SSD vs HDD, part 1

Hard-disk drives have been the default storage component in desktop and laptop PCs for decades. Although modern hard-disk drives are far more advanced and higher-performing than their counterparts from yesteryear, on many levels their basic underlying technology remains unchanged. Hard drives are essentially metal platters with a magnetic coating. That coating stores your data. A read/write head on an arm accesses the data while the platters are spinning in a hard drive enclosure. An SSD does much the same job functionally (saving your data etc) as the HDD, but instead of a magnetic coating on top of platters, the data is stored on interconnected flash memory chips that retain the data even when there's no power present. Therefore, no mechanical parts or magnetic bits are involved what leads to much better performance. Currently, it is the fastest storage option available. To comparison, the best HDD drives read data at circa 200 MB per second, wheras SSD achieves 550 MB.

However, the main drawback of SSD is price - approximately 0,60 USD per 1 GB. HDD costs only few cents per 1 GB. But it is normal, every new technology is more expensive  The question is whether this investment is worth it. In next part I will walk you through the advantages and disadvantage of both disks.