cheap first-generation SSDs (on the same EEE PCs) are already starting to slowly fail. I think that expensive and newer SSDs will last longer, but how long? Unlike hard drives with their hard-to-predict mechanical wear, SSDs have very specific aging criteria associated with writing to the disk.

Price

The most difficult aspect, because modern fast SSDs are very expensive. About 3-4 times more expensive than a hard drive, which is also three times more capacious. Those. the faster, the smaller and the more expensive. Is the game worth the candle? In my opinion, it’s worth it if you actively work with a laptop. The higher speed of the laptop allows you to save precious minutes of life and nerve cells that are wasted when shouting “Why is it all so slow?!” Don’t forget about the greater reliability of the drive and data safety. In this sense, for a working system, an SSD can make work more comfortable, and the increased reliability of the drive is also worth something. As for general and home use, it is worth purchasing an SSD if you are willing to accept the price difference: the performance will pleasantly surprise you.

Until recently, when purchasing a new computer and choosing the drive to install, the user had only one choice - an HDD. And then we were interested in only two parameters: spindle speed (5400 or 7200 RPM), disk capacity and cache size.

Let's look at the pros and cons of both types of drives and make a clear comparison of HDD and SSD.

Principle of operation

A traditional drive, or ROM (read only memory) as it is commonly called, is needed to store data even after a complete power outage. Unlike RAM (random access memory) or RAM, data stored in memory is not erased when the computer is turned off.

A classic hard drive consists of several metal “pancakes” with a magnetic coating, and data is read and written using a special head that moves above the surface of the disk rotating at high speed.

Solid state drives have a completely different operating principle. The SSD completely lacks any movable components, and its “internals” look like a set of flash memory chips located on one board.

Such chips can be installed either on the system’s motherboard (for particularly compact models of laptops and ultrabooks), on a PCI Express card for desktop computers, or on a special laptop slot. The chips used in SSDs are different from those we see in a flash drive. They are much more reliable, faster and more durable.

Disc history

Hard magnetic disks have a very long history (of course, by the standards of computer technology development). In 1956, IBM released a little-known computer IBM 350 RAMAC, which was equipped with a huge storage device of 3.75 MB by those standards.

These cabinets could store as much as 7.5 MB of data

To build such a hard drive, 50 round metal plates had to be installed. The diameter of each was 61 centimeters. And this entire gigantic structure could store... just one MP3 song with a low bitrate of 128 Kb/s.

Until 1969, this computer was used by the government and research institutes. Just some 50 years ago, a hard drive of this size was quite suitable for humanity. But standards changed dramatically in the early 80s.

5.25-inch (13.3 centimeter) floppy disks appeared on the market, and a little later 3.5- and 2.5-inch (laptop) versions. Such floppy disks could store up to 1.44 MB of data, and a number of computers of that time were supplied without a built-in hard drive. Those. To start the operating system or software shell, you had to insert a floppy disk, then enter several commands and only then start working.

Over the entire history of hard drive development, several protocols have been changed: IDE (ATA, PATA), SCSI, which later transformed into the now famous SATA, but all of them performed the sole function of a “connecting bridge” between the motherboard and the hard drive.

From 2.5 and 3.5-inch floppy disks with a capacity of one and a half thousand kilobytes, the computer industry has moved to hard drives of the same size, but with thousands of times more memory. Today, the capacity of top 3.5-inch HDD drives reaches 10 TB (10,240 GB); 2.5-inch - up to 4 TB.

The history of solid-state SSDs is much shorter. Engineers started thinking about releasing a memory storage device that would be devoid of moving elements back in the early 80s. The appearance in this era of the so-called bubble memory was met with very hostility and the idea proposed by the French physicist Pierre Weiss back in 1907 did not take root in the computer industry.

The essence of bubble memory was to split magnetized permalloy into macroscopic regions that would have spontaneous magnetization. The unit of measurement for such a storage device was bubbles. But the most important thing is that such a drive had no hardware moving elements.

They quickly forgot about bubble memory, and only remembered it during the development of a new class of drives - SSDs.

