Earlier storage devices were bulky, came with less space and were costly. Now, we have come a long way from those bulky devices to small, fast and less expensive ones. Technology has evolved at an exponential rate in the past decade. The kind of storage that we have at our disposal in terms of speed and size was unimaginable a decade ago. 

If you’re planning to buy a new external or internal hard drive for your PC or laptop, it makes sense to learn the difference between the three main options available in the market. In this article, we will be comparing various storage devices available, namely HDDs, SSD, and SSHD.

HDD vs SSD vs SSHD 

We will be going over several parameters that make these unique. You can choose which one to go as per your need. 

Method of storage  

HDD or Hard disk drives use mechanical arms to access data on the platter. The platter is made of magnetic material and is used to store bits of data. Storing data on the hard drive is done by magnetising sectors on the platter. As hard drives use mechanical arms and servo motors to access data, the process is slow and hard drives can be fragile. Therefore, if you drop your laptop, there is a high probability of losing your data due to hard drive breakage. 

SSD or solid-state drives use a completely different method to store and access data. An SSD uses flash memory, just like in a USB that has a high read/ write speeds due to this. An SSD consists of multiple cells used to store data electronically using transistors. 

SSHD or hybrid drives consist of both mechanical platters and flash memory cells. So, hybrid drives provide the best of both worlds. 

Also read: Is partitioning your Hard Disk Drive (HDD) a good idea? Pros and Cons

Capacity and Price  

Hard drives are complete workhorses when it comes to storage capacity. Hard drives offer storage up to 15 terabytes. Not only this, they provide this mind-boggling storage for a low price compared to SSD. A 5 TB hard drive is available for Rs 10,000 in the market. 

SSD can also store up to 8TB, but they are much more costly compared to HDDs. A 5TB SSD will cost you Rs 22,000 

SSHDs are available in 500GB, 1TB and 2TB options in the market. They come with an 8 GB flash memory cell. All this is offered at a relatively low starting price of Rs 6,999 

In conclusion, if it is mere storage that you need, then you should go for an HDD as it offers more storage for less money. If you have some extra money to spare you can upgrade to an SSHD Hard drive. It will not provide drastic improvement like an SSD, but it will make your device faster during boot up and copying files.   

Speed  

There is no messing around in terms of reading/write speeds with SSD. HDD comes nowhere close to SSD in terms of reading/write speeds. 

A typical SATA SSD has read/write speeds of 500MB/s. HDD, on the other hand, reads data at much slower rates of 125 MB/s. Due to this, using SSDs can make gaming and OS boot up fast. Just for an example, it takes about 3 minutes to boot up a laptop with HDD memory. On the other hand, it takes only 20 seconds to boot up with an SSD storage. Upgrading to an SSHD won’t make the boot up as fast as an SSD, but it will definitely make the boot up faster.   

There are different types of SSD available in the market. These are namely SATA and NVMe SSD. NVMe is a state of the art storage devices that can provide read/write speeds up to 3500MB/s. The reason for these astonishing speeds is that NVMEs connect to the system using PCI ports, which offer higher bandwidths for data transfer. SATA SSD uses the SATA port to connect to the system, which creates a bottleneck in data transmission. 

SSHD, on the other hand, lies in between both, which means that they are faster than HDD but are slower than SSD. They provide read/write speeds in the neighbourhood of 150 MB/s. All the data on your device is stored on the HDD, but the applications that you are using currently or use often are placed in the flash cells. Advance machine learning algorithms are used to predict which files to store on the flash cells. Due to this, the storage time is reduced. 

Wrapping it up 

In conclusion, if you want to make your laptop experience more fluid, you should go for an SSD — 250GB or 128GB as they are not much expensive — and place your OS and frequently used applications on it. This will improve your boot-up time and make games load faster. Make sure to place your OS and most used applications on the SSD and keep movies and other files on your old HDD. This would make your laptop faster in the least amount of investment. 

 If you do not have a lot of money to invest or you don’t have a place on your laptop to add an SSD you can go for an SSHD. This will make your laptop experience better, and it will not burn a hole in your pocket as well. 

Also read: FAT 32 vs NTFS vs Ex FAT