The Lagoon TechMy little blog in Cyberspace.

Over the last 20+ years, people have used a very popular hardware device called a hard drive. The typical hard drive is a mechanical device that has a spindle inside of it that reads over a magnetic disk (platters) to retrieve your stored data. These became common place in computers many years ago.

Over the past few years there has been another type of drive that came out in the market. They are called Solid State Drives (‘SSD’ for short). SSDs allow for extremely quick and easy access to your data, so you do not experience long delays when accessing your data.

SSDs are completely electronic (no mechanical devices are used in its operation). This is what allows for the quick and easy access to data I mentioned earlier.

Now that you have a quick explanation of the two types of drives, I am going to give you some pros and cons of both of them.

Pros for Mechanical Hard Drives

• Cheaper to buy
• Usually can get more disk space for less money.
• Will be a better choice for storing important information (e.g., family photos, personal bank info, attorney letters, etc.).    Note: You should have a backup of these files on external disks anyway.  Never trust a hard drive to never fail.
  

Pros for Solid State Drives

• SSD are not (are at least should not be) affected by magnetism
• Practically no heat to worry about when using SSDs
• No moving parts = no noise to bother you
• SSDs use almost no power (less stress on your computer’s power supply)
• SSDs will be more reliable, due to the fact that they do not have mechanical parts in them

So there you have it. Both types of drives are good for different situations.

In my opinion, if you really want/need a fast hard drive, then go for an SSD.

On the other hand, if you need/want a lot of disk space to store important information on, then you will be more cost effective going with a mechanical hard drive.