Are you still confused between HDDs and SSDs?

A year back when I was buying a laptop, I was stuck with this same confusion. I asked a lot of people, researched a lot of articles on google, seen plenty of youtube videos but never got the answer. Which one is better, if HDD is better, why people invented SSDs? If SSD is best, then which ones to buy? What’s the difference?

There are two main kinds of hard drives, solid-state drives, and hard disk drives when it comes to data storage solutions for a PC. But should you get a cheaper, traditional hard disk drive or buy a fast SSD?

A hard disk drive (HDD) is a traditional storage device that uses mechanical platters and a moving read/write head to access data. Since all of these pieces are “mechanical,” the hard disk is the slowest component of any computer — and the most fragile. By now you’ve likely heard of Solid State Drives, or SSDs as a blazing fast storage drive to speed up old computers, or provide reliable uptime compared to their replacement, Hard Drives, or HDDs.

So traditional old laptops generally have HDD attached to the SATA interface (SATA HDD). It is relatively cheaper but has a shorter lifespan, it will give you a maximum performance of up to 200 MB/s.

Now let’s talk about SSDs. There are several connector types that SSDs use to interface with a computer, including SATA, PCIe, M.2, U.2, mSATA, SATA Express, and even none, as some SSDs now come soldered to the board. For a consumer, the most common options are SATA, M.2 SATA, and M.2 NVMe:

1) SATA SSD -

• Good for desktops.
• Lane — SATA 3
• Protocol used — AHCI Protocol
• Maximum Bandwidth/ Performance — 500MB/s

2) M.2 SATA SSD -

• A bit costlier than SATA SSD, good for laptops.
• No improvement in performance as compared to SATA SSD.
• Better in design.
• The interface is compact.
• Lane — SATA 3
• Protocol used — AHCI Protocol
• Maximum Bandwidth/ Performance — 500MB/s

3) M.2 NVMe SSD -

• Fastest SSD
• Lane — PCI Express
• Protocol used — NVMe Protocol
• Normal Bandwidth — 2.5GB/s
• Bandwidth — 4GB/s(Maximum)

This means SATA-based SSDs cannot utilize the speed and efficiency of newer controllers such as NVMe. The performance improvement will only be seen with large read/writes to and from the drive or large amounts of small read/writes. Computers will boot faster, files will transfer and search faster, programs will boot faster, but it won’t make a Facebook page load any faster.

In conclusion, SSDs are quickly becoming ubiquitous in the computing world, and for good reason. Their prices are plummeting, their speeds are unmatched, they’re smaller fitting into thinner systems, and they’re far less likely to fail, especially after a drop or shake of the device. If you have an old computer with slow loading times in need of a performance boost, a great speed-augmenting solution is to buy a SATA SSD. But if being cutting edge and speed is what you’re looking for, nothing beats a PCIe NVMe M.2 drive.

Which hard disk is better? Which one to buy?

Speed Comparison -

PCIe NVMe M.2 SSD > M.2 SATA SSD ~ SATA SSD > HDD

So now you know the performance of all the hard disk drives, let’s talk about the storage capacities and what you should buy depending on the use-case.

SSDs for computers are available in 120GB to 30.72TB capacities when it comes to capacity, whereas HDDs can go anywhere from 250GB to 20TB.

• Less Storage, Medium speed, Low Budget — SATA SSDs
• Less Storage, Faster speed, High Budget — PCIe NVMe M.2 SSD
• More Storage, Less speed, Low Budget — HDDs
• You can also buy a combination of both such as 1TB HDD + 256 SSD (Hybrid HDD), which will provide you both good storage and high speed, but obviously, you have to compromise speed at some point or the other. Here also you can go for SATA or NVMe SSD(depends on the budget).

* If you are buying a laptop, the price will also depend on other factors such as RAM, Graphics, etc.

How to check the performance and type of your hard disk?

There are 2 options:

1) Manually open a laptop and check if it has SSD or HDD slots.

2) Install a software called DiskMark -

https://crystalmark.info/en/software/crystaldiskmark/

How to check drive read and write performance speeds on Windows 10 using Disk Mark?

To measure a drive reads and writes performance using CrystalDiskMark, close all the running programs, and use these steps:

• Open DiskMark.
• Using the first drop-down menu on the left, select the number of runs. (If the default is 5, you can change it to 3, which is enough to get more accurate results.
• Using the second drop-down menu, select the file size that the app will use to benchmark the drive. (The default selection is more than enough in most cases.)
• Using the third drop-down menu on the right, select the drive (HDD or SSD) that you want to test.
• Click the All button.

Once you’ve completed the steps, the performance tests will run on the disk for several minutes depending on the drive, and after they have been completed, you’ll see the benchmark result in megabytes/second.

From the above image, you can clearly see the difference in the performance speed of HDD, SSD, and NVMe SSD.

Got the answer? So now that you know which one is best for your laptop, share this knowledge with other people and buy the laptop which is most optimized for your use case.

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