I’ve Always Wanted To Know:
Why solid state over traditional hard drives?

Answer:

Are you in the market for a new hard drive or backup storage device and notice they come in two different types: solid state memory/hard drives and mechanical/traditional drives. So why would you want one over the other? Let’s talk about the Pro’s and Con’s:

Solid State Memory/Hard Drive

Pro:

• Faster speeds in both random access time (the time it takes to seek a random file out on the drive) and sustained transfer rate (the speed the file transfers to your machine at)
• Far more durable as it doesn’t have any mechanical moving parts which can wear down .
• Very low power usage saves energy and prolongs battery life.
• Light weight keeps the device as light as possible.

Con:

• Less reliable. Solid state memory has a limited number of read/write cycles it can go through and though many manufacturers offer 3 year warranties the drives do not have the long life of mechanical drives.
• Expensive for the size of the drive you get.

Traditional Hard Drive:

Pro:

• Large capacities up to 4 TB (4 trillion bytes of information)
• Long lifespan with some drives warrantied for up to one million MTBF (mean time between failure)
• Lower cost per gigabyte of storage.

Con:

• Significantly slower random access and sustained transfer rates then solid state.
• Very prone to shock damage (such as dropping or impact).
• Much heavier then solid state devices.
• Failure of mechanical components usually renders all information accessible instead of just information loss.

So which is better? If size is your thing then you can’t beat a mechanical hard drive. If you want speed and low power usage? Solid state is the way to go!

-Tim