Hard Disk vs. SSD: What's the Difference?
Wed Jan 16, 2008 10:46PM EST
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With the MacBook Air's arrival, Solid State Drives, or SSDs, seem to be making a run for the mainstream. (Numerous other vendors, including Dell and Fujitsu, sell them preloaded in laptops.) But many look at the extra thousand bucks or so that an SSD costs vs. an old-school hard drive and wonder.... um, is this really worth it? What is an SSD anyway? Well, I've heard the question enough times now that it's time to answer it in depth.
What is an SSD? A solid state drive is designed to act just like a hard drive as far as the user or the computer is concerned (and even looks similar on the outside), but it has no moving parts. SSDs have no spinning platters; instead they are based on flash memory, the same stuff in a camera memory card or a USB thumbdrive. Only there's lots more of it: Most SSDs are now 32GB or 64GB in size. That's a lot of flash memory.
SSDs are faster than hard drives (up to hundreds of times faster), use less power, and weigh less than traditional spinning hard drives. They don't crash when you drop them, and they don't make any noise. Over time, we should see far greater capacities in the same amount of physical space, too. Sounds great so far. But there's one catch: Magnetic hard drive technology is dirt cheap. Flash memory is very expensive. 64GB of hard drive space would cost you less than $50 (if you could even find a new drive that small). 64GB in SSD format? At least $1,000.
And there's the rub. All of flash's advantages are obviated if they double the total cost of your computer. Many people look at SSD drives and say, Hey, I'm accident-prone, and my drive won't crash if I drop the laptop... so maybe I should get an SSD. Well, maybe... but you could actually replace any broken hard drive for $100 or so. And you're making your backups, right? Is the SSD's insurance really worth 10 times the price of a spare hard disk?
In time, SSDs will probably completely replace hard drives in many applications, especially notebooks, but for now, they're really just a luxury toy for the ultra-rich who want a quieter, lighter, and more ghastly expensive laptop. Give it four years, then ask me again. For now: Just get a hard drive.
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7 Posted by middlenamefrank on Thu Sep 3, 2009 7:19PM EDT Report Abuse
I don't do video piracy, and only rip my own CD's or buy mp3's legally, so I could get by on 64GB of space. I'm currently using just a bit more than that on my 100GB laptop drive, and I'd have no problem trimming down to that size. I am very attracted by the smaller size, lower power consumption and cooler running of SSD's. Higher performance (though I don't think you'll realize anything like 100x performance in real life) is just a bonus. I'll probably get one in my next laptop, though that may be a couple of years from now. I'll pay a couple hundred more (which is all it should be by then) for the cooler operation, smaller size and increased battery life. In my opinion, the time to switch over is fast approaching....if it isn't already here.
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8 Posted by lewinjon on Thu Sep 3, 2009 6:49PM EDT Report Abuse
I remember well, back in the late 70's when Winchester introduced its 5 and 10 MB (Yes, Megabyte) drives. They sold for over $3000.00. Some of us drooled over them, others claimed nobody would ever need such a huge amount of storage. Now, such a drive couldn't even hold one of Vista's desktop gadgets. Our spinning disk drives will go the way of the floppy and SSD's will quietly take over and we won't give them a second thought
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9 Posted by fox95630 on Thu Sep 3, 2009 4:02PM EDT Report Abuse
lewinjon, I've been thinking the same thing. It won't be long before we marvel at magnetic drives in the Smithsonian.
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10 Posted by rogueist on Thu Sep 3, 2009 8:49PM EDT Report Abuse
Sheesh... And here I have about 1TB of storage space connected to my poor laptop and not even 30GB of free space... Windows is horribly inefficient - I have the SAME PROGRAMS installed on my MAC and I have not even used 20Gb yet!
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11 Posted by hndymn1014 on Thu Sep 3, 2009 4:19PM EDT Report Abuse
I've read in several places that Sandisk is coming out with a 32GB flash drive MP3 player sometime next month. The price? $329.00---look for flash drive prices to start being competitive with hard drives VERY soon...
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12 Posted by keybowvio on Thu Sep 3, 2009 4:50PM EDT Report Abuse
stogie414- I take 10 pics a day (sort of a challenge that I made for myself 5 years ago), and let me tell you... I have LOTS of pics. That take up LOTS of room. Then when you add in all my mp3s and videos that I d/l. well, let's just say that my 250gig HD, is beginning to not cut it anymore. Also, I find SSD's sort of ironic. Just when memory was becoming dirt cheap (like, when you buy a desktop computer, you could add a terabyte of storage for like $50, or sumthin like that. @ hndymn1014, Creative already came out with a 32 gig. mp3 player, price is $329.