SSDs appeared in laptops only in the late 2000s. In 2007, the budget laptop OLPC XO-1 entered the market, equipped with 256 MB of RAM, an AMD Geode LX-700 processor with a frequency of 433 MHz and the main highlight - 1 GB NAND flash memory.

The OLPC XO-1 was the first laptop to use a solid-state drive. And soon it was joined by the legendary line of netbooks from Asus EEE PC with the 700 model, where the manufacturer installed a 2 GB SSD drive.

In both laptops, the memory was installed directly on the motherboard. But soon manufacturers revised the principle of organizing drives and approved a 2.5-inch format connected via the SATA protocol.

The capacity of modern SSD drives can reach 16 TB. More recently, Samsung introduced just such an SSD, albeit in a server version and with a price that is astronomical for the average person.

Pros and cons of SSD and HDD

The tasks of each class of drives boil down to one thing: to provide the user with a working operating system and allow him to store personal data. But both SSD and HDD have their own characteristics.

Price

SSDs are much more expensive than traditional HDDs. To determine the difference, a simple formula is used: the price of the drive is divided by its capacity. As a result, the cost of 1 GB of capacity in foreign currency is obtained.

So, a standard 1 TB HDD costs an average of $50 (3,300 rubles). The cost of one gigabyte is $50/1024 GB = $0.05, i.e. 5 cents (3.2 rubles). In the world of SSDs, everything is much more expensive. An SSD with a capacity of 1 TB will cost an average of $220, and the price for 1 GB according to our simple formula will be 22 cents (14.5 rubles), which is 4.4 times more expensive than an HDD.

The good news is that the cost of SSDs is rapidly decreasing: manufacturers are finding cheaper solutions for the production of drives and the price gap between HDDs and SSDs is narrowing.

Average and maximum capacity of SSD and HDD

Just a few years ago, there was not only a numerical, but also a technological gap between the maximum capacity of HDD and SSD. It was impossible to find an SSD that could compete with an HDD in terms of the amount of stored information, but today the market is ready to provide the user with such a solution. True, for impressive money.

The maximum capacity of SSDs offered for the consumer market is 4 TB. A similar option in early July 2016. And for 4 TB of space you will have to pay $1,499.

The basic amount of HDD memory for laptops and computers released in the second half of 2016 ranges from 500 GB to 1 TB. Models similar in power and characteristics, but with an installed SSD drive, are content with only 128 GB.

SSD and HDD speed

Yes, it is for this indicator that the user overpays when he prefers SSD storage. Its speed is many times higher than that of an HDD. The system can boot in just a few seconds, launching heavy applications and games takes significantly less time, and copying large amounts of data turns from a multi-hour process into a 5-10 minute process.

The only “but” is that data from the SSD drive is deleted as quickly as it is copied. Therefore, when working with an SSD, you may simply not have time to press the cancel button if one day you suddenly delete important files.

Fragmentation

The favorite “delicacy” of any HDD hard drive is large files: movies in MKV format, large archives and BlueRay disk images. But as soon as you load the hard drive with a hundred or two small files, photographs or MP3 songs, the reading head and metal pancakes become confused, as a result of which the recording speed drops significantly.

After the HDD fills up and files are repeatedly deleted/copied, the hard drive starts to work slower. This is due to the fact that parts of the file are scattered across the entire surface of the magnetic disk and when you double-click on a file, the reading head is forced to look for these fragments from different sectors. This is how time is wasted. This phenomenon is called fragmentation, and as preventive measures to speed up the HDD, a software and hardware process is provided defragmentation or arranging such blocks/parts of files into a single chain.

The operating principle of an SSD is fundamentally different from a HDD, and any data can be written to any memory sector with further instant reading. This is why defragmentation is not needed for SSD drives.

Reliability and service life

Remember the main advantage of SSD drives? That's right, no moving parts. This is why you can use a laptop with an SSD in transport, off-road or in conditions inevitably associated with external vibrations. This will not affect the stability of the system and the drive itself. The data stored on the SSD will not be damaged even if the laptop falls.

