Question from Velda: On the new MacBook Pro, which is better, the regular hard drive, or the solid state, and why?
Jason answers: I wouldn’t say, overall, that one is better than the other. It depends on your needs.
If you need a large amount of storage without paying an arm and a leg, then a regular hard drive (HD) is better. For example, if you order a new MacBook Pro from Mac-O-Rama and want 500GB of hard drive space, you would pay $1300 EXTRA for a 512GB solid state drive (SSD).
If you want to compare performance, then the SSD is better. You will see performance gains of 30%-50% in all operations compared to a standard HD.
Another comparison deals with the how an SSD compares with an HD in composition. An SSD does not have any moving parts so it is silent. You will hear an HD spin, whine, and click as the internal components move around. If silence is a factor in your purchase, then the SSD is better.
Since the SSD does not have any moving parts, you would think it should be better than an HD as far as reliability. In fact, it is. I read about a test where an SSD was put on top of a paint shaker while an operating system was booted up and a game was being played. It survived for 40 minutes. An HD wouldn’t last more than a few seconds. However, THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT! An SSD is still an electronic device and can fail without warning. Always have a backup of your data. When it comes to backup… Three copies of your data are better than two copies of your data.
Jason
Newsletter article from Drivesavers:
The State of Solid-State Devices
As solid-state drives (SSDs) continue to grow in popularity, everyone seems curious about their speed, reliability and whether or not they’ll ever permanently replace hard drives that rely on spinning platters to store data.
DriveSavers experience with solid-state storage technology began around 1995 starting with SmartMedia cards, which were used with some of the first consumer-priced digital cameras. Since then, we’ve continued to aggressively research and develop unique methods to recover data on all types of solid-state devices.
Storage manufacturers currently use non-volatile flash memory for portable USB drives, camera cards and SSDs. One of the greatest benefits of flash memory is that it doesn’t require power to retain data it stores, unlike other types of memory chips such as DRAM or SRAM.
Because SSDs have no moving parts, they eliminate common problems experienced with typical hard drives that employ flying read/write heads such as: head crashes; bad motors and damaged head stacks.
Nevertheless, for all that you gain from a SSD, data is still at risk. Remember that the technology is relatively new and failures do occur. These devices are still susceptible to problems such as bad chips, directory corruption, virus attacks, accidental file deletion, impact damage, electrical spikes and fire or water damage.
Data recovery — specifically from SSDs, can be challenging for a number of reasons. First off, data is stored across multiple memory chips, similar to the way data is striped across multiple hard drives in a RAID 0 configuration. For a successful recovery to be achieved, we must be able to access all the chips on the drive to read all the data. Sometimes this requires us to remove some or all chips from the printed circuit board and make repairs as needed. This type of work is akin to microsurgery and indeed microscopes are used in the process.
Once data from the chips can be read, a disk image copy is made from each one. All of the disk images must then be aligned perfectly to create one uniform image of the data. Only after extracting the data and testing the files can we determine the success of the recovery.
Fortunately, having years of experience and achieving early data recovery success with solid-state storage technology, gives DriveSavers an advantage in overcoming the unique challenges SSDs offer.
Interesting! Always backup!