The difference between hard drives and solid state drives
Thursday 26 January 2012
Hard drives, also known as mechanical disk drives are made up of several components that work in unison to read and write data. Hard drives contain several platters that are coated in a magnetic material and are rotated at high speeds.
Several mechanical arms pass over the spinning platters reading the magnetisation of the material underneath. The different states of polarity in the material are then translated into something that a computer would be able to understand.
Solid state drives are made up of a series of non-volatile flash memory chips that can be electronically erased and reprogrammed. Unlike the RAM memory you find in a computer, flash memory does not lose its data when it’s powered off. Unlike hard drives, the data on a solid state drive can be accessed almost instantaneously as it does not have any mechanical parts that need to spin up or synchronise.
As solid state drives have no moving parts they are not susceptible to shock or vibration. In addition, they produce very little heat and consume substantially less power.
Enquire about this article