With HDD everything is exactly the opposite. The read head is located just a few micrometers from the magnetized blanks, and therefore any vibration can lead to the appearance of “broken sectors” - areas that become unusable. Regular shocks and careless handling of a computer that runs on an HDD will lead to the fact that sooner or later such a hard drive will simply, to use computer jargon, “crumble” or stop working.

Despite all the advantages of SSDs, they also have a very significant drawback - a limited usage cycle. It directly depends on the number of rewrite cycles of memory blocks. In other words, if you copy/delete/re-copy gigabytes of information every day, you will very soon cause the clinical death of your SSD.

Modern SSD drives are equipped with a special controller that ensures that data is evenly distributed across all SSD blocks. Thus, it was possible to significantly increase the maximum operating time to 3000 – 5000 cycles.

How durable is an SSD? Just take a look at this picture:

And then compare it with the warranty period promised by the manufacturer of your specific SSD. 8 – 13 years for storage, believe me, is not so bad. And we shouldn’t forget about the progress that leads to a constant increase in the capacity of SSDs at a constantly decreasing cost. I think in a few years your 128 GB SSD will be considered a museum piece.

Form factor

The battle between drive sizes has always been driven by the type of devices in which they are installed. So, for a desktop computer, installing both a 3.5-inch and a 2.5-inch drive is absolutely uncritical, but for portable devices such as laptops, players and tablets, a more compact option is needed.

The 1.8-inch format was considered the smallest serial version of the HDD. This is the same disc that was used in the now discontinued iPod Classic player.

And no matter how hard the engineers tried, they failed to build a miniature HDD hard drive with a capacity of more than 320 GB. It is impossible to break the laws of physics.

In the world of SSDs, everything is much more promising. The generally accepted 2.5-inch format became such not because of any physical limitations faced by technology, but only due to compatibility. In the new generation of ultrabooks, the 2.5' format is gradually being abandoned, making drives more and more compact, and the bodies of the devices themselves thinner.

Noise

The rotation of disks, even in the most advanced HDD hard drive, is inseparably associated with the occurrence of noise. Reading and writing data sets the disk head in motion, which moves at an insane speed across the entire surface of the device, which also causes a characteristic crackling sound.

SSD drives are absolutely silent, and all processes occurring inside the chips take place without any accompanying sound.

Bottom line

To summarize the comparison between HDD and SSD, I would like to clearly define the main advantages of each type of drive.

Advantages of HDD: capacious, inexpensive, accessible.

Disadvantages of HDD: slow, afraid of mechanical influences, noisy.

Advantages of SSD: absolutely silent, wear-resistant, very fast, no fragmentation.

Disadvantages of SSD: expensive, theoretically have a limited service life.

Without exaggeration, we can say that one of the most effective methods of upgrading an old laptop or computer is installing an SSD drive instead of an HDD. Even with the latest version of SATA, you can achieve a threefold increase in performance.

Solid state drives (SSDs) have been on the market for a long time, but they have been gaining more and more popularity recently. SSD drives are quite expensive, but they greatly improve system performance due to their very high speed of reading and writing data.

Unlike conventional hard drives, instead of magnetic tracks, a new technology is used - flash memory. But in addition to the great advantage in performance, there are several other disadvantages here - service lines, small volume and high price. In this article we will try to figure out how to choose an SSD drive for a computer, and also look at what they are and how they differ from each other. But first you need to find out what SSD drives are.

SSD or Solid State Drive is a storage device without moving elements based on memory chips or in other words, a solid state drive.

A typical hard drive consists of a magnetic disk rotating at high speed and a head for reading and writing data. Data storage is performed by magnetizing and demagnetizing the desired cells. But working with the cell, changing the disk rotation speed, and most importantly, moving the recording head takes too much time. Therefore, the hard drive cannot be very fast.

But an SSD drive solves this problem. Here, instead of this whole complex mechanism, flash memory is used. Thanks to this, there is no longer any need to move the recording head; recording to any point on the disk is instantaneous.

