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What is difference between a solid state drive and a mechanical hard drive installed in a computer?

2023-03-16

To answer this question, let's first understand difference between solid state and mechanical hard drives and their advantages and disadvantages

1. One word for a solid state hard drive is fast, two words is fast, three words is very fast. The read speed of solid state hard disk can reach 400MB per second, and write speed can reach 200MB per second, which is not possible with a traditional mechanical hard disk. So if your old computer is equipped with a solid state drive, you will have feeling that a second spring has appeared in computer.

2. So second hallmark of solid state drives, expensive, very expensive, very expensive. Search for solid state hard drives on JD.com and you'll see that capacities are typically 128GB and 256GB, with prices starting at a minimum of 300GB. What can 128G store? A high-resolution computer is generally no less than 4G. Of course, few people save movie files on an SSD. It's normal for a large single game to cost 30 to 40G, and almost nothing can be stored.

What is difference between a solid state drive and a mechanical hard drive installed in a computer?

3. Solid state hard drives have a limited lifespan. The theoretical erasing and writing time for ordinary flash memory particles in solid state drives is about 5,000 to 10,000 times. Of course, whether you can use hard drive for that long is another matter.

4. If SSD is damaged, data on it cannot be recovered. A traditional hard drive writes data on a magnetic layer that can theoretically withstand countless reads and writes without risk of magnetic field failure, so even if hard drive is damaged, you can still use professional tools to read information on magnetic layer. restore layer of cylinder. But SSDs are built differently: there is no mechanical structure inside, data is scattered across each flash memory, it is almost impossible to recover data from damaged flash memory chips. Because they have different storage principles, when you delete files on an SSD, it doesn't just delete file index like it does on a mechanical hard drive, it deletes them all.

Conversely, disadvantages of SSDs are advantages of mechanical drives. The mechanical disk has a large capacity and is cheap, but speed is relatively slow. If data on a mechanical disk is corrupted, it can be recovered to a certain extent by technical means. Very long service life.

In conclusion, if you don't have a shortage of money and you don't need to store very important data, choose a high-capacity SSD. If you're short on cash, best combination would be a mechanical drive + solid state drive storage.