Kingston Technology Guest Post: Are SSDs the future?

Kingston Technology and Ontrack Data Recovery launcehd new series of articles focusing on the 'Use of SSD's in IT.' Each blog will aim to provide basic information about technology, share insight into specific Kingston products, and 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.

This first blog post gives a brief introduction into the SDD and HDD.

Over the years the computers we use have become faster, sleeker and more technologically advanced than ever before. In line with these advancements, the storage solutions we use have also had to evolve.

The time for hard drives is nearly over, with replacements such as solid state drives being the storage solution of choice for today’s tech-savvy consumer.

But why is this and what are the differences?

The differences between an SSD and an HDD

Developed in the mid-1950s, HDDs use magnetised rotating disks. A moving head allows data to be written and read from the disks. HDDs, therefore, have many moving parts and can be prone to mechanical malfunction and interference due to environmental conditions, impact, and vibrations.

In contrast, an SSD has no moving parts. Instead, the disks and heads have been replaced with memory chips, similar to the common USB, SD and CompactFlash products. With no moving parts, SSDs are far less likely to suffer from a mechanical malfunction or be affected by environmental conditions.

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 faster is an SSD?

Due to hard disks being round (like a CD), any data that is stored inside the circle is retrieved at slower speeds than data stored at the outer edge. However, for SSDs, access is simultaneous across the entire drive. In addition, HDD disk performance can suffer 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.

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