SSD vs HDD

The future of storage?

by Michael Smith (Veshengro)

This is indeed the question. From many points and aspects SSD, that is to say solid state drives, do look to be the way forward as this is also a more environmentally friendly way and can reduce the carbon and environmental footprint but...

...and here it comes...

(1) SSD compared to the old HDD technology is much more expensive though this may – or may not – be balanced out by the reduction in running costs in the long run.

(2) Safety and reliability of SSDs and their chip technology are still something that I, for one, am much concerned about. Having managed to crash more than one SSD USB device by now I personally still am somewhat dubious about SSDs in the long term reliability context for storage in the long run.

Claims are made by makers as to guarantees of a minimum of ten years but thaqt may be OK if you do not write and rewrite and such to the drive but just use it for writing data to it once and then just leaving it sitting there.

Having used USB drives, which too are SSD chips, as basically external hard drives and crashing them while working on the as HDDs has me still concerned as to their reliability.

For that same reason, I guess, I am a hoarder of USB thumb drives.

I am though quite prepared to have someone prove to me a greater reliability of SSDs.

Having said before as well SSDs are also still rather expensive as regards to bucks per byte, or megabyte in this case, and chip prices too seem to be on the up in the late autumn of 2009 that I am not seeing the prices of good SSDs coming down soon.

The main advantage of the SSD or the conventional mechanical magnetic hard drive is the fact that the former requires far less energy to run it and as there are no moving parts SSDs are better for the rugged environment where knocks, duct, etc., could adversely affect the conventional HDDs and cause them to have permanent failure.

The SSDs that I crashed were also permanent failures and no data could be retrieved from them nor could they be reformatted and soo far no one has been able to give me explanations as to why and how this happened and the possible cause of it. All I can think of is that the drives, the chips, must have been inferior ones. My caution, however, does remain.

© 2009

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