Most people will not dwell much on the quality and capacity of hard drive of their PC. They are mostly interested in the amount of files that they can store on it. PCs usually come with hard disk drive (HDD). However, if you made up your mind to fork up for some quality hardware and buy yourself an Ultrabook, chances are – there will be solid-state drive (SSD) installed. Both have their advantages and shortcomings, which is why in this article we will determine, which one will suit your needs the best.

First of all, let’s try to define what each of them is:

Hard Disk Drive it’s a data storage gadget, which is used for information storage and retrieval. Nowadays, the top HDD manufacturers are Toshiba, Seagate and Western Digital. HDD uses standard interface cables to connect to the system, for instance SATA. Basically, it’s a metal platter in magnetic coating that stores any type or files until you decide to remove it.

Solid-state drive has similar functionality as the hard disk drive, however it does not contain any disks or drive motors, as opposed to HDD. One of the notable facts about SDD is that it does not have any moving components. The overwhelming majority of solid-state drives now use NAND-based memory.

Now that we established what each of them is, let’s move on to their comparison:

Age
It’s worth to mention that HDD is much older than SDD. The first HDD, IBM 350 RAMAC appeared back in 1956, while SDD appeared in the 2nd half of 2000’s, evolving from such technologies as bubble memory flashing.

Max Capacity:
The maximum capacity of solid-state drives is 4TB, at least for now, which is why they usually come in 500GB to 1TB. Thus, HDDs undoubtedly win this round, as their capacity is much bigger.

Price:
Given that SDDs are considered new technologies and are much more reliable and resistant to latency and physical damage, they cost understandably more than HDDs.

Speed:
SDDs are much faster than HDDs and can boot your system within seconds, while hard disk drive users will need to wait for much longer. Their speed is, actually, the reason why SDDs are often acquired as the additional drives, specifically for the system installation.

Durability:
As we mentioned before - solid-state drives have no moving parts, which is why they are much more resistant to physical damage. Even if you drop your laptop – SDD won’t suffer a bit. That cannot be said about hard drive disks.

Fragmentation:
Considering the fact that HDD is basically a rotating platter, with a flow of time large files will get written in different places, which will considerably slow down the playback. Here SDDs undoubtedly win, since they don’t care where the file is written – they can replay it right away and extremely quickly.

Availability:
You have a far greater choice of HDDs than SDDs. At least for now. There are a lot of companies, manufacturing HDDs and they will be used in PCs for a long time.

Conclusion:
SDDs win in terms of speed and durability, as they are less susceptible to physical damage due to the lack of moving parts, such as read heads in HDDs. However, they have limited capacity and cost considerably more, which limits the options for consumers that require big storage, but can’t afford spending a fortune just on hard drive. Thus, if instant system boot is critical for your work – by all means, go with SDDs. However, if you need a considerable capacity, SDDs just won’t do the trick – choose HDDs.