Hybrid Drive vs SSD vs HDD: Which One Is The Best?

Selecting the best PC storage may be very confusing for many users. Earlier the main factor for choosing storage was the one having highest space, but with the introduction of storage alternatives providing speed, it has become a hard decision to choose speed or space or mixed version. The blog will be explaining some of the pros and cons of available PC storage options i.e. Hard Disk Drives (HDD), Solid State Drive (SSD), or Solid State Hybrid Drive (SSHD) that may help users in choosing the better storage according to their needs.

Hard Disk Drive (HDD)

Hard Disk Drive has been the oldest or default storage component used in desktop and laptop PCs for quite a long time now. Though there may be improved versions of HDDs, their basic underlying technology remains same. All Hard-disk drives contain rotating magnetic platters paired with read/write heads travelling over platters’ surfaces to retrieve/record data. Some features of HDDs are as follows:

• The technology used in HDD is mature, reliable, and inexpensive compared to other storage options. HDDs have normally long life but its life also depends on the usage of HDD.
• It has high storage capacity but the speed provided by HDD is low. The faster the platter’s rotation-speed, the faster the hard drive i.e. 7200-rpm drive outperforms 5400-rpm drive.
• Hard disks do not stop working all of a sudden. It starts failing first & dies normally unless any external force is applied to destruct all the disks at the same time. Data on some disks can be still read if it is not damaged.
• HDDs do not require any specific software as they are supported by all types of Operating System.
• HDDs are useful for those users who need large storage capacity rather than achieving high speed. 

 Solid State Drive (SSD)

As there are no disks involved in this type of drive, it is called Solid State Drive. There are no magnetic platters and read/write heads present hence no mechanical parts involved. Some of the features of SSD are stated below:

• As SSDs contain no mechanical parts, there is no movement to read and write the data. Therefore, the time taken to read/write data is much faster compare to HDDs.
• The underlying technology used in SSDs are complex where data is stored is ON/OFF or 0/1 phases.
• The user cannot tell if an SSD is about to die or not as it does not send any signals like HDD. Once the SSD dies, it will not allow further read/write operations.
• Since the technology used in SSD is expensive, the cost of SSD is also very high as compared to HDD.
• SSD are addressed similarly as OS addresses the RAM making the speed much higher than that of Hard disks. SSDs are advisable for those users who prefer high performance or speed rather than high storage.

 Solid State Hybrid Drive (SSHD)

As the name suggests, it is a hybrid storage option that has combine both SSD and HDD capabilities. It provides high storage HDD capacity along with SSD speeds by combining rotating platters and high-speed flash memory in a same drive. Hybrid Drive are Hard Disk Drives that uses some SSD to act as a cache. Some of the main points of SSHD are:

• It monitor the data being read from the Hard drive and cache the most frequently used bits to the high speed NAND flash memory.
• As the flash memory of hybrid drive stores the mostly accessed bits, it serves the data from the flash memory giving high speed like SSD for most used files.
• Hybrid drives are slightly costlier than hard drives but much lesser than SSD because only small solid-state volume is needed to achieve significant performance gains.
• While writing new data, the performance of hybrid drive is similar with normal hard drive having break-in period while software decides which data is to be kept in cache.
• Hybrid drives are good for those users who need both speed and space. It provides high performance than hard drives with good storage capacity. 

 

Comparison 

Considering all the factors in Hybrid Drive vs SSD vs HDD, each storage drives has their own advantages and disadvantages according to which user can choose as per their needs. Taking all the aspects on mind, I feel that Hybrid Drives are better option as it provides both the plus points of Hard Drives and Solid-state drives. It is capable of providing large storage space with desired speed and the best part is it is available at affordable price.

Summary

The blog has been designed to help users guide on how to choose the most suitable PC storage among the available options Hard Disk drives, Solid State Drives and Solid State Hybrid Drives. The type of each PC Storage Options has been thoroughly explained in depth and their comparison has been made that consist all the positive and negative points. The factors that need to be kept in mind while buying the storage drive has been discussed like speed, space, price etc. Hybrid drive seems to be the best choice as it provides both speed and storage.