Hard disk drives have been ruling the non-volatile storage landscape on laptops and desktops for many years. But solid-state drives (SSDs) can do the important work of storing and accessing data in ways that are safer and faster. Here are several reasons you should consider an SSD with your next PC purchase.
Fast Access to Data, up to 28X faster!
There’s no question about it: Because SSDs use flash memory, they are simply faster than HDDs when it comes to storing and accessing data. A hard disk holding your operating system for bootup could take a few minutes; SSDs holding an OS can generally do all the loading in a minute. Programs load faster, files load faster, and data transfers faster. SSDs are the Flash in a race against HDDs which are, at best, .
No Need to Defragment
Fragmentation of data on an HDD is a problem going back decades. Because of the way data is stored on a disk, it’s not always contiguous. The head used to access data has to jump around the disk constantly to get to blocks of data, which slows access way down, even if the disk is spinning at 7,200 revolutions per minute (RPM) with all the modern tech possible. Fragmented data still happens with HDDs, and it gets especially bad as drives fill up. You don’t have that with solid-state drives. SSDs don’t care where the blocks are. They’ will use what is needed and show you the data with the same speed. You never have to run a defragmentation utility on an SSD to make it perform better.
Silence Is Golden
HDDs are full of moving parts. A spinning platter, a moving head, etc. And that means even in the most high-end drive, there’s going to be some noise SSDs have no moving parts. The non-mechanical storage is entirely on silicon, meaning there is no noise.
Less Chance of Damage
Remember that thing about no moving parts? That’s also what makes SSDs practically immune to getting hurt. Sure, there are laptops that aim to protect the components inside, but an SSD is still going to be more damage-resistant than an HDD.
Less Power Needed, no heat!
An SSD being non-mechanical means that it doesn’t have to spin up to speed to get going. Like starting a cold car engine on a winter morning, that same start time on an HDD is a true energy sucker. That translates to SSDs saving you some money on the electric bill, or at least extending the battery a bit.
Lower Prices Than Ever
There’s no question that SSDs are more expensive than HDDs. A visit to Dell.com to customize a laptop shows that the same model with a 2TB 5,400 RPM HDD would cost as much as getting one with a 512GB SSD. That’s a quarter of the storage for the same price. And because SSDs cost more, you won’t really find them as an option in ultra-cheap budget laptops.
That said, SSD prices are lower than they’ve ever been and will probably continue to drop.