SSDs as drives for Windows, games, software and files have long since become indispensable. If you don’t have to keep a lot of terabytes of data ready, nothing more speaks for a classic hard drive up to the price per terabyte. We explain the advantages of SSDs by also how to act the functionality of a hard drive and compare the prices of SSDs and hard drives.
We also answer the question of whether it should be a SATA or M.2 SSD, which things you have to consider at M.2-SSD and how important the data rates are when reading and writing-because a state-of-the-art M.2SD can have more than 10-fold data rate compared to a SATA SSD. In the end, we also selected 11 SSDs, each of which offers a good price-performance ratio as a 2- and 4TB version. At the very end explain how the durability of SSD.
Differences between hard drives and SSDS
The main difference between an SSD and hard drive is that the SSD electronically stores the data and no mechanical processes are required when reading or writing. In the case of a hard drive, the data transfer works in a similar way to a sound transmission for a record player: in the hard disk housing, metal slices are arranged on top of each other as data carriers, which rotate with several thousand revolutions per minute (UPM). Small arms with reading and writing heads float over the slices at a wafer-thin distance to capture or change the magnetic fields. Since the data is often distributed across the slices, the arms have to be moved here, sometimes there to read or write data. Every single movement is of course a tiny delay, and these delays add up.
Source: Western Digital
Hard drive without housing cover – the slices arranged on top of each other and the brass -colored reading arms are easy to see.
In addition, the rotary speed of the windows specifies a limit. Nowadays, faster than 7200 UPM are not common, although there are some faster hard disk models, but which are then exorbitantly expensive. A calculation example: Let us assume that a reading arm has just missed the data package you are looking for and now has to wait for a complete disc rotation in order to be able to call it up. At 7200 UPM, this area comes past the reading arm 120 times per second, or in other words: all about 8 milliseconds. The rotation speed alone can make it not immediately, but with 8 millisecond delay to access the data, and this delay can occur with each individual data package.
An SSD, on the other hand, has no access delay (except for negligible small electronic latencies) – and that is exactly what is the giant advantage of an SSD compared to a hard drive in performance. In addition to the access time, an SSD is also much faster when it comes to the data rate (MB per second, MB/s): A hard drive reaches around 120 to 150 MB/s when reading, however, a slow SATA SSD, however, at least 400 to 500 MB/s. Depending on the PCIe standard (3.0, 4.0 or 5.0), an M.2-SSD with PCIe connection creates up to around 3500, 7000 or even over 14000 MB/s. However, these data rates are not the main advantage compared to a hard drive, but above all the access times of a hard drive, because of which you are much slower than an SSD when charging Windows, applications and games. Because of the missing mechanical components, SSDs are also very robust. A hard drive is completely different: Since the reading and spelling of a hard drive only floats very thinly over the slices, a thrust can ensure that the arms touch the slices and then cause mechanical damage that make the hard drive unusable.
