Part 3: Hard Drives in the Market With the increase in solid state drives in the
ID: 3840671 • Letter: P
Question
Part 3: Hard Drives in the Market With the increase in solid state drives in the market, traditional hard drives may soon be obsolete. Explain your reasoning. Using the Internet and other credible outside sources, research solid state drives in the market. From your findings and your prior knowledge, compare and contrast the differences between solid state drives and hard drives. What are the advantages of using solid state drives instead of hard drives? Discuss the disadvantages. Do you agree that hard drives may become obsolete in the near future? Discuss why or why not. You must include 2 outside sources in your response and be sure to site your sources in APA format.
Explanation / Answer
Laptops coming in maket nowadays, come wih SSD i.e. solid state drive. And some laptops even come with both small storage SSD and large storage HDD. So why all the manufacturers are prefering the SSD ? For that we must know the working of the SSD first.
Working of SSD :
Before understanding the working of SSD we must know the computer architecture, i.e. how it works ?
The cache is the innermost memory unit. As your computer operates, it uses the cache as a sort of playground for doing all of its calculations and procedures. Because the cache is so intimately necessary, the electrical pathways to the cache are the shortest, meaning data access is almost instantaneous.
The memory is the middle ground for the computer. You may know it as RAM, or Random Access Memory. This is the place where your computer stores information related to active programs and processes running on your machine. Access to this memory is slower than access to the cache, but negligibly so.
The hard disk is where everything else is stored for permanence. It stores all of your programs, configuration files, documents, music files, movie files, and more. When you want to access a file or run a program, the computer needs to load it from the hard disk and into memory.
Because there is a vast difference in speed. While the cache and memory operate at speeds in nanoseconds, the hard disk operates at a speed in milliseconds, mostly because it has to spin to the right place before anything can be read from it. This means that before the computer can do anything, it has to wait for the hard disk. In essence, the hard disk is the bottleneck; no matter how fast everything else is, you can only operate as fast as your hard disk. This is where the SSD steps in. The SSD can cut down that bottleneck by up to a factor of 10, single-handedly cutting out a massive chunk of wait time when using your computer.
A solid-state drive uses a type of memory called “flash memory,” which is similar to RAM. However, unlike RAM, which clears whenever the computer powers down, SSD memory remains even when it loses power.
If you were to take apart a typical hard disk, you’d see a stack of magnetic plates on an axis with a reading needle–kind of like a vinyl record player. Before the needle can read or write to the plate, it has to spin around to the right location. SSDs, on the other hand, use a grid of electrical cells to quickly send and receive data. These grids are separated into sections called “pages,” and these pages are where the data is stored. Pages are clumped together to form “blocks.”
Also SSDs can only write to empty pages in a block. In a hard disk, data can be written to any location on the plate at any time, and that means that data can be overwritten easily. SSDs can’t overwrite data directly. Instead, the SSD must first find an empty page in a block and then write to that empty page.
Advantages for using the SSD are :
1) SSD draws Less power, on an averages 2 – 3 watts, resulting in 30+ minute battery boost than if using HDD.
2) Write speeds in SSD are generally above 200 MB/s and up to 550 MB/s for cutting edge drives.
3) Takes around 10-13 seconds average bootup time as read speed is very fast.
4) There are no moving parts in SSD so no sound is produced while operation.
5) Also no vibration is there like it was in HDD, just because of no moving part.
6) As we know SSD draws low power and have no moving parts, so very little heat is produced while using SSD.
7) SSD cannot be degaussed using a degausser, i.e no effect of external magnetic field plays on SSD.
Disadvantages of using a SSD :
1) Cost is very expensive as compared to HDD.
2) SSD doesn't comes with very high capacity.
3) Can write data easily in 1st time but difficult to overwrite data.
4) By the time passed, SSD becomes slow in writing data.
5) Data can be written only finite no. of time in it.
After looking at advantages and disadvantages, we see that SSD does offer something that a traditional HDD could never bring: lightning-fast speeds. The SSD is an intricate creation that has many layers of complexity behind it, and while it does come with a number of its own disadvantages, it certainly does its job well. So it might replace HDD in future.