But chip-based memory technology is more expensive than conventional hard drives. In addition, flash memory has one very undesirable property - a limited number of rewrites. Therefore, manufacturers have to come up with different ways of cell placement and compensation to ensure that their drives last as long as possible.

So that you can choose the right ssd drive for your computer, you first need to consider what types of drives exist.

Types of SSD drives

During the development of this technology, several types of SSD drives have appeared; they differ in size, method of connection to the computer, operating speed and method of placing memory cells.

Dimensions and connection methods

The size, method of connecting the SSD drive to the motherboard and operating speed are interconnected, because these characteristics depend specifically on the connection interface. Let's look at the most common ways to connect an SSD so that you know which ssd to choose:

• SATA- these SSD drives connect to the same interface as regular HDD drives. To be compatible with the installation space, these drives have a housing measuring 9x7x2.5 centimeters, which corresponds to the size of the HDD. Nowadays, they are used most often because they can be easily installed in any computer or laptop instead of a regular hard drive. But this option has a limitation - the maximum data transfer speed is 6 GB/second. For an HDD this is a very large figure, but some SSDs can develop even more.
• mSATA- exactly the same connection interface as SATA, and therefore the same operating speed. Only there is not such a large building here. This type of SSD is often used for laptops. The only difference between this type of disk is the size.
• PCIe- these drives look like a regular PCI card and, thanks to the use of this interface, can achieve data transfer speeds of up to 30 Gb/sec. But they can only be used in personal computers due to their size, and also cost two or even three times more than regular SATA SSDs.
• NVMe- a modification of PCIe SSD drives that provides even greater performance thanks to special optimizations, but at the moment it is only compatible with new motherboards. The case looks exactly the same as the PCIe one.
• M.2. is a smaller version of an SSD drive for PCI. It works using the same protocol and allows you to develop the same speed of data processing, but instead of a large case it is made in the form of one small board. Most modern boards already support slots of this type, but they can also be connected simply via PCI.

Methods for organizing memory cells

Based on the way SSD memory cells are organized, drives are divided into different numbers of bits that are stored in one cell. In fact, the less, the greater the rewrite resource and the speed of operation, but at the same time the higher the price. Therefore, manufacturers are trying to reduce the cost of production by increasing the amount of data in one cell. Currently there are the following types of memory:

• SLC NAND- This type of memory was developed quite a long time ago. One cell contains one bit of data. It guarantees maximum performance and up to ten thousand data overwrites, but is very expensive and therefore not released.
• MLC NAND is the next generation of flash memory, in which there are two bits per cell. The number of possible rewrites is reduced to three thousand times, and the operating speed is halved. But the price of such devices is already more or less acceptable.
• TLC NAND- in this standard, one cell already contains 3 bits of data and the rewriting resource drops to 1000. But they are even cheaper. Manufacturers have found a way out of the situation by adding various balancing controllers, which replace the failed cells with reserve ones, and also try to give the same load to all cells. A cache from SLC memory is also used. All this allows us to guarantee the operation of the SSD for up to 3 years or more.

Nowadays TLC and MLC with various optimizations are most often used.

How to choose an SSD drive?

Now that you already know what SSD drives are, let's look at how to choose an SSD drive for your computer. New users only pay attention to volume, price and size. But you also need to take into account the type of memory placement, connection method and controller manufacturer.

SSD memory capacity

The larger the size, the higher the price of the device, but at the same time, the greater the rewriting resource, because the controller has more space to redistribute the load between all cells. Most often, SSD drives come in sizes of 128, 256 GB and 1 TB. Most often, users take a 128 GB SSD for the system.

Connection method

In fact, there are only two connection methods: using the SATA interface and PCI. SATA is more common and versatile. This SSD drive can be installed in both a computer and a laptop. But if you want very high speed, it is better to choose the PCI interface.

Memory type

To find out which ssd is better to choose 2016 for your computer, you need to pay attention to the type of memory. The first type of memory, SLC, is no longer available. There are two types common in the market - MLC and TLC. The first one is more expensive, but has a recording resource of 3000 thousand times, and the speed of working with data is 50 milliseconds. Such disks can last 5-7 years with normal use, but are more expensive.

