What is the difference between a solid state hard drive and a regular hard drive?

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I think the answer is that the technology is new(er), that it hasn't reached the same market penetration and so demand is lower and costs higher. The price is coming down all the time. Hard drives used to cost hundreds of pounds for only a few hundred mbs not that many years ago.
 
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A solid state drive is not really a hard drive, it is only rewritable silicon memory (flash RAM) used for the same purpose as a hard drive.

A hard drive is a mechanical device with spinning platters & read heads. It has been continuously developed for many, many decades. When it was first introduced in the late 50s a ~4 MB disk (size of a big side-by-side refrigerator) cost about $60k.

The 1st commercial flash memory was released in the late 80s, and it has only recently become cheap enuff to think about using in personal computers. It is much faster than HDs (but note that reads are much faster than writes), and when packaged into a substitute for an HD their full potential is not realized. Directly accessing the flash by installing it on the motherboard gets more out of it.

The SSD uses less power, and is much more immune to physical impact (a good analogy is that the distance od an HDs heads over the platter is akin to a 747 cruising inches off the ground)

dave
 
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Ditto what Dave says. I own about 20 SSD and use them for HD video recording in the field.
They are very fast, very rugged and rather expensive.

If you are looking for a performance boost in you computer, make your primary drive (with the OS and essential programs) an SSD. Boot time will be much improved and general responsiveness will be much better. Cost per Gigabyte is the main disadvantage.
 
Many, if not most, new small laptops or net books use SSD now, like my MacBook Air. Additionally, this type of memory is ubiquitous on smart phones, tablets and so on. Small and fast, but expensive to hit the volume of memory available on a regular HD.
For music, I think a regular hard drive is adequate if directly attached to the playing computer. If it is over wifi, like i do, it works as long as you have a player that buffers or loads into memory. The buffer is needed if you want to do anything else memory intensive on the computer while playing music too. A SSD does not seem to have the same access problems.
I find that SSDs are also excellent for any program that references the hard drive a lot. I use a medical version of "Dragon Naturally Speaking" dictation software, and performance speed is much, much better with a SSD. Highly recommended. It has to do with the speed of data access and searching through a massive library and speech database.
 
My favorite quality of SSD.... quiet!

The sound and vibration of mechanical hard drives has always bothered me to the point of having to turn my PC off on days when my agitation level was high. All is silent now, and the world is good again. :angel:

Oh, yes. That too. There is a whole thread on "quiet" computers to use as music servers. SSD are quite and generate much less heat. With a MacBook Air as the player, and a music library on a hard disk over wifi in a another room, my listening environment is much better.
 
Traditional hard drives can be very quite. I have tried to build a quiet PC' I used low current mother board, and fan speed control. Replaced small fans with large quite fans, and a hard drive from samsung known to be quite. I had it in the living room - but in a closet and it's was inaudibel. Outside it was just audible with the ears very close. I didn't use any special hard drive suspension or boxes. If I had, the noise would have been even lower.
 
It should be noted that the MacBooks (Air or Pro) do not use SSD in the typical sense. The Flash is soldered to the motherboard and directly accessed unlike a typical SSD which emulates a SATA disk drive. This is why one cannot upgrade the quantity.

dave

Ahhh, one more reason or rocks as a computer. Best Mac and best PC I have ever had. Except that with the 11" screen, there are problems...
 
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