The Difference Between Solid State Drive and Ordinary Hard Drive

With the development of technology, Solid State Drives (SSDs) have gradually become the mainstream.

What are the differences between SSD drives and traditional hard drives?

• SSD drives have no motor acceleration and rotation process, which allows for faster startup.

  
  

• SSD drives do not use read/write heads and have fast random read speed with minimal read delay. According to relevant tests, laptops equipped with SSDs take only 18 seconds to start from turning on to displaying the desktop, while those with traditional hard drives take a total of 31 seconds, nearly a 50% difference.

• SSD drives have relatively fixed read time. Since the addressing time is independent of data storage location, disk fragmentation does not affect read time.

• SSD drives based on DRAM have extremely fast write speed.

• SSDs are silent, with a noise value of 0 decibels while working since there are no motor or fan. However, some high-end or large-capacity products are equipped with fans, causing noise.

• Low-capacity flash-based SSD drives have low energy consumption and heat under working conditions, but high-end or large-capacity products consume more energy.

• SSDs have no mechanical parts that may fail or be affected by impacts, vibrations, or tilting. Even under high-speed movement or accidental drops, the possibility of data loss is minimized, providing more robust protection for data than traditional hard drives.

  
  

• SSD drives have a wider working temperature range. Typical hard drives can only work within a temperature range of 5 to 55 degrees Celsius, while most SSDs can operate at temperatures of -10 to 70 degrees Celsius, and some industrial-grade SSDs can work at temperatures of -40 to 85 degrees Celsius, or even larger.

• Low-capacity SSD drives are smaller in size and lighter in weight than traditional hard drives of the same capacity. However, this advantage gradually weakens with the increase in capacity. Until 256GB, SSDs are still lighter than traditional hard drives of the same capacity.

How to extend the service life of SSD drives?

To extend the lifespan of SSDs, we should learn to maintain them. For example, we should timely clear large amounts of files to give SSDs more storage space. When deleting files, we should gather all files together and then delete them all at once to reduce usage and speed up deletion, thus also protecting the SSD. Also, we should timely upgrade by installing the latest firmware released by the manufacturer to refresh the performance of our SSDs.