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13 Posted by browncoatfan on Thu Sep 3, 2009 3:14PM EDT Report Abuse
Personally i don't think that HDs will be going out anytime soon as long as thier prices are lower and their capacities are higher then that of the newer SSDs. Also the prices have lowered on HDs even more as demand increased and competition caused a price drop. Ontop of that there is also the concerns over the lifespan and storage issues from the SSDs which are predicted to keep HDs around for a long time. http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/139422/hard_drive_prices_drop_as_pc_demand_rises.html
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14 Posted by andrisbukarts on Thu Sep 3, 2009 2:54PM EDT Report Abuse
About HD with 64 gig,was in the shop to buy one, didn't saw any less than 160 gig! :))
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15 Posted by tim_mckeand on Thu Sep 3, 2009 10:10PM EDT Report Abuse
this technology will find its way into portable a/v devices that will allow users to download HD quality movies onto and plug into their home televisions to replace blu ray. It will take years, but this is probably the future of rewritable storage. How fast the access rate is on this type of drive and it will NEVER skip is critical, plus the storage space. Also the article meant you can't find a 64Gig HD because they are tiny today. He meant you can't go into a store and find a NEW HD that ONLY holds approx 64 gigs.......He doesn't mean there are no drives bigger than 64 gigs I think.
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16 Posted by tedk_1 on Thu Sep 3, 2009 9:59PM EDT Report Abuse
One thing that nobody has touched is the limited write/erase cycles that are inherent in FLASH memory. Last I checked, erase cycles were limited too a few hundred thousand cycles. I see a long term reliability issue with this technology.
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17 Posted by wenger2k on Thu Sep 3, 2009 10:43PM EDT Report Abuse
One thing I don't believe this article mentions is the lower energy requirement for the SSD drives which should result in longer battery life. Someone noted that their are questions about the long term reliability of these devices. The manufacturers have stated that their are limitations to the number of read/write cycles to a given block of memory but that those limitations have been circumvented by sophisticated algorithms in the ssd controllers which reduce the read/writes to any specific memory block and give the drives similar overall mtbf to mechanical drives. Time will tell if that is the case. As for pricing - it seems that the manufacturers are taking advantage of the hype cycle as 8mb sd, flash and compact flash cards can be had for less than $50 - indicating the memory in a 64gb SSD is worth less than $400 and the rest is for the SSD controller and early-adopter tax. I think i'll wait about 12 months for mine.
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18 Posted by beach_slap on Thu Sep 3, 2009 3:04PM EDT Report Abuse
stogie414, if you don't have more than 40gb used on any one of your computers, you must not have very much fun on any of your computers. with the price of 500gb hd's dropping to around $100, i can't conceive of $1000, 64gb ssd'd pushing them out of that market any time soon. space is space, and it'll be a long time till a 500gb ssd becomes affordable enough for us average joes to want to get rid of our glorious, glorious HDD's. i mean yeah, eventually it'll happen, but not before Kuato reveals himself and all of Mars breathes freely.
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19 Posted by hitterg on Thu Sep 3, 2009 4:19PM EDT Report Abuse
leeemingerwayne needs to check his attitude to begin with. I am glad this article was posted and am thankful for any info people are willing to post and the time it took them to provide us with this info. I also wonder what kind of hack job, outdated computer shop leeemingerwayne has if he is only giving people 64Gb drives in the computers he sells them. Come on, we're in 2008. Maybe he is just doing his best to take advantage of and make money off of customers that don't know any better. Shame on him, he should be trying to help and inform people, not nickle and dime them to death. I wanted to check out this article for more info on SSD's and to see what others had to say about them and if anyone has used these. Unfortunatly it seems as if some people are on here just to cut others down and do nothing more. On the other hand, tedk_1's comment was short but brought up a very good point about the read/write cycles. I wish there were more people like him and all the others here that have had something infomative to say. I know I haven't added anything to this post about SSD's, but I wanted to give some support to the author of this article and thank everyone that has contributed intelligent and informative replies to this subject.
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20 Posted by barneymckim on Thu Sep 3, 2009 3:02PM EDT Report Abuse
Would SSD be swappable without having to take apart the entire laptop? sort of like how the express card slot/memory card slots work in current laptops? maybe slide and lock into the side or something? I just think something like that would make upgrading the memory easier. Also, the comment was that it would be difficult, not impossible, to find a 64g hdd. And being a Vista user, once I load in office, and few other aps, my memory is way too eaten up for anything less than 100gig. my itunes alone is using up around 26gigs
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21 Posted by ivan07032 on Thu Sep 3, 2009 4:25PM EDT Report Abuse
I just bought 4GB SDHC for $7.95 after $8 rebate. I remember when they were a lot more so SSD will go down as weel if there is demand for it.
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22 Posted by generalcp702 on Thu Sep 3, 2009 4:07PM EDT Report Abuse
For one thing, an SSD GB is 1073741824 bytes, instead of a billion. Second, lost data on an SSD is unrecoverable. Third, a hard drive will still have many, many read/write cycles, and minimization will require massive RAM to hold all things to write to storage AND run programs. The access time isn't as important as people are making it out to be, because EVERY program MUST be loaded into RAM to run, so access time is only important when saving or loading.
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6 Posted by m_knopp on Thu Sep 3, 2009 7:32PM EDT Report Abuse
stogie414, if it weren't for video and pictures I would be the same way. However, it doesn't take many minutes of home video to fill up 64 GB of space. And while it does take more time it isn't inconceivable that a person could fill 64GB of space with digital pictures, especially as the pixel count goes up on cameras. The computer industry has been working very hard on merging with media for these very reasons. If it weren't for doing video and graphics computers from four or five years ago are all that anyone needs. I doubt any single family could fill up 64GB with text or spreadsheets and does it really take a dual core 2GHz processor to send email and surf the web?