SSDs vs. Hard drive vs. Hybrids…which is best for your storage?

When it comes to selecting the storage media for your PC or storage system, you often get confused on what is best to be used and suits your application needs. It can turn a bit befuddling when you are going for a DIY home storage system or planning to just purchase the chassis without any storage media.

I have lined up below the basic advantages and drawbacks for the three most popular storage options available today and hope it helps you in making a fully informed decision the next time you’re shopping for drive space.

Solid State Drives- These drives can be treated as hard drive cousins on many levels as they usually connect to a PC system through SATA interface and carry on with their duty to store files like any other drive do. However, a slight difference is that these drives are free from the regular R/W heads and magnetic platters. In place of them, SSDs use non-volatile NAND flash memory and so they are no mechanical parts or magnetic bits involved in it. Hence, with the absence of moving parts, solid-state drives deliver more performance, offer quick access and can read/write data at much faster rates. Nowadays, they are SSDs running with more than 550MBPs transfer rate that essentially saturates SATA interface and their access time is just for a fraction of millisecond. Most of the storage experts feel that SSDs have more durability as they are no moving parts in them and are susceptible from degraded performance due to vibrations and movement. Some even feel that HDDs are susceptible for data corruption, whereas SSDs won’t skip a beat. But in reality, every technology has its own pros and cons and SSDs are no exception. These drives are first and fore mostly highly expensive as their data storage capacity is not up to standards of a hard drive when gauged on cost per gigabyte basis.

SSD performance depends a lot on the storage capacity of the SSD as you can witness a reduction in overall performance in a full filled solid-state. But this hiccup can be purged with the presence of certain features such as drivers and OS support offered by the SSD vendors. The other concern is that SSDs fail without warning and so in order to overcome this concern, most deployment experts’ practice a ritual of replacing solid-state drives for every 2-3 years irrespective of what the manufacturer claims with regards to their MTBF.

These drives are best suited for environments where you have the budget and like to have a fast and reliable high capacity hard drive. If you are looking to deploy it in a PC environment, then you can use it for holding your Operating System and most frequently used applications; which usually slow down in a hard drive environment.

Hard disks- Many people prefer hard disk drives as default storage media in their PC and storage systems and this has been in practice from decades and as a result of this practice, it has become a common descriptor of all storage hardware. It is to be notified that the basic underlying technology has remained unchanged from the past few years. But in recent times far more advanced and high performing disks are available in the market which are way more superior from their older HDD cousins. The technology is mature, reliable and relatively expensive when compared to other storage options and most HDDs are available for few cents per gigabyte.

In today’s world if you need a storage media with high storage capacity, then HDDs are best fit as they can offer you storage capacities varying in between 5TB-20TB of data storage in coming years. Usually hard drives connect to a system via the ubiquitous SATA interface and work without any need for special software requirement in any operating system. However, when the performance in between a HDD and SSD is scaled out, then SSDs are said to be far more superior to HDDs, due to the fact that the former has no moving parts. HDDs are best suited for environments where high storage capacity is required without any concern for peak system performance. But in recent times, there has been stupendous development in the make and performance of hard drives as they are being shrunk more in size in order to accommodate more storage capacity.

Hybrid Hard Disk- This type of storage media is made up with a blend of HDD storage capacity and SSD speed. It is offered with a mix-up of a traditional hard drive components tempered with high speed flash memory, all packed into a single hard drive.   Hybrid HDDs are offered with the capability of monitoring the frequently accessed data from the hard drive platters and shifting them onto high speed NAND flash memory for faster access. The data stored on flash will change over time and all this intelligence is due to the presence of on-board software.

The advantages of hybrid hard disks are that this storage media is offered with cost, capacity and managing abilities. Since, there is only a small requirement for flash, large investment in a high capacity SSD isn’t necessary. But these drives are a bit costly than traditional hard drives, but are far less than SSDs. When writing or accessing new data these drives perform just like standard hard drives till a break-in period. When the drive software learns which data to cache, the access time is reduced by almost 58%. But since, these hybrid drives rely on software for work functions, they are hard to configure than usual hard drives. For all those users who do not work with new data frequently and have no responsibility of using multiple volumes, hybrid drives are a great option to improve system performance.