Solid State Drive versus Hard Disc Drive

SSD Vs HDD

Attribute	SSD	HDD
Stands for	Solid State Drive	Hard Disk Drive
Speed	SSD has lower latency, faster read/writes, and supports more IOPs (input output operations per second) compared to HDD.	HDD has higher latency, longer read/write times, and supports fewer IOPs (input output operations per second) compared to SSD.
Heat, Electricity, Noise	Since no such rotation is needed in solid state drives, they use less power and do not generate heat or noise.	Hard disk drives use more electricity to rotate the platters, generating heat and noise.
Defragmentation	SSD drive performance is not impacted by fragmentation. So defragmentation is not necessary.	The performance of HDD drives worsens due to fragmentation; therefore, they need to be periodically defragmented.
Components	SSD has no moving parts; it is essentially a memory chip. It is interconnected, integrated circuits (ICs) with an interface connector. There are three basic components - controller, cache and capacitor.	HDD contains moving parts - a motor-driven spindle that holds one or more flat circular disks (called platters) coated with a thin layer of magnetic material. Read-and-write heads are positioned on top of the disks; all this is encased in a metal case
Weight	SSD drives are lighter than HDD drives because they do not have the rotating disks, spindle and motor.	HDDs are heavier than SSD drives.
Dealing with vibration	SSD drives can withstand vibration up to 2000Hz, which is much more than HDD.	The moving parts of HDDs make them susceptible to crashes and damage due to vibration.
Power Draw / Battery Life	Less power draw, averages 2 – 3 watts, resulting in 30+ minute battery boost	More power draw, averages 6 – 7 watts and therefore uses more battery
Cost	Expensive, roughly $0.10 per gigabyte (based on buying a 1TB drive)	Only around $0.06 per gigabyte, very cheap (buying a 4TB model)
Capacity	Typically not larger than 1TB for notebook size drives; 1TB max for desktops	Typically around 500GB and 2TB maximum for notebook size drives; 6TB max for desktops
Operating System Boot Time	Around 10-13 seconds average bootup time	Around 30-40 seconds average bootup time
Noise	There are no moving parts and as such no sound	Audible clicks and spinning can be heard
Vibration	No vibration as there are no moving parts	The spinning of the platters can sometimes result in vibration
Heat Produced	Lower power draw and no moving parts so little heat is produced	HDD doesn’t produce much heat, but it will have a measurable amount more heat than an SSD due to moving parts and higher power draw
Failure Rate	Mean time between failure rate of 2.0 million hours	Mean time between failure rate of 1.5 million hours
File Copy / Write Speed	Generally above 200 MB/s and up to 550 MB/s for cutting edge drives	The range can be anywhere from 50 – 120MB / s
Encryption	Full Disk Encryption (FDE) Supported on some models	Full Disk Encryption (FDE) Supported on some models
File Opening Speed	Up to 30% faster than HDD	Slower than SSD
Magnetism Affected?	An SSD is safe from any effects of magnetism	Magnets can erase data

Form Factors: HDDs relying on spinning platters, there is a limit how small it can be manufactured. There is an initiative to make smaller 1.8-inch spinning hard drives, but that is stalled at about 320GB, since the smartphone and tablet manufacturers have settled on flash memory for their primary storage. SSDs have no such limitation, so they can continue to minimize as time goes on. SSDs are available in 2.5-inch laptop drive-sized boxes, but that's only for convenience. As laptops become slimmer and tablets take over as primary Web-surfing platforms, you'll start to see the adoption of SSDs skyrocket.

Price: To put it bluntly, SSDs are more expensive than HDDs in terms of dollar per GB. For the same capacity and form factor 1TB internal 2.5-inch drive, you'll pay about $60 to $75 for an HDD, but as of this writing, an SSD doubles that to $130 to $150. That translates into 7 cents per gigabyte for the HDD and 14 cents per gigabyte for the SSD. Since HDDs are older, more established technologies, they will remain less expensive for the near future. Those extra hundreds may push your system price over budget. 

 

Battery Life: Commonly, storage will not effect battery life in a laptop computer by more than about 10%. Processor power and LCD really runs down the battery. But, SSD is the most power-efficient, and SSHD is a close second because it can spin more frequently than an HDD.

Reliability: The failure rate of SSD, HDD and SSHD technologies has very similar ratings. SSHD has benefits because it uses both the SSD and HDD portions are more effective than if they were used separate.

Durability: The SSDs has been considered as more durable simply because of its solid state design. Without moving parts, they can tolerate higher extremes of shock and temperature.

Availability: Hard drives are simply abundant. Look at the product lists from Western Digital, Toshiba, Seagate, Samsung, and Hitachi, and you will see some more HDD models than SSDs. For PCs and Macs, internal HDDs would not go away, at least for the next few of years. You will also see few more HDD choices than SSDs from different manufacturers for the same capacities. SSD model lines are growing in number, but HDDs are still in the majority for storage devices in PCs.

Maximum and Common Capacity: SSD are in market at 4TB, but are still rare and expensive. You are more likely to find 500GB to 1TB units as primary drives in systems. 500GB is considered as a "fundamental" hard drive in 2015. Multimedia users will require even more and more, with 1TB to 4TB drives as common in high-end systems. Actually, the more storage capacity, the more stuff (photos, music, videos, etc.) you can store on your PC. While the (Internet) cloud may be a good place to share and store these files and data among your phone, tablet, and PC, local storage is less expensive, and you only have to buy it one time, only.

Speed: An SSD enabled PC will boot in seconds, certainly under a minute. A hard drive requires time to speed up to operating system, and will continue to be slower than an SSD during normally. A PC or Mac with an SSD boots faster, launches apps faster, and has faster overall performance. The much higher scores and transfer time for external SSDs versus HDDs. Whether it's for fun, school, or business, the speed may be the difference between finishing time and failing time.

Fragmentation: HDD rotary recording surfaces work best with larger files that are laid down in continuous blocks. In this way, the HDD head can start and end its read in continuation. When HDD start to fill up, then large files can become scattered around the disk platter, which is otherwise known as fragmentation. While read/write algorithms have improved to the point that the effect is minimized, the fact of the matter is that HDDs can become fragmented, while SSDs do not care where the data is stored on its chips, since there are no physical head. Thus, SSDs are faster.

Noise: HDD will be noisy when it is in use from the drive spinning or the read arm moving back and forth, particularly if it is in a system i.e. been banged about or in an all-metal system where it is been  installed. Faster hard drives will make more noise than slower devices. SSDs make no noise at all, since they are based on semiconductor.

Finally, HDDs win on price, capacity, and availability. SSDs work best if speed, ruggedness, form factor, noise, or fragmentation is important factors to you. If it was not for the price and capacity issues, SSDs would be the great choice.