Hard-Disk-Drives (HDDs) are mechanical devices with spinning platters, not unlike old vinyl records, but instead of grooves, small magnetic blocks are used to save or load information in the form of 0's and 1's by magnetizing or reading the magnetized polarity on the platter's surface. They also have a 'head', that like a record player, swing to and fro over the platters to read or write information.
This is an amazing piece of robotics but it has it's limits… Although hard-drives come installed in laptops, they are not really intended to be used whilst moving. A small bump can cause the head to bump against the platter, causing irreparable damage. Hard-drives can recover and ignore that 'bad block' but over time the disk will quickly continue to degrade, until eventually one day, your data is lost.
Because HDDs rely on a spinning platter and a moving mechanical arm, the time it takes to read a piece of data at beginning on the disk, and after that data at the end of the disk, will induce a notable delay, as we wait for the head to move into position and the platter to spin around to the place where it should read or write. The average consumer HDD have a delay (latency) of about 10 milliseconds and can read at roughly 130MBs and write at roughly 100MBs @ p
Solid-State-Drives (SSDs) are electronic devices, similar to a USB flash-drive or camera memory card, but simulates a hard-drive and use much better technology than memory cards and flash drives. SSDs have no moving parts so is safe to use in any device under many conditions and are not as fragile as HDDs. They are also very reliable and super-fast! A wide variety of SSDs are available on the market, almost all of them will outlive the HDDs it will replace and are sure to make a gasping performance boost to your PC or laptop.
SSDs are not as big or cheap as HDDs, but well worth the cost, especially in laptops (that move around), gaming PCs or servers that need super-fast response times and super-fast speeds.
The average entry level SSD have a delay of <1ms data-blogger-escaped-and="" data-blogger-escaped-of="" data-blogger-escaped-read="" data-blogger-escaped-speed="" data-blogger-escaped-write="">500MBs @ price +→ R6/GB.
Written By:Tina Ekermans