Discs using TLC memory have a write life of 1000 times, a 75 millisecond read time and a service life of about three to five years. For a home computer, it is quite possible to choose TLC memory. But if you copy large files very often, then it is better to choose MLC.

Chip manufacturer

There is one more very important parameter that is worth paying attention to. This is the manufacturer of the controller chip. On the one hand, it may seem that this does not matter, but each manufacturer has its own characteristics and disadvantages.

• SandForce- This is one of the most popular controllers. It is quite cheap and has good performance. The main feature is the use of compression when writing data to the media. But there is a drawback - when the disk is full, the recording speed drops significantly;
• Marvel- similar to SandForce, has excellent operating speed, but it no longer depends on the disk full percentage. Disadvantage - too expensive;
• Samsung- also quite popular controllers. They have support for AES encryption at the hardware level, but sometimes you can observe a decrease in speed due to problems with the garbage collection algorithm;
• Fizon- has excellent performance, a low price and the absence of any problems that would reduce speed. But there is a drawback here. It performed poorly in random write and read operations;
• Intel- better than Fizon, but much more expensive.

The main manufacturers of memory boards are Samsung, SanDisk, Intel and Toshiba. But memory boards are not that different, so the choice of board manufacturer does not matter much.

SSD and HDD are two types of hard drives used to create computers.

SSD (abbreviated as “Solid-State Drive”)– a solid-state drive based on memory chips. It is quite advanced - it appeared in wide distribution only in 2009. There is a common storage device created on the basis of this technology - the familiar flash card (“flash drive”).

SSD has a high speed of writing, deleting and reading data, which is clearly incomparable with similar parameters of previous storage devices. For the same reason, “flash drives” have become so widespread, completely replacing CDs.

In terms of ergonomic performance, the SSD is unrivaled. It does not heat up, does not make noise, which sometimes irritates the ear and distracts from the task, and, most importantly, does not vibrate.

SSD power consumption is quite low. The use of such hard drives has the same positive impact on the budget as the use of energy-saving lamps.

In everyday life, in which physical characteristics sometimes become the determining factor in the choice of goods, SSDs are invaluable due to their small size. In addition, storage technology is ahead of its time, so the size of storage devices will rapidly decrease.

And the last comparison criterion is price. SSDs are considered high-tech, and therefore have a decent price tag.

SSD (abbreviated as “Solid-State Drive”)

HDD- a fundamentally different type of storage device, more conservative among current realities. Its main difference from “SDD” is the principle of operation - electronic-mechanical versus electronic. The design of the first contains a rotating magnetic disk on which information is recorded using a magnetic head - a solution borrowed from the era of gramophone records, but significantly improved.

The speed of the HDD is not as high as the “SDD”: the recording device is not as perfect, therefore it is not capable of recording information at the speed with which the “SDD” performs a similar operation, and the disk, due to mechanical limitations, is not able to move fast enough, to be a worthy competitor to SSDs.

What gives this type of drive a special flavor is the characteristic noise of its operation in the form of clicks, sometimes accompanied by strong vibration. After prolonged operation, the magnetic hard drive becomes warm.

HDD is more demanding in terms of energy supply - this fact cannot be disputed. As mentioned above, a magnetic drive tends to heat up, and to cool it you have to use fans (called “coolers” in computer jargon), which have a very immodest appetite.

HDD sizes are clearly a disadvantage. This technology is being used less and less often in portable personal computers, since users have firmly established in their minds the attitude of giving preference to compact devices.

But despite the outdated principles of operation, in terms of retail cost, HDDs are in an advantageous position.

Conclusions website

1. SSD drives do not use the same mechanics as HDDs.
2. SSDs process information faster than HDDs
3. SSDs are silent and not subject to strong heating, unlike HDDs
4. SSDs are less energy consuming than HDDs
5. SSDs are smaller than HDDs
6. The cost of HDD is significantly lower than the cost of SSD