Throwing a Glance at Solid State Drives - Advantages of SSDs
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Advantages of SSDs
First let's throw a quick glance at the advantages and then we'll discuss each of them in more detail:
Low power consumption;
No moving mechanical parts - zero noise, low heat dissipation, etc.;
Deterministic performance (constant) regardless of data fragmentation;
Way faster overall performance due to extremely low seek times;
Usually longer lifetime than conventional mechanical hard disk drives.
First and foremost, the biggest advantage of solid state drives is that they do not have any moving parts. Therefore, their power consumption is very low as well as their heat production values. Zero noise is produced, so we can call them ultra-silent drives. Did your flash drive "click" last time while accessing data? No, it didn't. Zero noise!
Because the data is stored within those cells as I mentioned in the previous section, the performance of SSDs is deterministic and always constant. Regardless of whether the device is full or empty, its level of performance will be the same. Therefore, solid state disks are not affected by data fragmentation. What a relief, isn't it?
Nevertheless, there are exceptions with very big flash drives where fragmentation could affect access times, but most often they're indistinguishable in real-world performance and eventually they can be fixed with the conventional defragmenting process (which takes a lot less time and effort, hence their speed).
The access times are way lower compared to legacy HDDs. There are no such things as mechanical parts moving all around and creating an inevitable bottleneck. This also results in significantly less wear and tear. However the greatest advantage once again is not requiring spin-up, thus an instantaneous boot-up is achievable. Overall speed gains can be quite insane and shocking.
Let me explain why an SSD should last longer than a traditional HDD. Flash drives based on the NAND technology have a particular endurance and that is circa 100,000 - 300,000 write cycles per block. Now if data were to be written constantly on the same block every second, that would lead to a failure in a matter of days. But this won't happen thanks to the technique called wear leveling, which distributes the data across the blocks. In consumer level flash drives this is akin to a lifespan of approximately 10 years.
Even though conventional HDDs might be rated for a few dozen years, according to MTBF, quite often they are worn out in 3-5 years or unfortunately sometimes even less. Therefore, a competitive SSD from a competent manufacturer should outperform and last considerably longer than any of today's latest and very best hard disk drives.
Another lesser advantage from my perspective is that SSDs are waterproof. This is worth remembering because it might be required in specific environments. It's a pro.
Next: Disadvantages of SSDs >>
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