Kingston Technology Guest Post: SSDs as Hard Disk Replacement.
Solid state drives are the next evolution in PC storage, they are running faster, quieter and they are cooler than the outdated technology used in hard drives. And since SSDs have no moving parts, they are more durable and reliable than hard drives.
What are the differences between an SSD and an HDD?
HDDs are based on a technology developed in the mid-1950s that uses magnetized rotating disks. Data is written to or read from these rotating disks by moving heads. HDDs are mechanical devices with many moving parts and are therefore prone to mechanical malfunction and interference due to environmental conditions such as temperature, impact and vibration. For SSD drives, the disks and heads have been replaced with memory chips, similar to common USB, SD or CompactFlash products. SSDs have no moving parts, virtually eliminating the rotation latencies associated with hard drives. In addition, SSDs are less prone to environmental conditions than traditional hard drives. SSDs are designed to be the next mass-market storage media generation and therefore have the same form factor and SATA ports as the current HDD generation.
How much is an SSD faster?
It is noteworthy that SSDs are not subject to the physical limitations of HDDs. Hard disks are round (like a CD) and data stored inside the circle is therefore retrieved at slower speeds than data stored at the outer edge. However for SSDs, access is simultaneous across the entire drive. In addition, disk performance suffers from data fragmentation, whereas SSD performance is only marginally affected, even for non-contiguous data. This makes SSDs about 10 times faster than a 7200RPM hard drive.
Copyright: Kingston Technology
With this blog post, Kingston Technology and Ontrack Data Recovery are launching a new series of articles dealing with "Using SSD in IT." In addition to interesting basic information about the technology, in the coming months articles on applications and specific products of Kingston will be published as well as the current possibilities of data recovery of flash-based data storages and SSD-cards. The series of articles is part of a collaboration between Kingston and Ontrack that aims to securely store and restore data from Solid State Drives.