The Awful Truth: SSDs Are Faster, But Not Better Than HDDs

Hard-disk drives are a common appearance in any personal computer and have a long tradition, dating back in the late '50s. It was improved and enhanced over the time, but its basic operating principle has not changed much. The advent of the newer storage media, known as the solid-state drives is the first significant change in the last 50 years.

Hard-disk drives are mechanical units that records data in an analogue form on spinning magnetic platters. It uses plenty of mobile parts, such as arms, heads, platters and even motors. On the other side, solid-state drives store data digitally on NAND flash memory chips, which allows the retaining of information even when the device has been shut down.

The new solid-state drives bring obvious advantages to storing data. They don't use any moving parts and store data at the speed of light, since they don't have writing heads to look for the appropriate storage space, for instance. They need less power than a regular HDD, because there's no motor to drain additional electric power. Moreover, they are completely silent and extremely hard to kill. But that's all about them.

The current versions of SSDs are extremely expensive, because the single-level cell NAND flash is difficult to produce. At the same time, except for some military solid-state drives, the commercial units provide between 32 and 128 GB of storage space.

The latest notebook from Apple, the MacBook Air for instance would make a good example. If you pick the HDD version, you only pay $1,799 and get 80 GB of storage space. The solid-state drive option would squeeze your pockets off $2,798 and will provide only 64 gigabytes. The same thing happens with Toshiba's Portege R500 notebook, that can be purchased for $1,999 in the 120 gigabytes HDD version, while the SSD-enabled R500 will wear a price tag of $2,699 (64 GB of storage).

Neither the energy-efficiency, nor their rapidity will compensate for the financial and capacity compromise. Data recovery services are a life-savior in case disasters strike, and, while HDDs enjoy easier and cheaper recovery, SSDs act just like a fortress, and you'd rather get some new data than recover it. It's true that SSDs are one step ahead of older HDD in terms of technology, but they are still a luxury piece rather than a necessity. By the way, do you imagine yourself saying "I'm gonna store this file on my solid-state drive"?

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